Eliana Willis

There’s some wild painting on show in London in Making Modernism. The Royal Academy’s new exhibition of women artists working in Germany in the early 20th century offers a fresh perspective on some of the great Modernist subjects—nightlife, the nude, the self. The work is burningly experimental—I spent ages hovering in close, trying to work out how paint had been applied—and distinctive in viewpoint.
Gabriele Münter portrays small children as complex beings full of thoughts and feelings. One grasps himself anxiously, another cocks her head, full of attitude. Paula Modersohn-Becker’s retort to the supine nudes of art history is to paint herself standing upright, naked but for a straw hat trailing orange ribbons—a color picked up in the fruit she holds, and the assertive triangle of her pubic hair. In Gabriele Werefkin’s The Dancer Alexander Sacharoff (1909), the gender-fluid performer emerges from fields of ascending blue, his skin, pale as a duck egg, illuminated by coral red burning from his eyes, lips and cheeks. Käthe Kollwitz translates studies of her own body writhing in sexual frenzy into a series of etchings showing skeletal death wrestling a grieving mother for the body of her child. 
Paula Modersohn-Becker, Self-portrait as a Standing Nude with Hat (1906). Image courtesy Paula Modersohn-Becker Stiftung, Bremen.
Making Modernism is the work of British curator Dorothy Price, who has researched, written about, and taught German Modernism for, she admits “all of [my] adult life, basically.” Some 30 years ago, during her postgraduate research into the art and images of 1920s Berlin, Price realized that there was “a huge gap between how art history is constructed and taught in UK academia, and the existence of a whole world of women.” Even her own PhD thesis presented “a one-sided view of modernism—it [didn’t] take account of female subjectivity at all.” So she went back and started to explore the lives and art of the women working in Germany at the time. Recently appointed Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art and Visual Culture at London’s Courtauld Institute, Price’s scholarship has introduced British art history students to the work of important women artists, most notably Paula Modersohn-Becker.
With the exception of Käthe Kollwitz, the artists in Making Modernism have been little, if ever, shown in Britain. And as Price admits, the exhibition only “scratches the surface” of the subject. “It would be great if this prompts other institutions in this country to do monographic shows.”
In the opening gallery, Price positions her artists within a dynamic creative milieu, demonstrating how deeply involved they were in conversations around color, spirituality, psychoanalysis, and modern society. In one interior study, Gabriele Münter shows her partner Wassily Kandinsky peeping over the bedcovers in an adjacent room. In another, he is seated at the kitchen table in his slippers, deep in conversation with the artist Erma Bossi. Münter also paints Paul Klee in a deep blue armchair, his head positioned as though an artifact in the collection of Folk Art arranged on a shelf behind him. 
As with the Barbican’s (unfortunately overloaded) 2018 exhibition Modern Couples, Making Modernism not only moves away from the idea of the avant-garde as a boys’ club, it also reminds us that ideas seldom emerge in isolation. Münter and Kandinsky weren’t just sharing a bed: they painted side by side, argued, conversed, and hung out with artist friends.  
How important were these women to developments in the art of this period? “From my perspective—from things I’ve read, and from their own words, none of it could really have happened without the women in the circle,” explains Price. The influence was material, as well as intellectual. “Münter financed Kandinsky, Marianne Werefkin financed [Alexej Von] Jawlensky. So [the avant-garde group] Der Blaue Reiter would not have been the same without Münter and Werefkin at all.” 
Living in twinned apartments with Jawlensky in Munich, Werefkin held artists’ salons where “ideas were discussed and fermented,” says Price. “The idea of the Phalanx and Neue Künstlervereinigung [art groups] and all those avant-garde moments are born in the salon.”
Werefkin, meanwhile, was recording her own ideas about art in an epistolary diary, published after her death in 1938 as Lettres à un Inconnu (Letters to a Stranger). “She talks a lot in terms of the spirituality of color,” notes Price. “This was in the early 1900s, prior to Kandinsky publishing Concerning the Spiritual in Art (1912), where he obviously talks a lot about spirituality and color. The kernel of those ideas are already being written in Werefkin’s diaries. She records having conversations with Kandinsky and him dismissing her ideas a little bit, so there’s interesting gender politics around those diaries as well.”
Marianne Werefkin, Circus – Before the Show (1908/10). Image courtesy of Leopold-Hoesch-Museum, Düren. Photo: © Peter Hinschlaeger
In addressing female subjectivity, Price was keen to include works that suggested female sexual desire “because we don’t often see that in Modernism—we see a lot of male sexual desire.” Pondering the ways in which male desire manifests itself in art of the time, the treatment of girlhood in this exhibition is particularly striking. 
Ottilie Reylaender’s Beta Naked (ca.1900) portrays a chilly-looking 12-year-old dwarfed by the high-backed chair she’s perched on. Tense and a little cross, her pale limbs poke out of the darkness of a wintery interior. As Price points out, Reylaender was a teenager herself at the time—just 17 or 18: “There’s not a massive difference in age, probably five years or so between model and the artist. So there’s a different kind of relationship between artist and model. It’s a girl on the cusp of adulthood—Ottilie—painting a girl on the cusp of pubescence. A really interesting dynamic.”
Throughout the show, girlhood is addressed without sentimentality or prurience. Werefkin’s Portrait of a Girl (1913) is towering—eyes closed, she seems caught in private thought. In Modersohn-Becker’s Seated Nude Girl, Her Legs Pulled Up (ca.1904), the artist paints her stepdaughter Elsbeth looking cold and a little bored. The artist wrote of the awkwardness she felt in paying local children to model for her when living in the artists’ colony in rural Worpswede. “In all representations of the nude there’s a power relationship,” notes Price. “I think what’s interesting about the ones that I’m showing is that it’s not a sexualized power relationship in the same way as, say, Gauguin or Munch. But it is a power relationship nevertheless. And it’s a class one.” 
Käthe Kollwitz, Woman with Dead Child (1903).  © Käthe Kollwitz Museum Köln
No one at this point would argue the importance of shining a light on overlooked women artists. Taking the position of devil’s advocate, I ask Price what these women actually bring to the story of Modernism? She directs my attention to the central room in the show, which explores intimacy. On one side are Kollwitz’s powerfully claustrophobic studies of maternal love and grief, and her own experience of illicit sexual pleasure. On the other, Modersohn-Becker brings the mannered poise of Renaissance saints into her treatment of solid flesh-and-blood women, complete with dirty fingernails and ruddy faces. The nude is re-imagined as a maternal figure.  
“We’re seeing the female perspective on Modernity,” says Price, simply. “I wanted to think about what the themes of modernism are, typically, and how they then are recalibrated if we look at them through the eyes of women artists.”
Making Modernism: Paula Modersohn-Becker, Käthe Kollwitz, Gabriele Münter and Marianne Werefkin, Royal Academy of Arts, London, 12 November 2022–12 February 2023

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When it was announced last week that Mattel was teaming up to launch a limited-edition, collectable line of Barbie dolls with painter Mark Ryden, the so-called “godfather of Pop Surrealism,” the pairing made an unexpected kind of sense.
This Friday, fans get their first chance to get their hands on the special art Barbies at a pop-up in L.A. put on by Kasmin, Ryden’s gallery. The exhibition features a 1994 work, Saint Barbie, which shows a young girl piously praying to a divine Barbie. Today it is one of Ryden’s best known works. For the “Pink Pop” show, the artist is also debuting a new series of paintings, drawings, and sculptures.
“Barbie has made appearances in my art for a long time,” Ryden said in a statement. “It is difficult to define Barbie. She is a cultural phenomenon, an archetypal figure. She is a bona fide celebrity, a subject worthy for Andy Warhol to portray alongside the likes of Elizabeth Taylor and Marilyn Monroe.”
A centerpiece of the collaboration is “Nature Queen Barbie,” a one-of-a-kind figurine with chartreuse hair and a dress sprouting a bouquet of animal heads, as well as a gold crown.
Nature Queen is the centerpiece of the “Pink Pop” exhibit by Mark Ryden X Barbie. Image courtesy of Mattel Creations.
Nature Queen is the centerpiece of the “Pink Pop” exhibit by Mark Ryden X Barbie. Image courtesy of Mattel Creations.
Nature Queen is the centerpiece of the “Pink Pop” exhibit by Mark Ryden X Barbie. Image courtesy of Mattel Creations.
As for the more collectable Ryden-themed Barbies, notable is “Bee Barbie,” who wears a bee-striped fur dress and hood, and has bee wings and a deathly pale face. “She’s sweeter than nectar and deep like a sting,” the Mattel Creations site enthuses. “Bee Barbie” is $150.
Barbie Bee Doll is part of the limited edition Mark Ryden X Barbie collection. Image courtesy of Mattel Creations.
Barbie Bee Doll is part of the limited edition Mark Ryden X Barbie collection. Image courtesy of Mattel Creations.
Certificate for Barbie Bee Doll. Image courtesy of Mattel Creations.
The signature product of the Mark Ryden x Barbie collab is likely the “Pink Pop Barbie,” awash in Barbie-core synthetic pink. With candy-stripe stockings and a purse in the form of a T-bone steak, the doll is accompanied by a pet yak and a goony, sentient flower pot. It is $350.
Pink Pop Barbie Doll is part of the limited edition Mark Ryden X Barbie collection. Image courtesy of Mattel Creations.
Pink Pop Barbie Doll is part of the limited edition Mark Ryden X Barbie collection. Image courtesy of Mattel Creations.
Detail of Pink Pop Barbie Doll from the Mark Ryden X Barbie collection. Image courtesy of Mattel Creations.
Detail of Pink Pop Barbie Doll from the Mark Ryden X Barbie collection. Image courtesy of Mattel Creations.
Yak from the Mark Ryden X Barbie collection. Image courtesy of Mattel Creations.
Flower pot from the Mark Ryden X Barbie collection. Image courtesy of Mattel Creations.
Higher up the price scale is the “Mark Ryden x Barbie at the Surrealist Ball” set, which goes for $500. It features two dolls, each with cropped bangs and a dress studded with surreal motifs. One has an orb on her head; the other, a star.
The set also comes with an occult-like pedestal with a dodecahedron studded with glazed, starring eyes.
Black and White Surrealist Ball Dolls is part of the limited edition Mark Ryden X Barbie collection. Image courtesy of Mattel Creations.
One of the dolls part of the Black and White Surrealist Ball Doll set from the Mark Ryden X Barbie collection. Image courtesy of Mattel Creations.
One of the dolls part of the Black and White Surrealist Ball Doll set from the Mark Ryden X Barbie collection. Image courtesy of Mattel Creations.
The Surrealist pedestal from the Black and White Surrealist Ball Doll set from the Mark Ryden X Barbie collection. Image courtesy of Mattel Creations.
A variety of merch related to the collection ranges from a $50 Mark Ryden x Barbie “Bee Brooch” and a $60 “Pink Pop Umbrella” up to a $300 Mark Ryden x Barbie “Pink Pop Purse.”
Mark Ryden X Barbie pin. Image courtesy of Mattel Creations.
Selection of pins from the Mark Ryden X Barbie collection. Image courtesy of Mattel Creations.
Mark Ryden X Barbie umbrella. Image courtesy of Mattel Creations.
Mark Ryden X Barbie handbag. Image courtesy of Mattel Creations.
The full capsule and accessories are available to purchase exclusively at Kasmin for one week before they open to the broader Barbie-collecting public from November 18.
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Many Lebanese will tell you how they hear a buzz in the air. Sometimes it’s faint and sometimes it is more prominent, but it’s always there. The monotone has become a constant within the backdrop sounds of everyday life, along with the regular hum of the generators now providing electricity (to those who can afford it) in a country locked in an extreme economic and political crisis. 
The source of the continuous drum is the thousands of Israeli fighter jets, missiles, drones, and planes that have been making incursions into Lebanese airspace over the past 15 years. 
Lawrence Abu Hamdan has long decoded the world through sound. The Jordanian, Dubai-based artist’s work, as he once described it, is concerned with the “politics of listening.” A self-proclaimed “private ear,” since his youth, he uses surveillance technologies, sound recordings and archival materials to investigate the role of sound as a tool used to silence, suppress, and heal. 
In his latest body of work, the Turner Prize-winning artist explores the impact of the continuous sound of the Israeli fighter planes on the Lebanese population. The result is Air Pressure (A Diary of the Sky), an ambitious 3D sound and video installation on view at Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo in Turin, Italy, until February 5, 2023.
Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Air Pressure (A diary of the sky) (2022). Courtesy the artist and Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo.
The conflict between Israel and Lebanon is decades old, but became particularly pronounced when Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982 during a period of civil war, and then again during the 2006 war between Israel and Hezbollah, Lebanon’s Shia Islamic political party and militant group. These noisy illegal flyovers, averaging around four and a half hours in duration, are intended to leave the Lebanese in a perpetual state of psychological distress and uncertainty.
Speaking to Artnet News, Abu Hamdan said the reactions to the sound generated from the massive explosion at Beirut Port on August 4, 2020, partly inspired him to make the work.  
“When the explosion happened, there was a big debate over whether there were planes in the air before the explosion, with people continually stating that they heard planes,” he said. “The question kept being raised as to whether the explosion happened due to a missile strike from an aircraft.”
At the time, Abu Hamdan had been doing work analyzing the sound of Russian airstrikes in Syria. He knew that the sounds heard during the Beirut explosion weren’t continuous with the sequence of sounds heard when an airstrike happens. “It was just too quick,” he said. “You wouldn’t have heard the plane so closely for an explosion like that and have no one see a plane.” 
But if it wasn’t a plane, what was it? Just before the Beirut Port blast there was a sound in the air akin to that of a plane. According to research conducted by the likes of Dutch investigative journalism group Bellingcat, just before a pressure wave of that magnitude, there is a vast suction of oxygen that makes a sound like that of a jet. Abu Hamdan presented this belief on Instagram to discuss the idea with those who were convinced they had heard a plane. 
“I realized that whether there was a plane or not, the idea of this constant presence in the atmosphere emerges in moments of peak anxiety in Lebanon,” Abu Hamdan said. For Lebanese the planes have become so routine that they “have lost their discursive value—they are no longer spoken about,” Abu Hamdan tells Artnet News. “They are just there. It is a terror that is a given.”
But all that changes when things get really bad, and all of a sudden, the planes “leave their status as objects humming and rumbling in the background, and come to the forefront to trigger questions as to what is happening in the country.”
Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Air Pressure (A diary of the sky) (2022). Courtesy the artist and Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo.
Abu Hamdan worked on Air Pressure (A Diary of the Sky) over the last two years during lockdown in Lebanon, after receiving the third edition of the Fondazione and Philadelphia Museum of Art’s Future Fields Commission in Time-Based Media. Building the multimedia installation began by capturing and analyzing hundreds of recordings of Israeli military jets, missiles, drones and planes across Lebanon’s skies. He also conducted recordings on the ground and crowd sourced real-time footage on social media with the Arabic hashtag # حربي_بالاجواء which means “war in the air.”
The project also includes information gathered from 243 letters recording all the radar information including: the time, duration, type and trajectory of each aircraft violation, submitted by permanent Representatives of Lebanon to the United Nations between 2006 and 2021. Transcribing and analyzing this data was a challenging process, Abu Hamdan said, as the filing of these letters in the UN’s digital archive was unsystematic.
He archived his research on the website Airpressure.info, which now documents how over the last 15 years, 22,111 Israeli military aircraft have violated Lebanese airspace. The site makes public the violations in detail for the first time. Crucially, Abu Hamdan’s project marks the first time anyone has documented the ongoing incursion of Israeli fighter jets, which neither journalists, nor the Lebanese government, nor the United Nations has undertaken to do. 
“I wanted to put all the information in one database so we could finally see the scale of this issue—how long these aircrafts are spending in the atmosphere and how many planes there were,” he said. The numbers are shocking—adding up the flight time of the more than 22,000 Israeli aircrafts in the atmosphere over the past 15 years is eight-and-a-half years itself. “That means that over half of the last 15 years there has been an Israeli combat vehicle in the Lebanese sky.”
Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Air Pressure (A diary of the sky) (2022). Courtesy the artist and Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo.
The 3D installation, which through sound and film hauntingly captures the buzzing sound and views of Lebanon’s airspace, encourages reflection on the contemporary conditions of aerial warfare. It is testament to Abu Hamdan’s continual investigations into the still largely undocumented and discussed political implications of listening during times of war. 
“Activating the atmosphere through sound has always been a part of an arsenal of weaponry,” said Abu Hamdan, adding that he hopes the information can be used to contextualize any possible future aerial strikes, or in the context of other discussions such as the maritime border dispute happening now between Lebanon and Israel.
The work, like that of other similarly powerful sound works of Abu Hamdan prompts us to rethink the role noise and listening plays in our daily lives and in accordance with specific world events. As he puts it, it prompts us to ask: “What can this teach us about the history of aerial warfare which has always been about disproportionately creating noise in the sky rather than hitting targets on the ground?”
Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Air Pressure (A diary of the sky) (2022). Courtesy the artist and Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo.
Research gathered from Abu Hamdan’s work, which is due to be shown at the UN Security Council, has already become a resource for political debate not only in the public sphere but among government agencies and bodies at the United Nations.
Above all, the work is also about how something supposedly neutral like air, and nature itself, can be made violent through man’s interference. “The work is about how air is turned violent more than the question of whether or not the planes had a right to enter a country and whose air belongs to who,” Abu Hamdan said. “The work raises the question of atmospheric violence and how to understand this as a category of warfare that is not about targeting one person but actually creating broadcasting and fostering collective punitive action and collective fear.”
“Air Pressure (A Diary of the Sky) (2022)” is on view through February 5 at Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo in Turin.
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