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Wassmann Foundation

@wassmannfoundation.bsky.social
227 followers 427 following 303 posts

Art historian Jeff Wassmann surveys the era of the pioneering, if apocryphal, Leipzig modernist and sewerage engineer Johann Dieter Wassmann (1841-1898). en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johann_Dieter…

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Wassmann Foundation @wassmannfoundation.bsky.social · 07/09/2026
"I first met Ms. Kusama in a coffee shop in Tokyo... Ms. Kusama walked fast and a little stooped, like a penguin. Her eyes were intense; she wore heavy lipstick, a bit of eyeliner, some rouge." Alexandra Munroe www.nytimes.com/2026/09/06/o...
nytimes.com
Opinion | Yayoi Kusama’s Fame Eclipsed Her Art (Gift Article)
She has become the world’s most unknown famous artist.
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Tomás Murray @tomasjmurray.bsky.social · 05/09/2026
Caspar David Friedrich, Painter, #BornOnThisDay in 1774, in Greifswald, Germany ‘Woman at a Window’ (1822), Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin
Caspar David Friedrich’s ‘Woman at a Window’ (1822), Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin
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The New Yorker @newyorker.com · 31/08/2026
Susan Te Kahurangi King doesn’t read, write, or speak. At 75, she may be New Zealand’s greatest living artist. www.newyorker.com/magazine/202...
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Wassmann Foundation @wassmannfoundation.bsky.social · 28/08/2026
In 1966, Yayoi Kusama debuted Narcissus Garden outside the Venice Biennale, before authorities ejected her for selling her silver balls for $2 each, ‘like hot dogs or ice-cream cones’. In 2002, she was selling these for $25 at the Queensland Art Gallery. My Christmas tribute to Yayoi. お悔やみ申し上げます
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Wassmann Foundation @wassmannfoundation.bsky.social · 20/01/2025
A little lightness on this darkest of days? Strangest hook-up in the arts: Yayoi Kusama and Joseph Cornell (1971) ❤️ NYTimes art critic Deborah Solomon writes that Joseph's mother (who he lived with along with his brother Robert) "tossed a pot of water their way" to stop them kissing in the garden.
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Wassmann Foundation @wassmannfoundation.bsky.social · 16/08/2026
Missed this by a couple days, but oh, so long ago. My first visit to East Berlin, 14 August 1978. Alexanderplatz and Karl-Marx-Allee. Crossed at Checkpoint Charlie.
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Hyperallergic @hyperallergic.com · 11/08/2026
On the occasion of Betye Saar’s 100th birthday, Roberts Projects in Los Angeles organized an exhibition to recognize her earliest professional works.
hyperallergic.com
How Betye Saar Came to Be
“You just have to pay attention to how you put things together,” the artist told Hyperallergic shortly before her death. “They’ll tell you if they fit.
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Smarthistory: the Center for Public Art History @smarthistory.bsky.social · 27/07/2026
Betye Saar (1926–2026) created a wealth of unforgettable art with clever multi-faceted imagery. The Liberation of Aunt Jemima, one of her most famous works, owned by @bampfa.bsky.social, can be found on Smarthistory here: smarthistory.org/betye-saar-l...
Shadow box lined with "Aunt Jemima" pancake flour ads with a Black "mammy" sculptural figure carrying a broom and a rifle. On her apron is printed an image of a Black mammy holding a White screaming baby. In front of her rises a Black power fist. Betye Saar, Liberation of Aunt Jemima (detail), 1972, assemblage, 11 3/4 x 8 x 2 3/4 inches (Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive) #feminism #BlackArt #FeministArt #AmericanArt #WomenArtists
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Wassmann Foundation @wassmannfoundation.bsky.social · 27/07/2026
Betye Saar, Los Angeles artist who upended Black stereotypes, dies at 99, just three days shy of her 100th birthday. www.nytimes.com/2026/07/27/a...
nytimes.com
Betye Saar, Artist Who Upended Black Stereotypes, Dies at 99
Working with dolls, family photographs, fabric scraps and other found objects, she became a leading figure in assemblage art.
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ArtReview @artreview.bsky.social · 17/07/2026
Preliminary insolvency proceedings were opened against Steidl, the German publishing house known for its photobooks, at the request of a creditor.
artreview.com
Photobook publisher Steidl faces insolvency proceedings
‘Times are very bad for the book industry'
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Wassmann Foundation @wassmannfoundation.bsky.social · 16/07/2026
"Betye Saar turns 100 on July 30, but she plans to start her day the same way as always: in the studio." www.latimes.com/entertainmen...
latimes.com
Enough about her legacy. At 100, Betye Saar just wants to keep making art in L.A.
As Betye Saar turns 100, she's more interested in creating new work than reflecting on her legacy as one of America's most groundbreaking artists.
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Wassmann Foundation @wassmannfoundation.bsky.social · 12/07/2026
"Before Gerhard Richter, before Anselm Kiefer, before the late Georg Baselitz, there was Joseph Beuys, the German artist who bridged his country’s horrific past and its post-war rise with a creation myth of his own..." www.theartnewspaper.com/2026/07/07/j...
theartnewspaper.com
Joseph Beuys was ambitious, ‘perhaps to the point of megalomania’, says a new book about the German artist
A new reading of the life and work of Beuys is no hagiography, seeing Beuys as someone who was fiercely determined and created myths about himself
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Wassmann Foundation @wassmannfoundation.bsky.social · 21/06/2026
"Saar’s magnetism either comes from being one of the most important living artists of the last century, the fact that her 100th birthday is approaching or being a Leo." www.latimes.com/lifestyle/im...
latimes.com
Ahead of her 100th birthday, we're still learning new things about Betye Saar
A new show at Roberts Projects lets us in on a different but equally foundational branch of Saar’s story: her costume design work.
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Wassmann Foundation @wassmannfoundation.bsky.social · 12/06/2026
RIP — David Hockney American Collectors (Fred and Marcia Weisman), Art Institute of Chicago, September 1982.
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Wassmann Foundation @wassmannfoundation.bsky.social · 12/06/2026
Julius von Bismarck, Two heads with one stone, 2026. Australian Center for Contemporary Art, Melbourne
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Apollo @apollo-magazine.com · 08/06/2026
‘Former slaughterhouses make for excellent exhibition venues.’ Catherine Bennett finds that Rome’s first photography museum in the Testaccio district is no exception to this rule.
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Rome’s first photography museum wants to be a European heavyweight
Housed in a former slaughterhouse, the new Mattatoio arts complex hints at the site’s industrial past and has grand plans for the future, writes Catherine Bennett
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Wassmann Foundation @wassmannfoundation.bsky.social · 31/05/2026
"Reproduced at a moment when ancient woodland makes up less than 3% of the UK’s landmass... the photographs in Trees of Great Britain and Ireland exist not only as scientific curios but artworks rooting us in time and place, tethered to the past and future." www.theartnewspaper.com/2026/05/22/b...
theartnewspaper.com
Shoot and branch: new photography book highlights the enduring majesty of trees
"Trees of Great Britain and Ireland" offers a handsome insight into early 20th-century botanical photography
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Wassmann Foundation @wassmannfoundation.bsky.social · 18/05/2026
Williams-Boltwood farmhouse, store and post office (1779). Goshen, Massachusetts
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Wassmann Foundation @wassmannfoundation.bsky.social · 10/05/2026
A little morning Americana. West Liberty, Iowa.
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Wassmann Foundation @wassmannfoundation.bsky.social · 07/05/2026
A quick stop this morning to see progress on the fabulous Obama Presidential Center in Chicago's Jackson Park, officially opening to the public on June 19, 2026. @obamafoundation.bsky.social @barackobama.bsky.social
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Yuliya Komska @ykomska.bsky.social · 26/04/2026
I’ve never seen WWII rubble photographed by a Bauhaus artist. You’d think rubble is rubble, and yet… Elsa Thielmann, Tenement buildings among ruins, Berlin 1945. In a very worthwhile Bauhaus women photographers show, Museum für Fotografie
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Wassmann Foundation @wassmannfoundation.bsky.social · 11/04/2026
A day in the country. Boxing kangaroos Mt Lofty, Victoria
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Wassmann Foundation @wassmannfoundation.bsky.social · 26/03/2026
Ahh. Crossing New Zealand’s Southern Alps.
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Wassmann Foundation @wassmannfoundation.bsky.social · 25/03/2026
This Week’s Forgotten Picnic Tables of New Zealand: —Lake Pukaki —Lake Tekapo —Pines Beach —Lake Wānaka
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Wassmann Foundation @wassmannfoundation.bsky.social · 22/03/2026
Lake Tekapo spillway. Mackenzie Basin, New Zealand.
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Wassmann Foundation @wassmannfoundation.bsky.social · 16/03/2026
Okay, I know, it’s a cop-out, but I’ve paddled to the furthest place we could find to escape it all. Keiteriteri, New Zealand.
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Wassmann Foundation @wassmannfoundation.bsky.social · 13/03/2026
A flightless Weka, often mistaken for a Kiwi, on New Zealand’s Abel Tasman trail this afternoon.
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Wassmann Foundation @wassmannfoundation.bsky.social · 11/03/2026
Aboard the Kaitaki to Picton.
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Wassmann Foundation @wassmannfoundation.bsky.social · 11/03/2026
Cook Strait (Te Moana-o-Raukawa) crossing today.
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Wassmann Foundation @wassmannfoundation.bsky.social · 04/03/2026
Wes Anderson brings Joseph Cornell’s Queens studio to the heart of Paris, transforming Gagosian’s storefront gallery into a meticulously staged tableau—part time capsule, part life-size shadow box—for the first solo exhibition of Cornell’s work in Paris in four decades. youtube.com/watch?v=SBKX...
youtube.com
Wes Anderson on Joseph Cornell | The House on Utopia Parkway | Gagosian Quarterly
YouTube video by Gagosian
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Wassmann Foundation @wassmannfoundation.bsky.social · 04/03/2026
George Orwell Diary 4 March 1941 Crocuses out everywhere, a few wallflowers budding... Couples of hares sitting about in the winter wheat... Now and again in this war, at intervals of months, you get your nose above water for a few moments and notice that the earth is still going round the sun.
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Wassmann Foundation @wassmannfoundation.bsky.social · 22/02/2026
"Bourgeois’s art is less a product of the psychoanalytic treatment she sought than an extended comment on psychoanalysis itself, on the stories—simultaneously disturbing and ridiculous—it encourages us to tell about ourselves." @chrisirmscher.bsky.social
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Wassmann Foundation @wassmannfoundation.bsky.social · 06/02/2026
“While it is not fundamentally new that we can create fake photos, Farid said, we can now ‘do it at a speed and a scale and a level of sophistication’ as never before.” @rijksmuseum.bsky.social www.nytimes.com/2026/02/04/a...
nytimes.com
A.I. Loves Fake Images. But They’ve Been a Thing Since Photography Began.
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Wassmann Foundation @wassmannfoundation.bsky.social · 22/01/2026
"Cultural institutions have long had space on their walls for political leaders and wealthy patrons, but in the Cohen Building murals, it's ordinary American workers that star." @kelseyables.bsky.social @washingtonpost.com www.washingtonpost.com/entertainmen...
washingtonpost.com
The stunning art trove hidden in a D.C. building marked by Trump for disposal
Packed with frescoes, paintings and reliefs, the federal government’s Cohen Building has been called “the Sistine Chapel of the New Deal.” Advocates fear these works could be at risk.
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Hyperallergic @hyperallergic.com · 17/01/2026
“In art history, meaning shifts over time, even if it was created for a specific intent or commissioned.... It is proof that, at some point, the power of the painting has nothing to do with the literal intent.” –Michael Berryhill
hyperallergic.com
Beer With a Painter: Michael Berryhill
“You can’t think your way through a painting,” the artist said during our conversation at his home studio in the Catskills. “You can only act, mark, or feel your way through.”
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Wassmann Foundation @wassmannfoundation.bsky.social · 11/01/2026
George Orwell Diary 11 January 1939 "One egg." (Orwell often recorded the egg count from his chickens, and sometimes not much else.)
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Wassmann Foundation @wassmannfoundation.bsky.social · 10/01/2026
"If someone grew up with a Jackson Pollock hanging above her bed... and that painting was subsequently stolen from her family home, how would she feel about the resulting absence?" —Sebastian Smee www.washingtonpost.com/entertainmen...
washingtonpost.com
The hunt for a stolen Jackson Pollock — and answers to a family’s pain
Decades after a brazen art theft drove Merry White’s father to despair, federal agents closed in on one last missing work. For White, the search is personal.
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Wassmann Foundation @wassmannfoundation.bsky.social · 05/01/2026
“Marshall can be solemn, portentous, improbable, joyous and slyly funny, sometimes within the space of a single canvas, mixing registers and messages to the extent that his paintings escape any simple, narrative reading.”
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Wassmann Foundation @wassmannfoundation.bsky.social · 01/01/2026
“In an ultimate act of appreciation for the artist's practice, The House on Utopia Parkway itself becomes a shadow box, viewed only through the windows of Gagosian's softly lit storefront.” @surrhealism.bsky.social
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Wassmann Foundation @wassmannfoundation.bsky.social · 28/12/2025
“The Royal Academy galleries are the perfect venue for his paintings. Not only do they match the architecture’s scale, they resonate with a level of ambition that was once expected from figurative paintings but was long ago disavowed.” www.washingtonpost.com/entertainmen...
washingtonpost.com
Review | To see America’s greatest living painter, you’ll have to cross the pond
A Kerry James Marshall retrospective traveling across Europe reveals the extraordinary power of his art.
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Wassmann Foundation @wassmannfoundation.bsky.social · 25/12/2025
“These are substantial, engaging, compelling works, but they don’t feel particularly connected to the longer history of surrealism and its origins in violence, dreams and desire.” @philipkennicott.bsky.social
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Wassmann Foundation @wassmannfoundation.bsky.social · 24/12/2025
“Throughout much of the exhibition, you can hear a slightly befuddled, fuzzy-thinking voice lost in a marijuana fog, expressing all the reductionist, simpleminded political truths of the age.” www.washingtonpost.com/entertainmen...
washingtonpost.com
Review | It’s almost surreal how disappointing this surrealism show is
The Whitney Museum of American Art’s ambitious effort to rewrite art history is largely a grab bag of disparate stuff.
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Apollo @apollo-magazine.com · 22/12/2025
‘Open his sketchbooks and Constable’s preoccupation with ploughs, carts and barges is impossible to ignore.’ Susan Owens explores how the artist’s brush with his family’s agricultural business made him the most practically minded landscape painter of his time
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How Constable ploughed his own furrow
The painter abandoned his father's corn business to pursue his artistic training – but it was his real agricultural knowledge that set him apart from his contemporaries
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Wassmann Foundation @wassmannfoundation.bsky.social · 17/12/2025
Turner is regarded as a singular genius, but looking at his social and artistic milieu also reveals him as a product of his time.
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Wassmann Foundation @wassmannfoundation.bsky.social · 11/12/2025
Enjoying the company we're keeping these days. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johann_...
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Wassmann Foundation @wassmannfoundation.bsky.social · 08/12/2025
For Martin Parr, ‘Showing Things as They Are’ Was Art www.nytimes.com/2025/12/08/a...
nytimes.com
For Martin Parr, ‘Showing Things as They Are’ Was Art
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Wassmann Foundation @wassmannfoundation.bsky.social · 05/12/2025
“Berlin—as a temporary refuge for bohemians, and for those who need it even more—is over.” Diedrich Diederichsen
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Wassmann Foundation @wassmannfoundation.bsky.social · 05/12/2025
“Berlin—as a temporary refuge for bohemians, and for those who need it even more—is over.” Diedrich Diederichsen
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Wassmann Foundation @wassmannfoundation.bsky.social · 04/12/2025
The number of places in the world where someone can earn a living making serious-minded fine art has shrunk drastically—now the number of places where people go to prison for rigorous creative action is rising at an alarming speed. How did that happen? @artforum.com www.artforum.com/features/yea...
artforum.com
The War on Bohemia
Critic Diedrich Diederichsen on political repression and precarity in the arts sector.
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Wassmann Foundation @wassmannfoundation.bsky.social · 30/11/2025
Frankfurt to Dubai along the northern border of Iraq and Iran, 13 hours on to Melbourne and nearly the same bleary-eyed in the darkroom.
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