Albert Pinkham Ryder “Resurrection” oil on canvas 6.7″ x 5.55″ (1885)
Christ is risen indeed!
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I don’t fundraise off of my blog. I don’t ask for Patreon or Paypal donations. If you’d like to support the Remodern mission, buy abook. Or a painting.
The establishment art world is in many ways an elaborate money laundering scheme.
Works of art have long been identified, and sometimes even romanticized, as ideal ways for racketeers to launder money. There’s a thread of logic here: the art world typically accommodates those that want to anonymously buy high-dollar paintings, and on top of that, the industry allows large cash deals. For those looking to launder money, it’s difficult to conjure up a more attractive set of circumstances than those.
There also seems to be plenty of instances where art has played a role in the act of money laundering. Consider that when the Mexican government passed a law in the early 2010s to require more information about buyers, and how much cash could be spent on a single piece of art, the market cratered, as sales dipped 70 percent in less than a year. Many believed that was because Mexican cartel rings had previously been the biggest buyers in the market.
I don’t fundraise off of my blog. I don’t ask for Patreon or Paypal donations. If you’d like to support the Remodern mission, buy abook. Or a painting.
Rogier van der Weyden “The Descent from the Cross” (c. 1435)
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I don’t fundraise off of my blog. I don’t ask for Patreon or Paypal donations. If you’d like to support the Remodern mission, buy abook. Or a painting.
The iconic Easter candy is getting a special exhibit in Wisconsin.
April 1 – 18, 2026 at Racine Art Museum The seventeenth edition of a popular annual exhibition showcasing artwork made from or inspired by PEEPS® Brand marshmallow candy.
Whether using the candy as a material or paying homage to it through representation, this exhibition brings together artists of all ages. For the first time, RAM PEEPS® Brand Art Exhibition will be held in one of RAM’s first-floor permanent gallery spaces, bringing this fan-favorite exhibition to a larger space that better shows off masterPEEPS® from the community.
I don’t fundraise off of my blog. I don’t ask for Patreon or Paypal donations. If you’d like to support the Remodern mission, buy abook. Or a painting.
William Michael Harnett “Still Life—Violin and Music” oil on canvas 40″ x 30″ (1888)
Happy April Fools Day!
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I don’t fundraise off of my blog. I don’t ask for Patreon or Paypal donations. If you’d like to support the Remodern mission, buy abook. Or a painting.
Guillermo Del Toro was a great film maker before he went woke. I’m not going to watch his Frankenstein film, which apparently makes Frankenstein’s wife the girl who is the key to everything, a really exhausted trope of Postmodern Hollywood.
Del Toro didn’t win the best picture Oscar, but he was gifted with a significant painting.
Guillermo del Toro’s heart-wrenching Frankenstein earned nine nominations ahead of this month’s 98th Academy Awards. Although the film’s costume, makeup, and production teams all scored wins, the Mexican filmmaker himself went home without the night’s biggest accolade—Best Picture, for which Frankenstein was nominated. Fortunately, del Toro received a more sentimental prize amid the festivities, when a cadre of his closest collaborators presented him with a painting of Frankenstein’s Monster by the late great British artist Josh Kirby.
Kirby became one of the U.K.’s best-known commercial creatives between the 1950s and ’80s, painting book covers for Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 (1953) and Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 (1961)—plus film posters for Star Wars: Return of the Jedi and Krull (both 1983).
The artist modeled his undated Frankenstein’s Monster painting after British actor Boris Karloff’s portrayal in the same seminal 1931 film that enraptured del Toro at age seven. A golden plate affixed to the frame of Kirby’s painting acknowledges this inspiration, as well as the work’s provenance, stating that American sci-fi author, magazine editor, and horror collector Forrest J. Ackerman acquired it in 1976.
I don’t fundraise off of my blog. I don’t ask for Patreon or Paypal donations. If you’d like to support the Remodern mission, buy abook. Or a painting.
I don’t fundraise off of my blog. I don’t ask for Patreon or Paypal donations. If you’d like to support the Remodern mission, buy abook. Or a painting.
Before the drugs took hold, young Jean-Michel Basquiat was known for compulsively drawing and painting on just about any surface he could get his hands on. A collection of studies of heads have been assembled for a museum exhibition in Denmark.
“Cleverly titled Headstrong, the exhibition gathers nearly 50 works on paper devoted to the head, each created between 1981 and 1983. This period is often considered to be Basquiat’s most prolific and experimental, seeing him return to the head with greater frequency. The vast majority of these head drawings, though, remained hidden during the artist’s lifetime, despite centering around this recurring motif. Headstrong seeks to unveil not just the sheer prevalence but significance of these works, exploring how Basquiat treated the head, anatomy, and science as abstract symbols.
“In comparison to his monumental paintings and collages, Basquiat’s head-related oeuvre seems more introspective, more intuitive, avoiding the viewer rather than inviting them in. Several compositions in Headstrong simply revolve around stark heads stripped of any extraneous information, suspended on blank canvases often devoid of the artist’s signature imagery.”
I don’t fundraise off of my blog. I don’t ask for Patreon or Paypal donations. If you’d like to support the Remodern mission, buy abook. Or a painting.
Pablo Picasso “The painter and his model” (1927). Current Location: Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art
Iran was a cosmopolitan nation before they were taken over by 7th century barbarians in 1979. A museum full of significant art has been in the possession of the mullahs all this time. We can only hope it will not be pillaged or destroyed in their death throes.
This time last year, art enthusiasts in Tehran were celebrating an extraordinary event. A masterpiece by Pablo Picasso, “The Painter and His Model,” went on display in the city for only the second time in decades. It was shown at the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art, in an exhibition entitled “Picasso in Tehran” — a rare highlighting of a different face of Iran, with similarly rare approval from the Islamic regime.
The 1927 painting was described by Bloomberg last week as “arguably the most important canvas in the world that cannot be visited or seen.” The work that helped inspire Picasso’s “Guernica,” which showcases the destruction caused by the Spanish Civil War, it sits in what Bloomberg called “one of the world’s most dangerous cities.”
But the current war is only the latest factor preventing the piece from being made available to the public, with little known about the museum’s current fate. (Its website, like many others in Iran, has been down, possibly due to internet disruptions in the country. Some users on social media have shared posts showing artifacts in some museums put away or wrapped in protective materials.)
Like dozens of other masterpieces in the museum, “The Painter and His Model” has spent virtually all of the 47 years since the Islamic Revolution shut away in TMOCA’s vaults, considered too inappropriate by the ayatollahs for display.
I don’t fundraise off of my blog. I don’t ask for Patreon or Paypal donations. If you’d like to support the Remodern mission, buy abook. Or a painting.
-Pierre-Auguste Renoir, French painter (February 25, 1841 – December 3, 1919)
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I don’t fundraise off of my blog. I don’t ask for Patreon or Paypal donations. If you’d like to support the Remodern mission, buy abook. Or a painting.
THE REMODERN REVIEW 