Eliana Willis

America hasn’t had a major Etruscan exhibition since 2009, when Dallas’s Meadows Museum hosted “New Light on the Etruscans.” That changes in May 2026, when San Francisco’s Legion of Honor museum unveils “The Etruscans: From the Heart of Ancient Italy,” a sprawling show of 180 Etruscan antiquities from 30 international museums—many of which have never been seen in the United States. The exhibition will culminate 10 years of research and elucidate how this enigmatic Italian civilization shaped the Roman culture immediately after theirs.
Terracotta Caeretan hydria attributed to Eagle Painter (520–510 B.C.E.) On loan from The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles. Photo courtesy of Legion of Honor
The Etruscans are one of Europe’s lesser-known entities. Rome is partly to blame. The Etruscans dominated central Italy throughout the 1st millennium B.C.E., until the formidably unified Romans conquered their comparatively isolated cities one by one throughout the 2nd and 1st centuries B.C.E.—claiming numerous Etruscan innovations as their own along the way.
“They needed to have somebody pleading their cause, especially in America where so many people had not heard of the Etruscans,” Reneé Dreyfus, one of two ancient art curators at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco and the mastermind behind this show, told me on a video call. “The timing is so right for this exhibition, because many museums now have new Etruscan galleries.”
Bronze balsamarium (perfume jar) in the shape of a female head (late 3rd to early 2nd century B.C.E.) On loan from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Photo courtesy of Legion of Honor
Historians also haven’t encountered many written records from the Etruscans. “They wrote plenty, both about themselves and their history,” Dreyfus said. “It was lost because they wrote, primarily, on impermanent material like linen.” That left the Greeks and Romans to tell their story, and “they didn’t always look kindly on the Etruscans,” Dreyfus noted.
The Etruscan language presents another puzzle. Like the Etruscan people, no one knows for sure where it came from. But, in the decade since Dreyfus started working on this exhibition, scholars have grown more adept at translating Etruscan inscriptions—the longest of which will make its U.S. debut at Legion of Honor. Meanwhile, new excavations like those at the spa village of San Casciano dei Bagni continue providing new revelations around Etruscan life.
Bronze appliqué depicting the Sun God Usil (500–475 B.C.E.). On loan from the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles. Photo courtesy of Legion of Honor
Fewer than 10 of the objects in this May’s exhibition will hail from Legion of Honor’s own collection. Dreyfus joined forces with leading Etruscologist Richard Daniel De Puma to source the rest. “We went searching through storage areas in museums to uncover objects that are not currently on view,” she said. “We wanted people, even those who are experts in the field, to know about some of these unknown or little known objects.” She wants the catalog to serve as the new definitive resource.
“The Etruscans: From the Heart of Ancient Italy” will really begin with an extensive treasure trove from the Regolini-Galassi tomb, one of the most luxurious Etruscan burials ever exhumed, courtesy of the Vatican’s Gregorian Etruscan Museum. Sites like these have proven so useful to scholars “because [the Etruscans] included so much in their tombs,” Dreyfus said. These burials weren’t just lavish sendoffs rife with frescoes and terracotta portraits—they were eternal parties.
Bronze funerary vase in the shape of a female head (225–175 B.C.E.) On loan from the Musée du Louvre. Photo courtesy of Legion of Honor
The exhibition’s crown jewel, however, will be a cache of bronze sculptures recently unearthed from San Casciano dei Bagni. “To have anything from there represents a coup for this museum,” Dreyfus said. Etruscans often left tributes to their gods, which overlapped with the Greek pantheon, while visiting this sacred town. Archaeologists regularly find relics there featuring both Etruscan and Latin inscriptions—concrete proof of Roman-Etruscan coexistence.
The rest of the chronological show will feature thematic sub-sections, highlighting the Etruscan’s evolving beliefs about the afterlife, the exotic goods they imported from the Phoenicians and Greeks, and more. “We’ll have a section on the opulent gold jewelry that’s going to blow people away,” Dreyfus beamed. It will include a drinking cup decorated with 250,000 gold granules, on loan from London’s Victoria and Albert Museum.
Gold-plated silver and gold finger Ring with the Ambush of Achilles (550–500 B.C.E.) On loan from The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles. Photo courtesy of Legion of Honor
Metal generated most of the Etruscans’ wealth. Their land was rich in iron, copper, and tin. They became master bronzesmiths and exported their raw materials throughout the Mediterranean. But, their contributions to the region go even deeper. “They were the ones who first learned how to cultivate grapevines and produce wines on the peninsula,” Dreyfus said. “The system of counting that we talk about as Roman numerals was Etruscan numerals.” The Etruscans taught the Romans how to drain marshes and play gladiatorial games. They even gave women the right to own property, run businesses, and retain their last names.
“There’s so many things that we want the world to know about the Etruscans that have been secrets they’ve kept for millennia,” Dreyfus said. Now those secrets are coming to light.
“The Etruscans: From the Heart of Ancient Italy” is on view at Legion of Honor, 100 34th Ave, San Francisco, May 2–September 20, 2026. More

Jenny Saville will be subject of a major new show at Venice’s International Gallery of Modern Art at Ca’ Pesaro, marking the celebrated British painter’s first major exhibition in La Serenissima. Opening March 28, 2026, it will run through November 22, alongside the illustrious Venice Biennale, the 61st edition of which opens in May.
Featuring around 30 paintings that trace the artist’s career from the 1990s to present, the show follows her critically acclaimed retrospective at London’s National Portrait Gallery earlier this year, which traveled to Fort Worth’s Modern Art Museum and is on view through January 18. The Venice exhibition will include seminal works like Hyphen (1999) and Reverse (2002–13), both of which are on view in Fort Worth and are prime examples of Saville’s superior use of paint and scale to render the human body at once grotesque and tender. Later works echo Baroque masters, like the pietà-like Byzantium (2018).
Jenny Saville, Reverse (2002-2003). © Jenny Saville. All rights reserved, DACS 2025. Courtesy of Gagosian.
Saville said it’s a “great honor” to show in Venice, “a place where art is an intrinsic part of everyday life and where the Biennale artists of today sit in dialogue with these great Venetian artworks.”
Widely considered a Modern master of figuration, Saville’s work has recently been in conversation with the Old Masters at Gagosian‘s Art Basel Paris booth, where one of her latest canvases was positioned opposite the 17th-century The Virgin and Christ Child, with Saints Elizabeth and John the Baptist by Peter Paul Rubens. 
Saville came to fame with the Young British Artists (YBAs) in the early ’90s with her painterly Rubenesque figures that foregrounded flesh in all of its delights and discontents, calling into question society’s expectations of beauty and womanhood. The 1992 painting Propped became the most expensive artwork by a living woman artist to sell at auction when it went for $12.4 million at Sotheby’s London in 2018; she was unseated by Marlene Dumas earlier this year.
Jenny Saville, Byzantium (2018). © Jenny Saville. All rights reserved, DACS 2025. Photo: Mike Bruce. Courtesy of Gagosian.
Her exquisite use of light and color to render the visceralities of the human body are of course what Saville is best known for, a skill that one could argue links her to greats like Titian and Tintoretto of the Venetian School of painting. Indeed, the final room of the Ca’ Pesaro exhibition will present a new series of works created by the artist in homage to the lagoon city.
Ca’ Pesaro is housed in a palazzo on Venice’s Grand Canal and showcases 19th- and 20th-century painting and sculpture. It’s one of 11 museums run by the Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezia The upcoming show will be curated by the gallery’s director, Elisabetta Barisoni, and is supported by Gagosian.
“This exhibition marks Jenny Saville’s return to Venice, a city she loves, has visited many times, and is rich in the work of the old Venetian masters that she has studied for many years,” Barisoni said.
Jenny Saville will be on view at Ca’ Pesaro, C. del Tentor, 2076, 30135 Venice, Italy, March 28–November 22, 2026. More

It’s a common adage that fashion comes in cycles, but you might not know that mud is back in vogue. A new London exhibition, “Dirty Looks: Desire and Decay in Fashion,” dives headfirst into fashion’s flirtation with subverting luxury and not being afraid of a little grime.
Across eras and aesthetics, the exhibition traces how designers have used dirt, distress, and imperfection as acts of defiance—and, paradoxically, as new forms of beauty. “Dirty Looks” is the first fashion-focused show at the Barbican Art Gallery in eight years and runs until January 2026. It is organized by the Brussels-born curator Karen Van Godtsenhoven, who was at the Metropolitan Museum’s Costume Institute for five years before joining the Barbican full-time. “I had to really push for the topic. Fashion exhibitions are usually more glamorous, it took a while to convince everyone,” she said. “In a way, it’s also really perfect for the Barbican because it’s a broader art dialogue for fashion and not locking it up in a sort of very fabulous retail display.”
A piece from Maison Margiela by John Galliano’s Artisanal Spring/Summer line (2024). Photo: © Catwalkpictures.
The show isn’t all about complete annihilation—there is still a lot of the old-school variety of beauty. Some garments are sullied just a tad, others are in tatters, some are almost completely disintegrated. Van Godtsenhoven has unearthed more than 60 designers, from powerhouse names like Alexander McQueen and Maison Margiela—helmed by its visionary founder Martin Margiela and later by John Galliano—to today’s emerging upstarts. The show traces big moments, like the rise of anti-fashion during the 1980s and newer trends like bogcore and beyond. Wait, what’s bogcore?
“It’s these Scandinavian and Northern European brands doing things like dyeing their garments in the bog,” said Van Godtsenhoven. “It’s sort of a neopagan look, folkloric—the witch being revived in popular culture.”
In various guises, decaying fashion is a phenomenon that keeps cropping up. “This happens especially in times of large social changes,” Van Godtsenhoven said. “In the 1990s, it was this anxiety around the turn of the century, the end of independent fashion, and the global conglomerates moving their way into fashion, as well as ecological crisis and the internet. I think that this obsession, this dealing with waste or dirt or mud, is almost a way of regenerating the field.”
Origins of Mud
All modern designer streams, somehow, seem to flow from Vivienne Westwood. After punk and the provocations of her and Malcolm McLaren’s 1970s boutiques—Sex, Seditionaries, and Let It Rock—the designer turned away from nihilism. The duo opened the short-lived Nostalgia of Mud store in 1982. “It was much more romantic,” Van Godtsenhoven said, “and was also the start of the New Romantic subculture in London that was still rebellious but more playful than punk.” The store’s design made the space look derelict: a mud-colored plaster relief world map covered the storefront window vitrine, and a tarp stretched across the ceiling.
The entrance to Nostalgia of Mud (1982–83), the short-lived London boutique by Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren, featuring a purposely off-putting relief map façade. Photo: Robyn Beech, courtesy of Vivienne Westwood Heritage.
The store’s namesake runway collection was a time-bending romp that is now seen as a definitive moment in fashion. Eschewing the punk nihilism of her 1970s incarnations for romance, it positioned Westwood as a time-traveling cultural magpie and visionary. The designer used visible distressing, fabrics like rough wool and raw sheepskin, seams on the outside of tops, and buccaneer-silhouette trousers paired with 1950s lingerie. The historical references were rife, but the foundation for the civilization she was exploring was that it was built upon decay. You can dress a punk up in a fancy frock, but Westwood was still a punk.
Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood’s “Nostalgia of Mud” Autumn/Winter collection (1983), from the Steven Philip Personal Collection. Photo: © David Parry/ Barbican Art Gallery.
Van Godtsenhoven equates Westwood’s Mud moment to the pastoral movement. “This also relates to Marie Antoinette, who played being a shepherdess in her private palace, the Trianon,” she said. “It’s a longing for getting rid of class hierarchies, literally rolling in the mud, living a rustic life. I would say Malcolm and Vivienne wanted to reconnect with a sort of pastoral life. We have a lot of great pictures of Malcolm in the mountains in New York where they went to live in sort of rural areas. But of course, this is all a bit of a cosplay.”
A runway look from Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren’s “Nostalgia of Mud” Autumn/Winter collection (1982–83). Photo: Robyn Beech, courtesy of Vivienne Westwood Heritage.
“This was during the Thatcher years in Britain and just after the punk movement, and you see what we would today call cultural appropriation. This collection uses many influences from different tribal and ethnic dress from around the world. You can watch the video on YouTube—it’s an incredibly long show with very vibrant music from the Duck Rock album by Malcolm McLaren.”
Digging Up Rare Treasures
British designers are well represented in the show, including a holy grail for fashion fiends. “We’ve been so lucky to find the buried Hussein Chalayan garments,” Van Godtsenhoven said. “I thought, let’s try. They’re part of fashion folklore. Almost no one has actually seen them, apart from the few who were at that graduation show.”
Hussein Chalayan pieces in an installation view of “Dirty Looks,” at the Barbican Art Gallery, London, September 25, 2025–January 25, 2026. Photo: © David Parry/ Barbican Art Gallery.
For those unfamiliar with the cult designer, the curator explains: “Essentially, Chalayan, a Turkish Cypriot designer, grew up in London and graduated from Central Saint Martins College of Art. And while he made sculptures and videos, fashion became part of a larger art practice. He famously buried his graduation collection, ‘The Tangent Flows,’ which was about a female mathematician who was kidnapped and buried by other mathematicians because she was introducing Eastern philosophies into her work. That was the conceptual story behind it.”
A piece from Hussein Chalayan’s “The Tangent Flows” collection (1993). Photo: Ellen Sampson.
“Basically, he buried the garments in his friend’s London backyard for several months with iron and copper filings. So they all had different effects on these dresses, which are still visible today. It’s like a geological landscape of rust, earth, and copper. And then he kept doing that throughout his career. I think in total, there are six collections where he buried garments.”
For all the decades since his graduation show, Chalayan had stored the collection at a friend’s country house in the UK. “This was a challenge for the conservation people because the dresses contain all these mini specks of dirt and copper. This is not what they’re usually dealing with. But that actually applies to the whole show—everything was falling apart or dirty.”
Dragon: Explosion on Pleats Please Issey Miyake (October 5, 1998), a collaborative performance with the artist Cai Guo-Qiang at the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, Paris, documented in a film on display in “Dirty Looks” at the Barbican Art Gallery, London, September 25, 2025–January 25, 2026. Photo: Yasuaki Yoshinaga, courtesy of The Miyake Issey Foundation.
The early experimental work of Alexander McQueen shares that same volatility. “Some McQueen garments were made DIY, like with fishing wire and tape, and then had thrown latex atop and spray paint,” Van Godtsenhoven said. “They were not made to last 30 years or be in a museum. They were not from a luxury fashion house. He was on the edges of the fashion industry at that time.”
A renowned fashion and art collaboration from 1998 is also on display. “One of the loans I’m very proud of is from the Issey Miyake Foundation,” Van Godtsenhoven said. “There’s the whole wabi-sabi philosophy in Japanese arts and crafts that celebrates aging and patina and decay. But there’s a great dress that was a collaboration between Miyake and the artist Cai Guo-Qiang. They basically made a large pattern of a dragon with dresses and sprinkled gunpowder on it and exploded it. All the dresses have a different pattern of burning. For Miyake, the main thing I think is experimenting and using different materials.”
A runway photo of Pleats Please Issey Miyake press presentation (1998), made in collaboration with the artist Cai Guo-Qiang, featured in “Dirty Looks.” Photo: courtesy of The Miyake Issey Foundation.
Beauty in Ruin
The early 1980s were a period of flux for Paris runways, as designers like Thierry Mugler and Jean Paul Gaultier challenged the traditions of the established houses. When Japanese designers Rei Kawakubo of Comme des Garçons and Yohji Yamamoto arrived on the scene, their thoroughly unorthodox approach caused a sensation—so radical it was dubbed “anti-fashion.” “They had all these fraying garments with holes that were deconstructed,” Van Godtsenhoven said. “They were received by the press in quite a culturally stereotypical way—‘Hiroshima Chic’—and it was called ‘Le Destroy.’”
A view from the Comme des Garcons Fall 1984 Ready to Wear Runway Show, by designer Rei Kawakubo. Photo: Michel Maurou/WWD/Penske Media via Getty Images.
“But for Kawakubo, the holes were a type of lace and were actually very precious to her. She made the holes by hand; she would unscrew the machine to create these patterns. She saw it as a luxury that knitwear wasn’t fully even,” Van Godtsenhoven said. “Yamamoto was known for his historical perspective and for his ability to imbue garments with the passage of time and also to create very ornamental, empty spaces. The look we have from him was from the wardrobe of Zaha Hadid, because she wore a lot of the Japanese designers.”
A model wears a creation for Maison Martin Margiela during the Spring/Summer 2006 Ready-to-Wear collection show in Paris, October 7, 2005. Photo: AFP/Pierre Verdy via Getty Images.
Just as Kawakubo and Yamamoto deconstructed luxury in the 1980s, Maison Martin Margiela distilled that spirit during the next decade. “The 90s were the heyday of this new type of beauty that is not pristine and has a lot of edge to it,” Van Godtsenhoven said, mentioning the designer’s 2006 show before he left fashion for good to create fine art. “In Martin’s case, it’s very poetic. For example, this beautiful white gown with pink stains on it. The models were basically wearing ice-cube earrings with pink ink in them. On the catwalk, they melted on the dresses. It was a very beautiful way of capturing time and questioning things like whiteness or what is clean and proper.”
A general view of atmosphere at the Miguel Adrover Fall 2012 fashion show during Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week at Teatro Latea in New York City (February 11, 2012). Photo: Brian Ach/Getty Images.
But perhaps no designer embodied dirty beauty quite like Miguel Adrover, the Spanish-born maverick who shook up the New York scene at the turn of the millennium. “An incredible personality,” Van Godtsenhoven said. “He was basically what today would be called an appropriation artist.” In the late 1990s, Adrover transformed Yankees caps and tourist tees into jackets, or turned a discarded Burberry trench found at a flea market into a dress—acts of both rebellion and reinvention. “He was celebrated, but he would also get sued by these brands because he was using their logos,” she added. “These practices have become very normal now, but he was doing it earlier.”
Miguel Adrover pieces in an installation view of “Dirty Looks” at the Barbican Art Gallery, London, September 25, 2025–January 25, 2026. Photo: © David Parry/ Barbican Art Gallery.
After losing his financial backer, Adrover created “Out of My Mind” in 2012, one of his most haunting collections, assembled from fragments of his own and his family’s archives. “It was very sculptural, very beautiful silhouettes,” Van Godtsenhoven recalled. Adrover eventually retreated to rural Mallorca, where he still lives among his stored collections. His work—stitched together from what others cast off—feels like a natural extension of the show’s fascination with decay and renewal, finding poetry in the worn and the weathered.

“Dirty Looks: Desire and Decay in Fashion” is on view at the Barbican Art Gallery, Silk Street, London EC2Y 8DS, through January 25, 2026. More

Three thousand years ago, the Egyptians domesticated cats and set humanity on a long trajectory towards feline companionship and contention, treats and brushing and endless cans of tuna. The animals have also served myriad symbolic purposes, as objects of worship and fear. In recent years, cat videos and the emergence of the “childless cat lady” trope have brought the animals into the news cycle and further emphasized their association with the feminine. Whatever humans think about cats, in any given era, inevitably reveals something about us.  
“CATS!,” an exhibition opening at Hamburg’s Museum am Rothenbaum (MARKK) in December, aims to unpack these disparate cultural histories. The show unites ancient artifacts with contemporary artworks to tell larger stories about shifting values and beliefs through the lens of our furry friends.
Karagöz figure by unknown Kedi Master, 19th century. © MARKK. Photo: Paul Schimweg.
Some of the show’s oldest objects hail from ancient Egypt and connect cats to the spiritual realm. Two gilded and painted cartonnage masks for cat mummies date from the late period to Ptolemaic Period, 1st millennium B.C.E., when cats could serve as offerings to the goddess Bastet. Their owners also mummified them in the hopes they’d be reunited in the afterlife.
A green faience statuette of the goddess Sekhmet with a small cat at her feet, from the New Kingdom to Late Period (c. 1550–332 B.C.E), suggests early conceptions of cats’ duality and mystique. According to the Egyptian Museum, Sekhmet “was seen as the protector of the pharaohs and led them in warfare.” When she was in a calmer state, she shape-shifted into “the form of the household cat goddess Bastet.” 
Mask for cat mummy, 1st millennium B.C.E. © Ägyptisches Museum Bonn, Photo: Mick Vinzenz.
Across the Atlantic, pre-Columbian culture took an interest in the house cat’s more predatory relatives. Pumas, jaguars, and pampas cats featured in early Peruvian crafts, reflecting the region’s unique ecosystem.
The MARKK show includes an embossed gold sheet pendant in the shape of a spotted cat from ca. 500 B.C.E.–700 C.E., likely by an artist from the Vicús or Moche culture. A clay and colored slip Moche vessel, from ca. 100–700 C.E., features a fearsome feline with large eyes, swirling stripes, and open jaws. The jaguar held special significance for the peoples of Latin America, the press materials noted, who perceived the creature as “a mysterious and sacred being that walks between worlds, bridging boundaries between life and the afterlife like a shaman.”
Pendant in the shape of a spotted cat by artist probably from the Vicús or Moche culture, c. 500–700 C.E. © MARKK. Photo: Paul Schimweg.
The exhibition detours from these ancient civilizations to 19th century Europe and Asia: a Turkish animal hide sculpture, a Japanese drawing, and a children’s cap and shoes from China display a vast range of media and craftsmanship. The 20th century ushered in the ability to capture our cats on film. American performance artist Carolee Schneemann famously included her cat in her feminist films, including Kitch’s Last Meal (1973–76), which honors their domestic bond in the lead up to the animal’s passing. 
Hello Kitty Paladone lamp, Tomik Toys GmbH, licensed by Sanrio China, 2024. © MARKK. Photo: Paul Schimweg.
The exhibition organizers seem particularly interested in where cat representations have landed today. Two of the youngest objects on view are from last year: a plastic Chinese Hello Kitty lamp and an election campaign poster that read “Cat Ladies for Kamala” with a cat face at the center. Once sacred, it seems cats have become emblems of new a new duality: between protest and product, campaigning and consumerism. 
U.S. election campaign poster, “Cat Ladies for Kamala 2024, produced by LifeSizeCustomCutouts, 2024. © MARKK. Photo: Paul Schimweg.
“CATS!” is on view at Museum am Rothenbaum, Rothenbaumchaussee 64, Hamburg, Germany, December 5, 2025–November 29, 2026. More

One unlikely art venue is holding its own amid the mega-galleries of Chelsea, New York. This season, Gotham dispensary is presenting “The Smoking Section,” a sprawling show of 50-odd ashtrays that the trendy “cannabis concept store” commissioned from more than 45 renowned artists and designers. At last night’s reception, even passersby were curiously peeking inside at the mind-boggling creations of Netflix-famous glass blower Deborah Czeresko, sculptor and SNL costume designer Kate Rusek, rising textile artist Tura Oliveira, and their cohorts.
View of the reception for “The Smoking Section” from 10th Avenue. Photo by Vittoria Benzine
New York-based art collector, angel investor, and Gotham founder Joanne Wilson opened the legal dispensary’s original East Village location in 2023. Since then, Gotham has added stores in Williamsburg, Hudson, and most recently, Chelsea—all selling pre-rolls, flower, and vapes alongside high brow beauty products, cultural magazines, and the chicest smoking accoutrements you’ve ever seen.
Rachel Berks, Gotham’s vice president of product development and partnerships—who conceptualized and curated “The Smoking Section”—is one of the few employees who’s been with the company from the start. She told me over a video call that Wilson drew inspiration for Gotham from the now-defunct Parisian concept store Colette, beloved by the fashion set. “You really see concept stores more in Europe than you do in the U.S.,” Berks said.
A wood ashtray by Richard Haining, and a soldered glass and copper ashtray by Grace Horan on view in “The Smoking Section.” Courtesy of Gotham
Gotham has nourished art world connections since its inception. Its East Village location has a mezzanine gallery that often exhibits emerging artists, like the colorful drawings of Jared Freschman and the abstractions of Adee Roberson. In 2024, one of Gotham’s vendors, Amitha Raman, a prominent art collector with her own line of cannabis accessories, co-hosted a dinner at Derrick Adams’s Crown Heights studio with Gotham. Adams went on to produce his own line of Gotham merchandise.
It’s hosted group shows before, too. Alyssa Alexander, Adams’s studio manager, will curate one spanning Gotham Chelsea and Gotham East Village this January. Nevertheless, the ”The Smoking Section” marks the first time that Gotham has curated a group show of entirely new works in-house.
Installation view of “The Smoking Section” featuring Anna Sew Hoy’s stoneware Blacknoir Ashtrays in the foreground, with Tura Oliveira’s silver and epoxy Ashtray behind it. Courtesy of Gotham
Berks had been holding the concept for “The Smoking Section” close since she started working for Gotham. When she quit smoking cigarettes 16 years ago, Berks threw out all her ashtrays. But working at Gotham reminded her of the object’s innate beauty, ritual significance, and capacity as a canvas.  “I am married to an artist; all my friends are artists,” Berks added. “I knew I wanted to curate a show of commissioned ashtrays.”
She’s an artist too, as is her sister. Their works are in the show. The remaining participants were either friends of Berks, artists she already admired, new talent she found online, or contributions from her colleagues; some she met when Gotham showed at New York’s Shelter Design Fair earlier this year.
Ashtrays by Stefanie Haining, John Gill, Stephanie Boyd-Berks, and Math Bass in “The Smoking Section” at Gotham. Courtesy of Gotham
The directive was simple: “Really, just make an ashtray,” Berks said. “Some people made more than one.”
John Gill, a New York-based ceramicist represented by Miami-based Mindy Solomon gallery, created seven colorful, geometric ashtrays, all featuring little nooks for lit joints. Rusek, meanwhile, made five far smaller ashtrays in blue, violet, and indigo forms elaborating on her signature organic style. All five offerings that had amassed red dots by the time I arrived were part of sets, too, including three dark, earthen ashtrays by L.A.-based sculptor Anna Sew Hoy, and two stoneware paper fortune tellers by Brooklyn-based Stephanie Haining.
Piera Bochner,Ritual Object #1. Courtesy of Gotham
This exhibition is certainly not predictable, to say the least. Styles and shapes vary widely, as do the price points, which range from $55 to $24,000. There’s tiny ashtrays (I particularly liked the acrylic and resin Stay Focused Ashtray by interdisciplinary artist Kim Mullis) and massive statement pieces, like the plaster and coal firepit by Ridykeulous, the queer feminist curatorial initiative by acclaimed French-American painter Nicole Eisenman and Brooklyn-based polymath A.L. Steiner.
Ridykeulous, Coal Smoke. Courtesy of Gotham
The show’s artists have employed extremely diverse materials, too. Sure, there’s plenty of clay, glass, and metal on offer, but there are also ashtrays made from beeswax, abalone, and sinuously carved wood. The line between art and craft has proven a hot topic in this century—“The Smoking Section” makes a strong case for abolishing it. As I marveled at illustrator Jennifer Xiao’s incredibly detailed paper mache ashtray Dirty Dishes, replete with sudsy standing water and a little rat, I overheard another guest telling her friend my exact thoughts: “I wouldn’t even want to mess this up by using it.”
Jennifer Xiao, Dirty Dishes, with ashtrays by Kate Rusek, Alma Berrow, and Lauryn Sigel behind it. Courtesy of Gotham
Berks plans on making this type of show an annual tradition. “I don’t know what next year’s will be—maybe pipes, maybe bongs, maybe stash boxes,” Berks said. “But I think it’s a very exciting proposal to reach out to artists of all mediums, working across disciplines, saying ‘there are no restrictions.’”
“The Smoking Section” is on view at Gotham, 146 10th Avenue, New York, New York, November 6, 2025—January 5, 2026. More

It’s not often that a man known for dwelling in his mother’s basement becomes a revered cultural icon, but Joseph Cornell has long enjoyed cult status among the cognoscenti of the 20th-century art world. Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, Yayoi Kusama, and Peggy Guggenheim were among the many artists and collectors who turned up to the New York artist’s family home in the hopes of gaining access to the highly secretive studio where he made his eccentric assemblages. Few made it past the kitchen table.
“He didn’t let many people in, but the people he did were really interesting,” said Jasper Sharp, ex-curator of modern and contemporary art at the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. In this way, the humble workshop became something of a microcosm of its era’s most radical ideas, pre-empting pivotal postmodernist movements like Neo-Dada and Pop Art.
Cornell continues to inspire creatives to this day, including the legendary film director Wes Anderson. He has teamed up with Sharp to recreate Cornell’s studio, complete with some of his best-known works, at Gagosian in Paris next month. “We thought, wouldn’t it be fascinating to bring it back to life?” Sharp said.
An Artistic Affinity
Growing up in Houston, Texas, Anderson first encountered Cornell’s work at local museums like the Menil Collection, which owns Palace (1943). Typical of the artist’s “shadow boxes”—glass-fronted boxes containing assemblages of found objects, often with a surreal effect—the work contains a palatial building set before a forest of twigs. Its attractive symmetry echoes that of the Grand Budapest Hotel in Anderson’s 2014 film of the same name.
Sharp has not been the first to note an affinity between the director and Cornell, both of whom are admired for their highly original approach to creating stylized and antiquated, diorama-like worlds. “They both can take quite simple things and have an alchemical effect on them,” he noted.
Joseph Cornell’s studio in the basement of his family home in Queens, New York, 1971. Photo: © Harry Roseman.
Anderson and Sharp, another longtime Cornell head, have based their reconstruction of the artist’s studio on surviving black-and-white photographs. These reveal one wall of shelves stacked with shoeboxes full of found objects. The artist was a regular at flea markets and antique shops, obsessively hoarding a vast array of items from feathers and seashells to discarded toys, marbles, and maps. Other walls of his studio were lined with curiosities, unfinished constructions, or craftsman’s supplies, from glue and tape to saws and drills.
First stop for Sharp and Anderson was the Joseph Cornell Study Center at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, where the contents of Cornell’s studio were preserved some years after his death in 1972. Objects borrowed from the Smithsonian have been bolstered by the collection of a U.S. artist and close confidant of Cornell’s who received many of his books, shoeboxes, and collages by mail. They will be loaning several hundred to the Paris show. Meanwhile, Sharp and Anderson’s team are scouring markets across Paris and New York for thousands more objects to complete the set.
Labor of Love
At the center of the reconstructed studio will be Cornell’s work table, littered with his X-acto knife, gluing paste, and old magazines from which he cut material for his collages. The time capsule will also feature several unfinished shadow boxes from the Smithsonian. “It will be almost as if he’s just gone out to lunch,” said Sharp.
Some details of the reconstruction could only be described as a labor of love. A galvanized metal sink just like Cornell’s will be decorated with the same cleaning detergent he used. Anderson’s set designers are learning the artist’s handwriting so that they can scrawl true-to-life labels over the white-washed shoeboxes that will replace fragile originals. Some objects have been baked in the oven to give them an artificially aged patina, a technique that Cornell also used.
Presented as a storefront tableau to curious passersby, the installation seeks to capture the softly lit atmosphere of a studio where Cornell mainly worked at night. “We’re not attempting to create a facsimile of the studio,” said Sharp. “We’re trying to get as close as we can in spirit.”
Joseph Cornell, Pharmacy (1943). Photo: Dominique Uldry, © 2025 The Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation/Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, courtesy Gagosian.
Competed works like the antique apothecary Pharmacy (1943) or the art history-laden Untitled (Pinturicchio Boy) (ca. 1950) have been chosen to demonstrate Cornell’s considerable range. “He often gets accused of being whimsical, in a derogatory way,” said Sharp. “People see him as a bit light and poetic, which I’ve always found peculiar because he was so substantive in his thinking, and so influential on so many artists.”
The city of Paris held a special significance for Cornell, who had been promised a post-graduation trip that never materialized after the death of his father. “He traveled there in his head,” said Sharp. The artist, a recluse who rarely left New York, pored over guidebooks and postcards from Paris. One of the first times he met Duchamp, who would become a close friend, Cornell stunned the French artist with his “almost photographic memory of a city he’d never seen.”
This passion brings a certain poignancy to Sharp and Anderson’s mission. “There is something lovely about bringing him here in perhaps the most intimate form,” said Sharp. “Not just bringing his work here, but the place where the work was born.”
“The House on Utopia Parkway: Joseph Cornell’s Studio Reimagined by Wes Anderson” is on view at Gagosian, 9 rue de Castiglione, Paris, December 16, 2025–March 14, 2026. More

One of the most significant private art collections in Germany has gone on public display for the first time in Berlin. The trove of masterpieces includes pieces by Goya and the French Impressionists, as well as leading contemporary names like Katharina Grosse and Daniel Richter. The Scharf Collection has been amassed over four generations of one visionary family.
Visitors to “The Scharf Collection: Goya – Monet – Cézanne – Bonnard – Grosse,” on view at the Alte Nationalgalerie through February 15, 2026, will be treated to a veritable “who’s who” of Western art history. Among more than 150 works, they will discover a story of growing collector ambition across three centuries.
“You dive deep into the historical developments, learn about the different personalities who have been collecting and preserving the collection,” promised Anette Hüsch, director of the Alte Nationalgalerie.
Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, The Seated Clown, Miss Cha-U-Kao from the series “Elles.” Photo: Peter Tijhuis, © The Scharf Collection.
The collection has its origins in the passions of Berlin entrepreneur Otto Gerstenberg, who started out buying Renaissance and Baroque-era prints from Germany and the Netherlands. Over time, his interests expanded to include a much wider range of artists, from legendary Spanish painters El Greco and Francisco Goya to major London names like Joshua Reynolds and James McNeill Whistler. But it was French art that really took Gerstenberg’s fancy. He acquired works by Gustave Courbet, Eugène Delacroix, and Honoré Daumier, and become the owner of the world’s largest hoard of work by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec.
Among the examples of Gerstenberg’s Toulouse-Lautrec treasures are lithographs from his “Elles” series, all studies of stage and sex workers seeming relaxing in the time between shifts. The artist himself often lived in brothels for weeks at a time, and this is reflected in his broadly empathetic view of their residents. One of his frequent models was the clown Miss Cha-U-Kao, and in one seated depiction she is shown with her legs spread in a provocatively gender-blurring pose.
Edgar Degas, Nude Combing Her Hair (1886–1890). Photo: © The Scharf Collection, Ruland Photodesign.
After Gerstenberg’s death in 1935, his collection of some 2,200 artworks, including 116 paintings and 1,600 prints, was passed down to his daughter Margarethe. She worked with Berlin’s Nationalgalerie to ensure their protection during the air raids of World War II, although some pieces were looted by Russian troops and taken to Saint Petersburg. The artworks, including Edgar Degas’s notable 1875 painting Place de la Concorde, have never been returned.
Degas is best-known for his distinctive, cropped compositions that offer an unusual vantage point onto a myriad scenes of modern Parisian life, as well as figure studies of ballet dances or jockeys on the racecourse. Many of Degas’s women are shown not in the spotlight but backstage, usually in an unposed and private moment observed from afar. In many cases, the focus is on the curves of her bent body as she washed or combs her hair.
Claude Monet, Waterloo Bridge (1903). Photo: © The Scharf Collection, Ruland Photodesign.
In 1961, Margarethe’s estate was split between her two sons Walther and Dieter, who each went on to develop their share in new directions. Dieter would become known for his eye for leading Surrealists, including Salvador Dalí, Joan Miró, and René Magritte. He sold many of Gerstenberg’s works to secure these acquisitions, and many of his best finds are on public display at “Surreal Worlds” at the Scharf-Gerstenberg Collection in Berlin.
Walther, meanwhile, kept a stronger focus on 19th-century French art. Together with his wife Eve, a mechanical engineer and successful businesswoman, he began buying works by Impressionists like Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and Degas, as well some Post-Impressionist pieces by Paul Cézanne and Pierre Bonnard.
One classical example is Waterloo Bridge (1903), one of several views that Monet made of London’s Thames. He was particularly drawn to the atmospheric effects produced by a hazy layer of smoke that draped the city, describing these conditions as “so idiosyncratic” in a letter to his wife in 1900. The randomness of the elements meant that every time Monet settled on the riverbanks, he was met with a new impression. Years later, the painter recalled how London’s “fog gives it its magnificent breadth. Its regular and massive blocks become grandiose within that mysterious cloak.”
Paul Cézanne, The Palace of Fontainebleau (1905). Photo: Philipp Hitz, © The Scharf Collection.
A generation after the Impressionists first used quick, visible brushstrokes to capture fleeting moments that felt true to life, the Post-Impressionists advanced their ideas, bridging them with the modernist developments of the 20th century. Perhaps no artist had a bigger influence on the likes of Picasso and Matisse than Cézanne, who revealed the underlying geometric structure of his still-lifes and landscapes by emphasizing the role of line and form in the pictorial plane.
Meanwhilem Cézanne’s contemporary Bonnard, another favourite of the Scharfs, is admired for his expressive use of color in otherwise unremarkable but charming domestic scenes.
Works by Katharina Grosse in the exhibition “The Scharf Collection: Goya – Monet – Cézanne – Bonnard – Grosse.” Photo: David von Becker, © Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Alte Nationalgalerie / VG Bild-Kunst.
Walther and Eve’s drive to accumulate important works was inherited by their son René, who has expanded the collection to include modern and contemporary art. Having worked at Christie’s auction house in London and New York, he founded Scharf Fine Art in New York in 1988. Inevitably, the city brought him closer to the work of great Abstract Expressionist artists, and for a time he began supporting figures like Maurice Estève and Sam Francis.
Since 2001, René has been living in Germany with his second wife, Christiane. The pair specialize in leading Berlin artists like Katharina Grosse, Daniel Richter, and Liverpool-born Tony Cragg. Their works pull into the present the story of rapid and radical change that is told by the Scharf Collection.
“The Scharf Collection: Goya – Monet – Cézanne – Bonnard – Grosse” is on view at the Alte Nationalgalerie in Berlin through February 15, 2026. An altered version of the exhibition will travel to the Kunstpalast in Düsseldorf from March to August 2026.  More