Duane Michals died this week; he was 94. via Wayne Bremser comes an incredible archive at the Yale-hosted Praxis, of the archival photos, pdfs, and videos Michals began sending around to friends and colleagues during the COVID era. @bremser has pulled some interviews and video shorts, particularly. I’ll flag just one incredible pdf, sent on Sept 24, 2020, when Michals recounted his visit in 1983 to the descendants of Édouard Manet [manet.pdf]:
Everything there was something thrilling to see. One of my favorite paintings by him is of a little bouquet of violets and a ladie’s fan, and they owned it. I could pick it up, look at the back of it, and feel its patina.
Originally a gift to Berthe Morisot, the Manet family also owned the artist’s portrait of Morisot, which is now in the Musée d’Orsay.
The uniqueness of this Venice Biennale is in positing African curation as an ontological stance from which to watch, listen, apprehend, adapt, connect fragments of the world, and forge new embodied modes of communication.
Shipley has deep, full looks at many African participants whose contributions to the Biennale I’ve not seen discussed too much elsewhere, and certainly not with any depth. I only single out blaxTARLINES KUMASI because the Ghanaian art/teaching collective’s name has the same Marcus Garvey reference that moves through Kahlil Joseph’s collaborative film/installation BLKNWS.
Between In Minor Keys, BLKNWS and the expanded Arthur Jafa-verse, and Saul Williams and Anisia Uzeyman’s mindblowing 2021 Afrofuturist musical Neptune Frost, it really does feel like a generative African/diasporic vision is coming into fuller view, not just of itself, but the world. And if white American/European critics and audience don’t recognize or resonate with key aspects of it, maybe that’s because for once/again, it’s not for them/us.
The New Social Environment panel with all three curators of the Duchamp retrospective: Matthew Affron, Michelle Kuo, and Ann Temkin was moderated by none other than Thierry du Duve. On the one hand, it’s amazing to have a moderator who’s as expert on the artist as the curators; on the other, a slightly less erudite interlocutor might have couched more things in the form of a question than a statement. But then we would not have had the fireworks of Francis Naumann refuting some of du Duve’s statements.
Though I don’t have enough basis to assess du Duve’s claims about Duchamp’s painting fails, I lean towards Naumann, whose decades of researching and dealing with Duchamp’s art objects feels of a piece with the material, chronological grounding of MoMA’s show.
I had a conflict and missed the NSE conversation with Paul Mpagi Sepuya, but it’s online now, so none of us has any excuse left. Will report back.
While everyone else was distracted by the Richter, Giovanni Lusi was reading the spines of Twombly’s bookshelf. Screenshot from his 2026 Drawing Masters Symposium lecture via vimeo
Of course, anyone who reconstructs the period library of Cy Twombly by analyzing the spines on a bookshelf in the 1966 Vogue Horst photoshoot is going to have my attention. Lusi’s work goes beyond the circumstantial to trace Twombly’s early, formative engagement in Rome with the works of Old Masters—in this case, Leonardo da Vinci’s drawings and codices.
Screenshot of a slide from Giovanni Lusi’s 2026 Drawing Masters Symposium lecture showing a page from Leonardo’s Codex Atlanticus and Twombly’s Delian Ode 55, 1961, which was shown in Geneva in 1963. The brochure has a collage of Twombly’s head peeking out from Leonardo’s beard. Incredible stuff.
Lusi locates specific references and connections between Twombly drawings and paintings, including unearthing gallery checklists that show works with original titles like, “About Leonardo.” But the most fascinating thing for me was the link between Twombly’s all-over text and diagram painting compositions and the packed, palimpsest content of a Leonardo codex. It’s a reference I imagine almost no one at the time would have suggested for a young contemporary painter—and apparently one which few Twombly observers have recognized since.
There’s much more to be understood about how Twombly worked, and whether he worked from encountering Old Master originals, or—as Lusi suggests—from studying them in reproduction. When he offhandedly identifies the paperback source of a set of Leonardo collages Twombly made in Captiva in 1968, it makes a strong case for an entire dissertation just on Twombly’s library.
[few minutes later update] Come for the Twombly X Leonardo, stay for Femke Speelberg’s introduction to a fascinating, monumental 15th century architectural rendering which is the centerpiece of a show at the Met right now.
I’ve had my copy of Nihon No Minka for 30 years, and I only just found these three photos between the book and the dust jacket.
They’re stamped Photo NADAL Saigon, the mark of Fernand Nadal, who operated a photo studio in Saigon for several decades in the early 20th century, when France still called the southern region of Vietnam Cochinchine.
Nadal did lots of work for colonial companies and surveyors, and most of the images I see online are from his souvenir postcard sets. They’re almost all cities, though, buildings and public spaces mostly devoid of people.
These are actual silver gelatin prints, 18 x 24 cm (actually around 17 x 23 by my quick check), with portraits of indigenous people in a rural village setting. The one photo of a man has a larger group of people in colonial dress in the background, but otherwise, everyone is South Vietnamese or Cambodian. Maybe the group of women are photographed under the same house the guy is standing in front of, I haven’t Errol Morris’d them yet.
Mukai-ya, a sake shop in Hiroshima built in 1832, 📷: Futagawa Yukio via Nihon no Minka
The months after coming back from Japan are always when it hits the hardest, the desire to live in a minka by the sea. Except most minka are not by the sea, so you’d have to move it there. Or you’d have to live where the minka remain, in the mountains.
whole bunch of minka in Satsuma Shinashi, Kagoshima, I think, 📷: Futagawa Yukio for Nihon no Minka
Instead, I just pull out my copy of Itõ Teiji and Futagawa Yukio’s incredible 1957-59 survey of minka, 日本の民家, and soak in it. I read Craig Mod’s accounts of walks, and consider that rapidly depopulating rural Japan is probably not the place for foreigners to grow old in.
And then I rewatch Minka, Davina Pardo’s extraordinary 2011 short film about the love and life of two men and their house. And as I wonder if Yoshihiro Takishita still has any minka lying around, waiting to be reassembled, and then I’m like, yeah, three hundred years in, the heating really does sound like an unsolved issue, maybe I’ll just visit.
1981 pic by Magnum photographer Thomas Hoepker of Andy Warhol at 860 Broadway with the caption identifying the stuffed dog, but not the Albert Speer-related paintings behind him, via @twixnmix via @voorwerk
I swear, until this morning I was just going to like and reblog this photo of Warhol and move on. And then the Angel of History started piling rubble on top of rubble on the White House lawn.
Albert Speer was Hitler’s favorite architect, and Andy Warhol loved him. In the early 80s he made multiple paintings of Speer’s Lichtdom, and they seem to exist only in the backgrounds of snapshots of Warhol himself. Though they appeared in a major international exhibition in 1982, they seem to have been ignored by dealers and curators and historians then and since.
“The Ultimate Fight ring had not yet been erected on the White House lawn.”
The first line of the survey I did for Art in America of museums’ America 250 shows already locks it into a slightly less bleak past, April, when this stupid UFC thing did not yet stand. And reading the piece for the first time in over a month, I gotta say, it goes downhill from there.
The headline is, “As the Country Turns 250, Why Won’t Its Museums Meet The Moment?” My editor’s working title for the piece was “Picturing Independence”; mine was “Museums Will Not Save Us.” It started bleak, and it got bleaker, but I am grateful for the opportunity and the insights and all the folks who helped along the way.
For reasons beyond me that perhaps relate to the article appearing first in print, the links I used for reference do not appear in the Art in America published version. So I’ve gathered them here, like bonus content for a DVD. [Ask your parents.]
Giovanni di Paolo, Creation of the World and Expulsion from Paradise, 1445, tempera on panel, 18 1/4 x 20 1/2 in., locked in the Lehman collection at the Met
I saw some color theory on tumblr last night that reminded me of this painting, and I could not remember who made it or where it was. I felt like it was not at the Met, probably the National Gallery. And I started to wonder if there was an executive order banning searches for rainbow apocalypse. Was it in a gallery that’s closed for renovation?
Anyway, this morning Peter Huestis generously suggested he thought he knew which painting I was talking about, and that was indeed at the Met. And eventually yet, there it was. And the reason I couldn’t picture it at the Met was because it’s in the Lehman Gallery section, segregated off from the rest of the 15th century Italian paintings, including the other piece the Met has from the same Sienese altarpiece.
And it turns out that’s not a rainbow encircling a vision of another plane; it’s the nested spheres of the heavens with the paradisiacal earth at the center. I readily recognize that this is perhaps a suboptimal practice, and that my memory palace needs some refurbishing and a rehang. So be it.
John Singer Sargent, Motorcycle, inscribed as Peronne, Oct. 1918, charcoal on paper, 7 x 5.1/8 in., one side of a sheet at the NGAThe other side of the sheet at NGA
4. Motorcycles [at least three studies, made in October 1918 in Peronne, at the Somme, and donated by Sargent’s sisters to the Corcoran, so now at the NGA.
A really great conversation at Hyperallergic between Valentina Di Liscia and artist Jamie Nares. Come for the essence of the brushstroke—one of Nares’s most intensive interests—stay for the incredible visuals like the wall of handmade brushes in her studio in Chatham, or the still from an early experimental film where Roman togas were doing a lot of long-unacknowledged gender work.
Besides Nares’s own work and story, there are a couple of moments where the difference between generations really comes through: Nares’s story of complimenting Frank Stella at an opening, and Di Liscia’s gentle deadpan, “It’s what we call a soft launch.”
Speaking of sick artist fits from upper Fifth Avenue museums:
The Neue Galerie offers a replica of Gustav Klimt’s artist smock in indigo linen with hand-embroidered epaulets, based on Moriz Nähr’s iconic 1911 photo of the artist and his cat, Katze:
Looking for the story on this Schiele portrait, it turns out Klimt’s friend/partner/muse Emilie Flöge operated a couture shop in Vienna that promoted the Reformkleidung, Reform Dress, a loose, flowing, and liberating fashion refutation of Edwardian-era corset-based dresses.
Gustav Klimt in his painting smock & Emilie Flöge in her Reform Dress, c. 1909, photo: Heinrich Böhler, via Klimt: Sonderausgabe
The twelve pieces made of “hand-drawn and hand-stitched” “grids and stripes” on “natural fabrics such as linen and canvas” were adapted from specific Martin artworks. They all seem to be from the 60s, none of the works that ended up in the Guggenheim’s Agnes Martin animated gif campaign. I thought I’d hunt them down, but I don’t have my Martin books handy.
COS says the collection was also inspired by the artist’s own wardrobe. And yet, they ignore her most iconic looks:
Charles Rushton portrait of Agnes Martin in New Mexico, 1991. Collared shirt, cardigan, sensible trousers, sneakers: the artist’s own.Agnes Martin photographed in 1960 in her unheated loft in Coentie’s Slip by Vogue creative director Alexander Liberman. Thermal quilted liner ensemble: artist’s own.
And of course:
An undated photo of Agnes Martin by Mildred Tolbert, with the painting Night and Day in the background, from an exhibit in the lawsuit filed in October 2016 by Mayor Gallery against the Agnes Martin Catalogue Raisonné LLC
Johannes Adam Simon Oertel, Pulling Down The Statue of King George III, New York City, 1852-53, oil on canvas, 32 x 41 in., collection NYHistorical
I have a piece in the Summer 2026 issue of Art in America, buy it wherever print magazines are sold! I’d say I’m psyched, but it was lowkey depressing as hell. Though it’s in the reviews section, it’s more a preview, of what US museums are showing for the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, at a moment when the country’s facing an ongoing fascist existential attack. tl;dr, museums are not going to save us.
But one museum is doing the most, and it’s honestly not who I’d have expected. The NY Historical has had Johannes Adam Simon Oertel’s 1852-53 painting of New Yorkers pulling down the gilded lead statue of King George III after a public reading of the Declaration of Independence on July 9, 1776, since 1925. And the online text goes deep on the symbolism of the Native American family turned away on the left, and the Black figure on the ground at the center, about to get crushed. But they don’t say why Oertel painted this when he did.
What the Historical also has, though, are pieces of the statue itself.
Medusa, 2003, Barbara Gladstone’s own Richard Prince car hood, 62 x 45 x 5 1/2 in., selling at Sotheby’s
I’m scrolling through the Sotheby’s sale of furniture from Barbara Gladstone’s well-appointed home and wondering why there’s so much art mixed in. Was there concern that some art might attract less attention in a design auction? Or was it the other way around? Were there so many artist-designed furniture objects, that they made sure to add some art art objects so art art collectors didn’t miss the sale?
Franz West, INRI, 1991, wood, gauze & plaster, 101 3/4 x 64 1/4 x 9 1/2 in., from Barbara Gladstone’s own sanctuary, being rendered unto Caesar at Sotheby’s
Whatever it is, it includes Franz West’s table & chairs, perhaps the most collectible thing from his Hamsterwheel installation at the 2007 Venice Biennale. [Also this buck wild, 10-foot tall cross, for the Franz West true believer.]
Christopher Wool, New Linen, 2012, hand-dyed silk carpet, 119 by 97.5 in., ed 3/15, walked on by the conservation-minded Barbara Gladstone, now selling at Sotheby’s
Scott Burton, Cafe Table II, 1987, violetta calcutta, absolute black granite, 28 ⅝ by 29 ⅝ by 15 ⅞ in., ed 4/10, from under the cocktail glass of Barbara Gladstone, selling at Sotheby’s
Actually, that was like the second thought I had. The first thought was that Barbara bought this 1987 Burton table from Andrew Kreps in 2011? MoMA could really do a lot worse than having a dealer like Kreps take over the Scott Burton estate.
I was just checking Cy Twombly’s childhood address yesterday by looking up his 1946 draft card on Familysearch, as one does, and saw his signature: Edwin PCy Twombly.
Did the high school senior standing in front of Mrs Beatrice McKenny Garth of the Rockbridge County Draft Board start to sign his government name, and then switch to Cy? Except Cy Twombly fits on the line. Did he sign his name, and Mrs Garth was like, “I am not writing this all out again, young man. Fix it.”?
The real thing I wonder is if Twombly hadn’t developed an art practice so infused by handwriting and line, and a writing style so intrinsic to that practice that his notes and letters often came to stand on their own as artistic objects, would I have ever even noticed?
