For the Love of Nature

By WALDEMAR JANUSZCZAK

The Sunday Times Magazine, 3 August 2025

    People really love this artist — so why does the art world ignore a great Briton? Andy Goldsworthy is imaginative, inventive, poetic, hard-working, big-hearted and brave. He has been making art for 50 years. Nature loves him, people who have seen his work in books love him, people who go to his exhibitions love him, I love him, my wife loves him, and so do my kids. But for reasons we need to go into, the art establishment does not. Indeed, it ignores him.

    He has never been nominated for the Turner prize. He has never received an MBE or an OBE, let alone been knighted or damed like the Gromleys, Kapoors or Emins. He has never had a show at the Tate or the Hayward. No one has asked him to represent Britain at the Venice Biennale. For 50 years Goldsworthy has been making art that touches the heart and delights the eyes. But the art establishment can't see it. Why?

    One reason is that his work is centred on landscape, and the art establishment, these days, is an urban beast. Sheep don't fret about their identities. Trees don't remember the empire. Farmers don't express themselves with their clothing as relentlessly asLeigh Bowery did, night after night, club after club, in the posthumous show he had recently at Tate Modern.

    Another problem is the delightful nature of Goldsworthy's art: that it is so easy to love. The gorgeous patterns he finds in autumn leaves, the magical moments he creates with nature's simplest materials, the ecstatic understanding he has of the joy of colour are not neurotic enough to appeal to the art world's tastes. It sees itself as a complex ally of the ego, not a joyous buddy of the id. It hungers for difficulty, rigour, unpleasure.

    So my advice to the commissars of the art establishment, to Tate directors and Serpentine curators, is to get yourselves to Edinburgh and visit Andy Goldsworthy: Fifty years at the Royal Scottish Academy. It's a look at the whole of his lengthy career, but also a statement show that seems determined to stamp out the rumour that he's a softie. The real Andy Goldsworthy ➖hardcore, thoughtful, mysterious➖ is being encouraged to emerge.

    It begins spectacularly with a long and shaggy sheepskin rug running down the centre of the posh stairs that welcome us to the Royal Scottish Academy (see picture below).  Infused with the stony rigour of the Scottish Enlightenment, carved out of local granite, the posh stairs speak of privilege and rank, politeness and empire. Goldsworthy's rug, meanwhile, ascending shaggily step by step, speaks of muddy fields and the dirty bottom of sheep. Two worlds colliding, and societal sparks are flying. (Click on link above to see a gallery of the exhibited pieces.)

    The attack continues with the next sight, a filigree of delicate lines stretching between the portentous Doric columns that loom over the entrance. What is it? A silk hanging? A beaded embroidery? As you get closer, you finally recognise it: barbed wire. From many fields and with many patinas. For the first time in its unpleasant history, the vicious outdoor fencing has been woven by an industrious spider into a curtain of fragile beauty.

    Like nature itself, the show keeps switching moods. Gravestones, a lumpy gallery full of rocks that appear to have emerged beneath the floor, like the biblical prophecy about the resurrection of the dead at the End of Days, is doomy and gothic. It's made out of stones dug up in the cemeteries of Dumfries and Galloway.

    But Sheep Paintings, two panels of cosmic swirlings with a perfect circle at their centre, feels druidically mystical, like that installation with the setting sun at Tate Modern by Olafur Eliasson. Goldswothy's solar discs were actually created by the muddy feet of sheep feeding around a perfectly circular food trough.

    In  his student days Goldsworthy worked on a farm, where he learnet a respect for labour and inherited an appreciation for the seasons. Despite their many moods, his installations are invariably centred on a simple piece of geometry: a circle, a square, a line. Oak Passage seems, from its first angle, to be an impenetrable tangle of branches. But, as you walk round, you see that its centre is dissected by a miraculously straight path. Man and nature are doing their thing in evident harmony.

    Most readers will know Goldsworthy's work from the sumptuous photography books he produced in the 1990s. They were popular and are, I suspect, the chief reason the art world took against him: it dislikes crowd-pleasers. Some of those images are on show here as well ➖a mysterious zigzag in the earth created with feathers of a heron; a bottomless hole in a tree fashioned from autumn leaves.  

    Rather than shinning glossily in a coffee table book, they hang cooly on the gallery walls, part of a thoughtful photographic encapsulation in their production is easier to note. They remain beautiful ➖what a nose he has for the intensity of nature's colours➖ but their ambition to record a fleeting moment is much more evident. The job of this gorgeous photography is to record a natural performance that would otherwise be lost.

    All through the event there's a feeling that the artist is trying to right some wrongs. Here, finally, the truth is being projected that he is, at heart, a minimalist: a lover of geometry's simplest order. But where most minimalists are urbanites, searching for industrial precision with industrial materials, he's a rural minimalist who finds order and simplicity in nature. If it's not there, he inserts it into the chaos.

    And like all great landscape artists ➖and he is certainly one of those➖ he's bringing the outdoors indoors. It's a traditional British ambition. It deserves far greater recognition that it has hitherto received.⦿

Boots_series

A current Netflix tv series review by Josh from joshatthemovies.com

Inspired by memoir The Pink Marine by Greg Cope White, Netflix’s 90s-era dramedy, Boots, takes aim at the homophobic realities of being a Marine during that decade. Gay people, openly serving in the U.S. military, was not legalised until 2011, well after some of the unfortunate events that take place during this compelling series.

Undeniably, The Pink Marine is a better title and thankfully carries over as the name of the debut episode.

Closeted eighteen-year-old Cameron (Miles Heizer, 13 Reasons Why) enlists as a Marine, becoming our window into a world of toxic masculinity, intense tests of physical and emotional endurance, and ultimately, the bonds formed through forced camaraderie.

Some viewers may be disappointed that the queer struggles materialise as more internal than external in Cameron’s specific viewpoint. But make no mistake—Boots is a very gay, very emotional series with an excellent ensemble cast to anchor its intensity.

Presenting a critical analysis on the Marine lifestyle, 90’s time-capsule Boots houses a layered performance from Miles Heizer and moving queer subtext...

[Josh’s full review]: https://joshatthemovies.com/2025/10/09/tv-review-boots/

Trailer: https://youtu.be/2mjN2f5tu2s?si=IBp_uLE6aYZXkoPy

Available on Netflix and on ororo.tv

smartphone-free childhood

jonathanhaidt

 

@smartphonefreechildhoodus made this great Public Service Announcement about what happens when we give kids smartphones and social media.

We overprotect kids in the real world and underprotect them online. Research shows early or unlimited access to social media can lead to:
😟 Increased anxiety and depression
🌙 Disrupted sleep
⏳ Fragmented attention span
🚫 Exposure to harmful content
🤝 Underdeveloped social skills

Childhood should be about learning, friendships, and play — not spent scrolling.

Let’s change our social norms together! Delay smartphones and social media. Implement #belltobell #phonefreeschools. Give kids more independence, free play, and responsibility in the real world. #thefournorms

I hope you'll follow @smartphonefreechildhoodus and check out their great resources (links in their bio).

If you repost this reel to your own account, please acknowledge @smartphonefreechildhoodus and the creators:

Written and directed by @timmasonchicago
Creative agency: @fearlessmortals
Production company: @tessa.films

#smartphones #socialmedia #smartphonefreechildhood #theanxiousgeneration #psa #letschangethenorm

Love is Love

Intentaron borrarnos

Pero seguimos aquí

Seguimos siendo queer

Seguimos siendo nosotros

Después de todos los nombres que nos llamaron

Todas las mentiras que nos dijeron

Todas las lágrimas que hemos llorado 

Pero ahora no les tenemos miedo 

Hemos sentido lo que es sujetar su mano 

Conocemos el calor de estar en sus brazos 

Hemos vivido una vida de “te quieros”

Ojalá poder volver atrás y enseñarle a ese chico aterrorizado 

quién somos ahora

Decirle que hemos vivido nuestra verdad

Ojalá poder decirle que se sienta orgulloso de quién es 

porque sabemos la verdad

Hemos vivido esa verdad:

El amor es el amor.

Esteban Jiménez, a Rising Cello Star

His musical vision, full of elegance and sensitivity, always ready to excite, has recently led him to be the second Spanish musician since 1997 to be Laureate in the prestigious Witold Lutoslawski International Competition in Warsaw, where he also obtained the Special Jury Prize for the best interpretation of a work by said composer and Special Prize granted by the Polish Society of Authors and Composers.

Initially a student of Richard Eade's (Soloist at the Seville Royal Symphony Orchestra), and Iagoba Fanlo's (Real C.S.M. Aragón), he has expanded his training in different masterclasses with teachers such as Frans Helmerson, Sung-Won Yang, Johannes Moser or Norbert Anger.

As for his record, he has been awarded first prizes in the 17th International Violoncello Competition in Portugal, the first International Valencia Cello Competition, the Paderewski International Cello Competition or the Slava International Cello Competition, and has been a finalist in others, such as the Llanes 20th International Violoncello Competition or the 7th David Popper International Cello Competition.

His debut as a soloist took place at the age of 11 with the Seville Philharmonia Orchestra, in the León Auditorium, performing the Kódaly Sonata. He has performed on the most important stages in Madrid, such as the Juan March Foundation or the National Auditorium and recently with the Warsaw Philharmonic under the baton of Marek Mos.

He has been part of the prestigious Barenboim-Said Foundation and is currently completing his training at the Katarina Gurska Higher Music Center in Madrid with professors Karolina Styczen and Michal Dmochowski, where he enjoys an Honor Scholarship for his foundation.

How ‘Gay’ Became an Identity in Art

 

Andreas Andersen, “Interior with Hendrik Andersen and John Briggs Potter in Florence,” 1894, from
“The First Homosexuals:The Birth of a New Identity, 1869-1939” at Wrightwood 659 gallery in Chicago.Credit...

 

Two groundbreaking exhibitions in Chicago explore the shift in portrayals of same-sex attraction. They are being staged at a fraught moment. Arthur Lubow reports. 

The New York Times, July 12, 2025

When did homosexuality change from a description of what people do to a definition of who they are? How was an act transformed into an identity? In this precarious moment, as White House pronouncements, court decisions and public polling indicate backsliding support for gay rights in this country, such questions, long chewed over by scholars of sociology, philosophy and gender studies, are addressed in two impressive art exhibitions in Chicago.

Six years in the making, “The First Homosexuals: The Birth of a New Identity, 1869-1939,” at Wrightwood 659 gallery in Chicago, through Aug. 2, is an eye-opening global survey of same-sex-oriented art. With roughly 300 works on view, venturing beyond Europe and North America to include Latin America and Asia, it is a huge show. Yet the curator Jonathan D. Katz, who was assisted by Johnny Willis, said that procuring loans from international museums for an exhibition with this title and focus was a struggle, and more often than not, the requests were refused. Indeed, at the last moment, two promised paintings from Slovakia, which is governed by a socially conservative populist party, were withdrawn; a large black-and-white reproduction of one is hanging on a wall.

Coincidentally, a superlative exhibition nearby, “Gustave Caillebotte: Painting His World” at the Art Institute of Chicago until Oct. 5, explores how the Impressionist master concentrated on the portrayal of men, at a time when turning the male gaze on another man was almost unthinkable. Most of his depictions are not overtly homoerotic. However, in a large painting, scandalous in its day and startling even now, he viewed from behind a naked man drying himself. It’s the sort of boudoir picture that his friend Edgar Degas frequently made of female bathers. Caillebotte, who died at 45 in 1894, lived with a woman and never identified as gay. An important lesson drawn from both shows is that categories like gay and straight are markers of our time, not his.

Gustave Caillebotte, “Man at His Bath,” 1884, from “Caillebotte: Painting His World”
at the Art Institute of Chicago. The Impressionist master turned the male gaze on another
man, an almost unthinkable perspective at the time.Credit...via Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

As documented in the erudite and sumptuous “First Homosexuals” catalog, the term “homosexual” (and “heterosexual”) came into being in the 1860s, along with “urning,” a newly coined word that has not lasted so well. Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, a German lawyer, divided humanity into those who are innately attracted to the opposite sex, and the “urnings” who are enamored of their own. A few years later, the writer Karl Maria Kertbeny came up with “homosexual.” Unlike Ulrichs, he viewed sexual choice as a changeable taste, not a binary division, akin to deciding what dish to cook for dinner. Yet in the years that followed, Ulrichs’s hard-and-fast split between gay and straight came to be popularized with Kertbeny’s terminology.

Katz argues that at about the turn of the 20th century, in light of behavioral and psychological research, same-sex attraction shifted. Instead of something that could turn like a weather vane, it came to be regarded as an immutable orientation, and the objects of erotic fascination for gay and lesbian artists changed, too. Earlier gay artists embraced indeterminacy and represented bodies that blurred the line between masculine and feminine. But once homosexuality was no longer viewed as a momentary preference, androgynous adolescents gave way to muscular men and buxom women.

Gustave Courtois, “Narcissus,” 1872, from “The First Homosexuals,” at Wrightwood 659.
Courtois in his early works elided the distinction between male and female.Credit...
Marseille, musée des Beaux-Arts/Claude Almodovar-Michel Vialle; via Wrightwood 659

Pascal Dagnan-Bouveret, “La Blanchisseuse (The Laundress),” 1879. Graphite, ink and ink
wash on paper, Wrightwood 659.Credit...via Schiller & Bodo European Paintings and Wrightwood 659

Two paintings in the show by the academic French painter Gustave Courtois illustrate this transformation. In 1872, Courtois limned the nude body of a young model who posed as the self-adoring Narcissus. With his sex discreetly hidden by a ribbon, Narcissus elides the distinction between male and female. But over the next 35 years, Courtois rechanneled his energies. Painting a portrait of Maurice Dériaz, a professional bodybuilder, in 1907, Courtois clearly relished Dériaz’s dark mustache and bulging biceps as emblems of virility.

Courtois is believed to have been the life partner of another painter, Carl Ernst von Stetten. The exhibition includes a polished drawing of them walking arm in arm, which the art historian André Dombrowski asserts in an essay is the first known depiction of a modern gay male couple in European art. Women more frequently paired off as loving friends; the show features many depictions of lesbian domesticity, including the photos that Alice Austen made on Staten Island at the end of the 19th century, of herself and her friends, holding each other tenderly or frolicking in drag.

Alice Austen, “The Darned Club,” 1891, a depiction of lesbian domesticity. Austen
made a tender image on Staten Island of herself and her friends.Credit...via Wrightwood 659

Many of the gay male encounters portrayed in Western art are fleeting or transactional. In early 20th-century America, George Bellows, who was not gay, made a print of a public bathhouse that centers on a naked effeminate youth flirting outrageously with a stout older chap; and Charles Demuth, who was gay, depicted himself in conversation with two sailors on a street outside the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Same-sex relations between men were thought to be driven by lust, not affection.

But in other cultures, same-sex relations and gender nonconformity were accepted. The exhibition includes fascinating depictions of cross-dressers in the early 19th century on the street in Lima, Peru; the erotic adventures of a young man engaged with male and female lovers in a Japanese scroll from the mid-19th century; and the tender intimacies in the early 20th century of Uzbek men with youths who worked traditionally as singers and dancers.

Francisco Fierro, “Hombres vestidos de mujer,” circa 1834-41, depicts a cross-dresser
on the street in Lima, Peru.Credit...Museo de Arte de Lima, via Wrightwood 659; Photo by Daniel Giannoni

Charles Demuth, “On ‘That’ Street,” 1932. Watercolor over graphite.Credit...via Wrightwood 659

And even in the West, by the end of the 19th century, one can find affectionate scenes of domesticity, such as a painting from 1893 by the Danish artist Emilie Mundt of her female partner, their adopted daughter, and the partner’s elderly father at the piano; and a remarkable portrayal the next year by Andreas Andersen of his sculptor brother Hendrik lying under a duvet and stroking a pink-ribboned kitten, as the artist John Briggs Potter, naked at the foot of the bed, pulls on a sock.

For sheer eccentricity, it would be hard to outdo Elisàr von Kupffer, who called himself Elisarion. With his partner, Eduard von Mayer, also an artist, he lived in a mansion in southern Switzerland that he deemed a temple dedicated to a self-styled religion that denied gender differences. His endearingly campy 1915-16 oil painting of two youths in a chapel being joined in union by another young man, all of them nude, is said to be the first artistic depiction of a same-sex wedding.

Elisàr von Kupffer, “La Nuova lega (The New Union),” 1915-1916, an early depiction
of a same-sex wedding.Credit...Municipality of Minusio — Centro Elisarion, via Wrightwood 659

Unlike these gay fantasies, in the art of Caillebotte there is no certain tip-off to sexual orientation. A wide-ranging talent who energetically pursued boating, boat design, philately and gardening, along with painting, the independently wealthy artist was for many years remembered primarily as a patron of his fellow Impressionists, bequeathing his collection of their work to France. When his own art was rediscovered, it was hailed for its radical use of perspective and cropped framing, which he derived from photography. The more recent curiosity about Caillebotte’s interest in masculine subjects raises questions that can’t be answered, and the curators are careful to avoid making any claims about his sexuality.

But naysayers who argue that finding traces of homoeroticism in Caillebotte’s work is an unsupported anachronism are mistaken. His first major painting, “Floor Scrapers,” depicted bare-chested muscular men stripping the wood parquet in the apartment of his parents. Its rejection by the establishment Salon of 1875 led Caillebotte to ally himself with the Impressionists and exhibit with them the following year. When he took up boating at his country estate outside Paris, his paintings of the sporting activity, unlike those of his colleagues Manet, Monet and Renoir, depicted only lithe men at the oars, rather than fashionable male-female couples. Most of the men he portrayed were not engaged in war, hunting or business, but within domestic settings thought to constitute the feminine domain.

Caillebotte, “Floor Scrapers,” 1875. The Art Institute of Chicago focuses on his subjects,
often lithe men, but the curators are careful to avoid making any claims about his sexuality.Credit...
via of Musée d’Orsay, Dist. GrandPalaisRmn / Franck Raux

These musings are not merely the product of our own day. The almost life-size “Man at His Bath,” with its subject prosaically naked rather than heroically or classically nude, provoked embarrassment and hostility when Caillebotte tried to exhibit it in 1884. It would have held pride of place at Wrightwood 659; none of the artists in that show, gifted and intriguing as many of them are, approaches Caillebotte in achievement. He painted the towel with white and gray slashes of pigment, but stippled the skin lovingly in flesh tones, with rosy highlights on the buttocks. Eventually, the canvas was accepted for an exhibition by the progressive Brussels artists society, Les XX, in 1888, but the organizers hid it in a back room to avoid attention. The following year, the leading Impressionist dealer in Paris, Paul Durand-Ruel, declined to show it, and Caillebotte, who didn’t need to sell his paintings, withdrew from exhibiting for the remainder of his life.

Caillebotte’s reputation hardly rests on his predilection for male subjects. His vertiginous depictions of the street as viewed from his balcony, which are included in the exhibition, are justifiably acclaimed. His most famous painting, “Paris Street; Rainy Day,” a treasure of the Art Institute, with its exaggerated perspective, bold cropping and a choreography that softens the bustle of urban life into a gentle ballet, doesn’t gain anything from scrutinizing in what direction the male protagonist is looking.

“Paris Street; Rainy Day,” 1877. Caillebotte’s masterwork at the Art Institute, with its exaggerated perspective and bold cropping, softens the bustle of urban life into a gentle ballet.Credit...via The Art Institute of Chicago, Charles H. and Mary F. Worcester Collection

Indeed, the hunt for telltale signs of his sexual orientation turns ludicrous at times. The notion that the working-class fellow looking out over the Pont de l’Europe, in Caillebotte’s painting of that name, could be a sex worker eyed by the well-dressed bourgeois who is the artist’s double — as suggested in an essay by a feminist art historian, Norma Broude, that is cited in the catalog — strikes me as absurd. Yet refusing to acknowledge the homosocial, and in some instances homoerotic, elements in Caillebotte’s work is also a distortion of the record.

At this politically charged moment, American arts institutions seem anxious to avoid controversy. Wrightwood 659 offered to send its monumental exhibition to a major museum, without a fee and even covering the costs. It received no acceptances (although an abbreviated version, one-fifth the size, will be shown at the Kunstmuseum Basel next year). And the Art Institute chose a banal and anodyne title for its Caillebotte exhibition, “Painting His World,” forgoing the title of the Musée d’Orsay and the J. Paul Getty Museum shows: “Painting Men.” Asked why, the Chicago curator Gloria Groom said the new title was more “inclusive”: the show displays the artist’s sole female nude and a few other nonconforming works. But in practice, the rebranding obscures the originality of this take on Caillebotte’s oeuvre. Maybe the art world has not come so far as we might think from the days when “Man at His Bath” was hidden in a virtual closet.