Items of Interest, Jewish Painter Edition

"There are still partners to be found who value art for art’s sake and the freedom that spirit represents."

Kikuo Saito, Winter Step (1984), stoneware, 20¾ × 20½ inches, courtesy of KinoSaito

David McGrogan, A Foucauldian Defense of Liberalism. “The most useful of Foucault’s contributions were not published in book form but were delivered as lectures, posthumously compiled and translated. Those gathered in the collection Security, Territory, Population are far and away the most significant. In them, Foucault provides a complete conceptualisation of the evolution of modern governance, showing how it is characterised, above all, by ‘governmentality’ or what has elsewhere been called the ‘conducting of conduct.’”

Ryan McMaken, To Fight the State, Build Alternatives to the State. “If we are meaningfully oppose state power, it is necessary to encourage, grow, and sustain institutions and organization over which states cannot so easily roll their enormous weight. When people support a local parish, raise a family, build a business, create mutual aid organizations, or foster local civic independence, they are doing work that is absolutely critical to fighting state power.”

Jacopo Prisco, Scientists identify secret ingredient in Leonardo da Vinci paintings. “Trace quantities of protein residue have long been detected in classic oil paintings, though they were often ascribed to contamination. A new study published Tuesday in the journal Nature Communications found the inclusion was likely intentional — and sheds light on the technical knowledge of the Old Masters, the most skilled European painters of the 16th, 17th, or early 18th century, and the way they prepared their paints.”¹

Alexander Adams

, A masterclass for dissident gallerists. “In a pamphlet about the Barbican (2022, now out of print), I pondered what would be needed to make viable an arts centre which supported counter-elite values and platformed dissident art. In that case I was thinking of fine art, especially the grander arts of opera, theatre, orchestral performances, classical dance, fine art and so on. However, if one accepts that action via artivism may be effective at presenting values whilst not necessarily having much (or any) value as art per se, then a commercially viable project space seems a necessity for any counter-cultural movement.”²

Marc Weitzmann, Leonardo da Vinci Was Jewish. “His mother, Caterina, was a Circassian Jew born somewhere in the Caucasus, abducted as a teenager and sold as a sex slave several times in Russia, Constantinople, and Venice before finally being freed in Florence at age 15.”

James Panero, Saving the Arts from Politics and Presentism. “Fortunately, outside of the world of land acknowledgments, preferred pronouns and black squares, there are still partners to be found who value art for art’s sake and the freedom that spirit represents.”

Laura Hodes, A Jewish painter, perhaps, but undeniably a spiritually transcendent one. “In his book Fierce Poise, Helen Frankenthaler and 1950s New York, Alexander Nemerov wrote that critic Clement Greenberg, with whom Frankenthaler had a serious relationship during the ’50s, said that Innerlichkeit, or inwardness, was ‘the real task for the individual Jew in the West,’ and it was perhaps this quality, according to Nemerov, that Greenberg saw in Frankenthaler’s Mountains and Sea and her art of that period.”

Gordon Fuglie, Fade to Black: Recent Work by Duncan Simcoe. “Sparks are nothing if not shards of radiance. And radiance is another name for glory—and the domain of the sacred. Simcoe’s Black Drawings variously manifest glory in ways both sublime and subtle.”

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Out now: The Sleep of Reason by Jonathan Goodman.

Out now: Tiny Hearts Sing Loud: Birds & Haiku by Necee Regis.

On now: “Kikuo Saito: Pictorial Clay,” curated by Jim Walsh, at KinoSaito through May 7.

1. Spoiler alert: the secret ingredient is egg yolk. This is in fact not terribly surprising to anyone familiar with the work on reclaiming older oil methods. It has long been suspected to be the secret to the crisp white of various Dutch masters. It’s nevertheless interesting to learn that the proteins play a protective role.

2. Adams has been killing it lately. See also his review of Anthony J. Cascardi’s Francisco de Goya and the Art of Critique. On top of that, he has a new book out, Blood, Soil, Paint.