Eliana Willis

Caravaggio, Rubens, Raphael, Titian, Botticelli, Veronese, and Bernini: it’s a roll call of the greats, and just a handful of the artists whose Renaissance and Baroque works have traveled from their home in Rome’s Galleria Borghese to the Musée Jacquemart-André for a rare exhibition in Paris.
The museum chose the all-star line up for its first show back since it has been closed for renovations since 2023. Curators at the Paris mansion-turned-museum have handpicked 39 paintings and four sculptures from the once powerful Cardinal Scipione Borghese’s Baroque collection, and are displaying them at the gilded Boulevard Haussmann former home of the banker Edouard André and artist Nélie Jacquemart—major collectors in their own right—until January 5, 2025.
The exhibit is as much an opportunity to soak in these rarely traveling masterpieces of 16th and 17th-century Italian and Nordic art as it is to understand the artistic vision and life of the powerful, yet ruthless man who collected them. Scipione Caffarelli-Borghese (1577–1633) wielded influence through his uncle, Pope Paul V, famously whipping up criminal charges against Caravaggio-collector Giuseppe Cesari, who was forced to hand over paintings by the chiaroscuro master to the Borghese family as a result.
In fact, one item from the confiscated trove is the poster image for the exhibit: Caravaggio’s Boy with Basket of Fruit, (c 1595). It depicts a young man holding an overflowing basket of perfectly ripe fruit, his open lips and bare shoulder beckoning provocatively. On several other occasions, Borghese threatened artists, and even imprisoned Domenichino Zampieri (1581-1641), in order to get his hands on their creations.
Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Self-portrait at a Mature Age , circa 1638-1640, oil on canvas, 53 x 43 cm, Galleria Borghese, Rome © Galleria Borghese / ph. Mauro Coen
Along with Borghese’s insatiable taste for contemporary talent, however, came artistic patronage—of which he was quick to benefit himself. Importantly, the cardinal is credited with discovering and supporting then-adolescent Baroque sculptor, Gian Lorenzo Bernini (1598-1680). One of Bernini’s earliest surviving sculptures, The Goat Amalthea (c. 1609-1615), which depicts a reclining goat feeding the infant Jupiter, has made it to Paris, as has his striking Self-portrait at a Mature Age (c. 1638-1640). The latter is one of Bernini’s few surviving paintings—a work not easily forgotten. With his concentrated stare, the artist appears to look right back at the viewer.
Raphael, Lady with Unicorn , circa 1506, oil on canvas applied on panel, 67 x 56 cm, Galleria Borghese, Rome © Galleria Borghese / ph. Mauro Coen
Another highlight is Raphael’s Lady with Unicorn (c. 1506) oil painting. The 16th-century Florentine girl depicted is thought to have been inspired by the Mona Lisa, with the composition’s similar framing, and quarter-turned, mysterious profile. In her arms, the model holds a miniature, furry unicorn—a symbol of conjugal virtues. For centuries the picture was painted over into Saint Catherine of Alexandria, but after a 1935 restoration, its true subject matter and attribution to Raphael was revealed.
There is also an ever-fascinating, early copy of Leonardo’s Leda (c1510-20). In it, a nude Leda stands beside her swan, who cups her hips with its wing while their children play at their feet, with an unhatched egg resting behind the odd, but smiling couple.
Leonardo da Vinci (copy after), Leda and the swan , before 1517, oil on panel, 115 x 86 cm, Galleria Borghese, Rome © Galleria Borghese / ph. Mauro Coen
With his considerable wealth and influence, the cardinal filled his early 17th-century Villa Borghese Pinciana (today the Galleria Borghese) with several hundred works of art spanning Italian schools and international regions. He showcased the collection much like a museum would today, though this was a radical concept at the time, and is credited with galvanizing Rome’s golden era, as a precursor to what became the modern collector.
Co-curator Francesca Cappelletti described the Borghese collection as “a space that could be equated with a time machine,” blending classical Roman works from antiquity with Renaissance and Baroque masterpieces, surrounded by marble works and frescoes. Seen in the context of the Musée Jacquemart André’s collection of Italian art from the Middle Ages to the 18th century, including its sumptuous Tiepolo ceiling fresco in what is now a café, the entire experience becomes a journey through history, shaped by the art that defined it. More

To most people, Harcourt Road is a normal street name. But for the people of Hong Kong and those living in the English city of Sheffield, this road existing in these two places carries the weight of parallel histories of resistance despite the fact that they are 6,000 miles apart from each other.
Uncovering these ties are Sheffield-based Hong Kong artist duo C&G Artpartment, formed by Clara Cheung and Gum Cheng. Through their expansive community art project, Harcourt Road, in collaboration with local art space Bloc Projects, the pair has been working on matching streets in the two cities that share the same names. In 2023, they narrowed down the focus of the project to just Harcourt Road, comparing the histories of the residential street in Sheffield and the Hong Kong thoroughfare that has played host to major social movements of the past decade.
“To me, and a lot of people from Hong Kong, Harcourt Road is a significant street full of memories,” said Cheung, an artist, curator, and former elected District Councillor who emigrated from Hong Kong to the U.K. in 2021. “Harcourt Road in Sheffield plays a pivotal role in the area’s grassroots activism and local democracy. On many occasions, the residents stood up for themselves and fought for justice in their community.”
Clara Cheung of C&G Artpartment (left) explains to a local resident about the parallel histories of Harcourt Road in Sheffield and Hong Kong. Courtesy of the artists.
On September 28, the project enters a new stage of development with the opening of the exhibition “Harcourt Road” at Bloc Projects, with a grant of £47,930 ($64,143) from the National Lottery Heritage Fund. The show’s opening date coincides with the 10th anniversary of Hong Kong’s Umbrella Movement, which saw pro-democracy protests erupt in Hong Kong in September 2014 after Beijing shot down the city’s proposal for a political reform that would allow its leaders to be elected in universal suffrage, as promised in the city’s mini-constitution. The protests at the time were largely peaceful. Demonstrators occupied Harcourt Road, a major highway in the city’s Admiralty neighborhood that connects Central and Wan Chai, with camping tents and makeshift structures reclaiming the public space that was previously inaccessible to the general public. It evolved into a space for public art and community events.
On September 28, 2014 Police fired 87 rounds of tear gas and pepper spray at the peaceful demonstrators on Harcourt Road. Protesters shielded themselves against tear gas and pepper spray with umbrellas, which became a symbol of resistance. The incident marked the beginning of the Umbrella Movement, also known as Occupy Central, a 79-day demonstration occupying Harcourt Road and the nearby government complex.
A local resident participated in a Harcourt Road Mobile Museum initiative in Sheffield. Courtesy of C&G Artpartment.
Since then, and even more so after Hong Kong’s anti-government protests in 2019–20, when Beijing imposed a sweeping national security law that saw activists, lawmakers, and journalists arrested, many from Hong Kong have sought refuge in the U.K., among them C&G. During their research into the histories of Sheffield’s Harcourt road, Cheung discovered that the little street has witnessed waves of migration throughout the past century—from Irish and Eastern European workers after World War II to Hungarian and Polish migrants in the 1950s, followed by those arriving from the Caribbean and India in the following decade. Today, Hong Kong migrants setting in the U.K. have joined the neighborhood’s diverse community.
The artist duo, as well as their collaborator, Bloc Projects’ co-director Sunshine Wong, are eager to tell the stories that connect these two roads and their respective communities. “The two very different Harcourt Road tell surprisingly similar stories of collectivity: that no matter how large or small the communities, how permanent or temporary, they coalesce whenever there’s a common struggle,” Wong said in a statement.
Earlier in the summer, C&G launched an initiative called Harcourt Road Mobile Museum. An e-bike mounted shelf carrying books, documents, photographs, and drawings related to the two Harcourt Roads. Stationed in various locations around the street and the nearby Weston Park, the duo conducted oral history interviews about their stories and memories of the neighborhood.
Artist Wai Hang Siu’s photography work on Hong Kong’s Umbrella Movement on Harcourt Road, 2014. Courtesy of the artist.
As part of the project, the team also worked with a local photographer to produce a series of portraits of local families and invited residents to color the contour outline drawings of a type of Sheffield-grown wild weed, a symbol of resistance as it cannot be eradicated. More than 100 drawings have been collected and will be compiled in an animated short to be unveiled at the exhibition.
Meanwhile, C&G Artpartment is also presenting “Iron Barricades – Cable Ties – Hope,” a solo exhibition of photography artist Wai Hang Siu, who also emigrated to the U.K. from Hong Kong. The show will feature Siu’s never-been-shown photographs taken during the 2014 Umbrella Movement at their own art space in Sheffield. The show runs from September 29 through November 2.
“As part of the collective of Hong Kong diaspora, we will not disperse completely, although I cannot tell how things will pan out in the future. We do what we can do now, and focus on the present,” Cheung said. More

What time is it? Time for The Clock (2010) by Christian Marclay to come back to New York’s Museum of Modern Art. The 24-hour film is made up entirely of over 10,000 appropriated shots of watches and clocks showing the actual time for each and every minute of the day.
The Clock will be on view in MoMA’s second floor galleries from November through some time next spring. Though it is quite literally watching the clock in real time, viewers often find the experience strangely addictive, and can stay for hours on end, creating long lines almost any time it’s screening.
It took Marclay and a team of six assistants two years to find all the sequences featured in the artwork, which draws on both film and television to pay perhaps the ultimate homage to the passage of time.
Cinema buffs will of course enjoy trying to identify the source material for each fleeting shot, drawn from everything from Gone With the Wind to Sex in the City. Selections are paired thematically, not just based on time—although naturally morning hours feature plenty of snoozing alarm clocks, and lunch time is heavy on office workers taking their midday break.
Christian Marclay, The Clock (2010). Collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Promised gift from the collection of Jill and Peter Kraus. Installation view at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, December 21, 2012–January 21, 2013. ©2024 Christian Marclay. Photo by Thomas Griesel, courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery, New York.
“It follows the precise flow of time, yet there are multiple narratives, which jump around, cut and return at another moment,” Marclay told Frieze magazine in 2018, ahead of the film’s showing at Tate Modern in London.
The MoMA acquired the epic video work in 2011, as a promised gift from the collection of Jill and Peter Kraus. The subsequent exhibition, which ran just one month, from December 2012 to January 2013, welcomed 40,000 visitors. It was just one of many blockbuster showings of The Clock since its debut at White Cube gallery in London.
The film won the Golden Lion at the 2011 Venice Biennale, and, earlier that year, drew crowds braving the January cold to wait at Paula Cooper Gallery during its first New York run. (The first MoMA outing was actually the second time The Clock had played in the city that year, following a run at Lincoln Center that summer.)
“Made only three years after the launch of the iPhone and YouTube, this epic video collage anticipated a world in which the separation between our daily lives and those lived onscreen would become increasingly intertwined. Produced through meticulous editing and exhaustive research well before today’s A.I. tools became commonplace, the work brilliantly highlights a world in which our symbiotic relationship to the digital world of images has taken on 24/7 dimensions,” Stuart Comer, the MoMA’s chief curator of media and performance, told me in an email, calling the work a “cinematic tour-de-force.”
Christian Marclay, The Clock (2010). Collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Promised gift from the collection of Jill and Peter Kraus. ©2024 Christian Marclay, courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery, New York.
The MoMA has not yet announced the dates for after-hours viewings of The Clock, but such events are part of Marclay’s conditions whenever the work is shown.
The museum stayed open 24-hours a day for three weekends during the film’s last outing, plus a special New Year’s Eve showing with a silent disco. Midnight is a particularly dramatic time in the film, with celebrations of the holiday, of course, and the explosion of London’s Big Ben clocktower in V for Vendetta.
The Swiss American artist initially created The Clock in an edition of six, for sale for $467,500. The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa teamed up to jointly purchase one edition, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art snagged another. Overseas, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, and the Tate joined forces to purchase a third.
Christian Marclay, The Clock (2010). Collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Promised gift from the collection of Jill and Peter Kraus. Installation view at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, December 21, 2012–January 21, 2013. ©2024 Christian Marclay. Photo by Thomas Griesel, courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery, New York.
Last time the work screened at MoMA, the museum opened a special Twitter profile to keep would-be visitors appraised of the wait time. According to the account, which will not be reactivated for the work’s return, the final weekend saw lines as long as three hours for access to the exhibition.
Seeing the whole film is, of course, nearly impossible.
“Some people are frustrated and they feel they have to see all 24 hours,” Marclay told the Guardian in 2018. “I say, ‘No no no!’ Just enjoy it for the moment. Enjoy what you can. When it’s time to eat or go to the bathroom, you leave.”
“Christian Marclay: The Clock” will be on view at the Museum of Modern Art, 11 West 53 Street, New York, New York, November 10, 2024–spring 2025.  More

The Union Church of Pocantico Hills in Westchester County, New York, may appear a modest country church, but inside its unassuming stone walls lies something extraordinary—Marc Chagall’s very first stained-glass window in the U.S.
The work was commissioned following the death of oil magnate John D. Rockefeller Jr. in 1960, when his children decided a memorial was due him in their family church, located close to the Rockefellers’ Kykuit estate. For decades, the Union Church had benefitted from the clan’s largesse, including a $10,000 donation toward its first building. It already housed a rose window designed by Henri Matisse, commissioned by Rockefeller in 1948 in honor of his late wife, Abby.
To commemorate their father, the Rockefeller kids tapped another artist from the French school, Marc Chagall, hot off a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, where his famed Jerusalem Windows were shown. For Union Church, Chagall created an intricate, jewel-toned piece after the biblical tale of the Good Samaritan to mirror Rockefeller’s philanthropic efforts. He would go on to design eight more windows for the congregation. Today, the Union Church is the only one in the country to feature Chagall’s stained-glass work.
Union Church windows by Marc Chagall, showing the Good Samaritan behind the altar and Hebrew prophets on the side. Photo: © J Matorano for Historic Hudson Valley.
This fall, the David Rockefeller Creative Arts Center is revisiting Chagall’s historic contribution to the church. The Pocantico institution’s “Sketching Light” will bring together 27 preparatory studies that Chagall made for the stained-glass pieces. These works on paper provide a rare view into the artist’s creative process, said Katrina London, the center’s curator.
“Chagall’s sketches give us fleeting insights into the mind of one of the most renowned 20th-century modernists,” she said in a statement, “rendering his work at once extraordinary and familiar.”
Marc Chagall working on stained-glass windows in the Jacques Simon studios in Reims, 1961. Photo: Keystone-France/Gamma-Keystone via Getty Images.
When Chagall embarked on the Union Church project, his stained-glass works were growing in demand after he unveiled his series of 12 monumental windows for what is now known as the Abbell Synagogue. The Metz Cathedral had come calling, as had the Chichester Cathedral in the U.K. These commissions arrived as the artist was rounding off his long-running “Bible” series, begun in the 1930s, which saw him reinterpret the Old Testament in a set of striking figurative illustrations.
Unveiled in 1962, his large Good Samaritan window is a narrative work in which the entirety of the parable can be read—from the act of violence that besets a traveler to his rescue by a kind stranger. Chagall’s preparatory sketches show how he began the work as a pencil and ink sketch, before adding color and texture with paint and mixed media. These maquettes helped him picture how sunlight would activate the glass work.
“For me,” Chagall once reflected, “a stained-glass window is a transparent partition between my heart and the heart of the world.”
Marc Chagall sketches for Union Church windows (1965-66). Collection of Rockefeller Archive Center. Photo: © Mick Hale.
The show will also explore the eight other windows Chagall created for Union Church. He had proposed these other pieces, David Rockefeller remembered, to create a more “harmonious” environment (the congregants, however, required some persuading to allow yet more modern art into their place of worship). The windows he produced depict Hebrew prophets including Elijah, Joel, and Ezekiel in colors—blues, yellows, and greens—that were specifically chosen to echo those of Matisse’s rose window.
Marc Chagall, sketch for Ezekiel. Collection of the Rockefeller Archive Center. Photo: © Mick Hale.
Chagall’s drafts and colorwork for the church’s nine windows were snapped up by David Rockefeller for the Rockefeller Archive in 1975. They were exhibited only once, at MoMA in 1978—making “Sketching Light” the first time they will be presented together in decades, to mark the Rockefeller Archive Center’s 50th year. The Union Church is a brisk half-mile walk from the exhibition venue.
“Sketching Light” is on view at the David Rockefeller Creative Arts Center, 200 Lake Rd, Tarrytown, New York, October 11, 2024–May 17, 2025. More

What is the meaning of life to someone who has experienced a long, eventful ride? Yayoi Kusama, one of the most famous living artists in the world, has the answer.
At the age of 95, Kusama is still bursting with creative energy, and her latest solo exhibition “Every Day I Pray for Love” is solid proof. Opening at Victoria Miro in London this week ahead of Frieze London, the show (the artist’s 14th solo exhibition with the gallery) is more than just a presentation of the famed artist’s vision and versatility across paintings, installations, and sculptures. Collectively, they paint a picture of a life that should be embraced by people of all ages.
Some industry insiders jokingly said Kusama is like a lifeline to many art industry workers,  and even to luxury brands in these trying times. Indeed, she is one of the top-selling artists in the world, with a total sales value of $190 million, the eighth “most bankable” artist in 2023, according to Artnet Price Database. But sales aside, she is adored by the people.
Yayoi Kusama, Death of Nerves (2022), installation view of “Every Day I Pray For Love.” All works courtesy the artist, Ota Fine Arts and Victoria Miro © YAYOI KUSAMA
A long queue formed outside the gallery on Wharf Road when I went to the show’s first public opening day on Wednesday. It was a diverse crowd of all ages and different ethnicities. There were plenty of mothers bringing their young children along; one toddler was wearing a child harness, which was probably a relief to gallery staffers worried about sticky fingers and unsteady toddlers (another child nearly touched a painting). But they all shared the same eagerness and excitement as they stepped into the gallery to immerse themselves in the world of Kusama.
Many of them first stopped by the nearly 50-foot tall installation Death of Nerves (2022), located the closest to the ground floor entrance. Originally commissioned by Hong Kong’s M+ as part of the artist’s 2022 retrospective, “Yayoi Kusama: 1945 to Now,” the work consists of multiple, long, colorful fabric tentacles decorated with the artist’s signature polka dots. When it was shown at M+, the work was given more space and spread out across the room, whereas at the London gallery, the work is installed in a much more confined space, suspended from the ceiling of the gallery’s upper floor and saturating the gallery’s architectural void like tendrils or vines. Viewers get to enjoy two very different perspectives of the work standing on either the ground or upper floor. The setting offers a more dynamic and playful viewing experience as one cannot get a full-view of the entire gigantic installation no matter where they stand. It is almost like playing hide and seek with these sewn tentacles.
Yayoi Kusama, Every Day I Pray for Love—Women’s Profiles (2024). All works courtesy the artist, Ota Fine Arts and Victoria Miro © YAYOI KUSAMA
A few steps away from that installation sits the much-anticipated Infinity Mirrored Room—Beauty Described by a Spherical Heart. This 2024 work is the latest rendition of Kusama’s popular Infinity Mirrored Room series, echoing two of the artist’s early works from 1966, Infinity Mirrored Room—Love Forever and Narcissus Garden. Tickets to its showcases, such as the one at Tate Modern, were constantly sold out throughout its nearly three-year exhibition period that concluded in April. The work, set in a hexagonal space is also a headliner of the show.
Does this Infinity Mirrored Room live up to the hype? In most cases, standing in any room immersed in the visual illusion of infinite mirrored images can never be called a total disappointment. But what about when  the room is installed with a ceiling of flashing LED lights in fluorescent colors that form a hexagonal pattern, reflecting endlessly across all surfaces from the mirrored walls to the reflective surface of a large sphere sitting right in the middle of the room? It was fun at first when I set foot in the room. Then, it grew uncomfortable as the throbbing lights changed the tone of the room in rapid speed, and I could not stay for longer. Certainly, contemporary art is not meant to make you feel comfortable, but such a unique viewing experience leaves a complex aftertaste that lingers on my mind.
Exhibition goers and their children admire Yayoi Kusama’s paintings on the wall at Victoria Miro, London. Photo: Vivienne Chow.
Compared to all these complex installations, the playful paintings hung on the walls of the upper gallery offer a much more straightforward channel to connect with Kusama’s rich inner world. These colorful new paintings from the artist’s most recent ongoing series Every Day I Pray for Love (2021-) are created in the artist’s room, rather than her studio, according to poet, critic, and curator Akira Tatehata, who penned an essay for the show. “Kusama has often described her approach to art as being a quest,” she wrote, “and it would be no exaggeration to say her entire life is now focused on picking up a paintbrush.”
Polka dots are still the dominant motif but these whimsical, childlike paintings—some that even appear to be spontaneous—are the artist’s most direct expressions of and commentaries on life. They may seem repetitive at times, but if one has a will, it is still possible to create extraordinary out of the ordinary. Out of these lines and dots in different colors and patterns, Kusama added some profiles of funny faces which serve as inspirations for the three new bonze sculptures installed in the gallery’s garden. The artist also inscribed texts in Japanese and English on several paintings, prompting Tatehata to wonder if poetry is playing a role in Kusama’s creations now. Together, they form a meaningful body of work.
Yayoi Kusama, Ladder to Heaven (2024). All works courtesy the artist, Ota Fine Arts and Victoria Miro © YAYOI KUSAMA
The sculpture Ladder to Heaven (2024), a new rendition of the series of the same name, may well be a metaphor of the role Kusama plays as an artist. The sculpture is simple, a 13-foot ladder with a reflective surface connecting two mirrored circular panels, one on top and one at the bottom. The ladder’s surface is full of hollowed polka dots.
The gallery said this is the first from the series ever created for outdoor installation. The past renditions, such as the one conceived in 2002 that sold for £478,800 ($536,771) at a Sotheby’s London auction in October 2022 according to Artnet Price Database, were made with lighting fibre tube and exhibited indoors only. But this latest version in the garden sees the ladder expanding endlessly through mirrored panels, as if it was an infinity ladder that connects heaven and earth. The artist, who had once incorporated herself into works by applying polka dot stickers on her body in her performances, or the polka-dotted mannequin sculptures featured in Self-Obliteration (1966-74), is like this ladder, acting as a conduit bridging the infinite realms.
“I pray for love everyday,” Kusama inscribed across her paintings. Seeing the smiling faces of curious visitors and young children roaming around the gallery, I am certain that Kusama’s prayers are heard.
The exhibition runs through November 2. It is free but all advance tickets have been fully booked. The gallery will release additional new tickets each Monday. More

With the impending closure of New York’s Rubin Museum of Art on October 6, the institution has made arrangements for its Tibetan Buddhist Shrine Room, the jewel of the collection, to move to the Brooklyn Museum.
The Rubin, which is dedicated to Himalayan art, announced plans to close its Chelsea flagship back in January. The museum is adopting a decentralized model to become a “museum without walls,” organizing traveling exhibitions and loaning out works from its holdings.
The shrine represents the first such loan, set to go on view at the Brooklyn Museum’s second-floor Arts of Asia galleries for the next six years, starting in June 2025.
“The guiding principle of our borderless future is: more art, accessible to more people, in more places. We are so thrilled that the beating heart of our 17th Street building, the Tibetan Buddhist Shrine Room, will continue to have an exceptional home in New York City at the Brooklyn Museum,” Jorrit Britschgi, the Rubin’s executive director, said in a statement.
An exterior view of the Rubin Museum of Art in New York. Photo by Ben Hide, courtesy of the Rubin Museum of Art, New York.
The installation features an impressive array of over 100 artworks, ritual objects, and furniture pieces from the 14th to 18th centuries. The display reflects how such pieces would be found in a typical household shrine. Adding to the meditative effect are recordings of prayerful chanting from Tibetan monks and nuns, as well as the smell of incense, which is burned during religious rituals.
“From the very start, the Tibetan Buddhist Shrine Room has been the most loved space at the Rubin Museum for providing a glimpse into how Tibetan religious art would be displayed and used as a part of the living cultural tradition and practice,” Elena Pakhoutova, the Rubin’s curator of Himalayan art, added.
At the Rubin, curators would rotate in different works from the collection every two years, allowing the shrine to change to represent the four major Tibetan Buddhist religious traditions: Nyingma, Kagyu, Sakya, and Gelug. (It also served an important conservation purpose by limiting the amount of time light-sensitive paintings spent on view.) The Rubin curators will also continue to regularly rotate the works in the installation at the Brooklyn Museum.
At the Brooklyn Museum, it will help fill a gap in the collection.

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“We’ve never been as strong in Buddhist art from the Himalayas as we are in some other regions of Asia,” Joan Cummins, a senior curator for Asian art at the Brooklyn Museum, told the New York Times. “This is an opportunity, in a really dramatic way, to beef up our presentation of a really dynamic and beautiful regional art form.”
Husband-and-wife collectors and philanthropists Donald and Shelley Rubin founded their namesake institution in 2004 to showcase their collection. They had bought the museum’s Chelsea building, a former Barneys New York, for $22 million in 1998. With the closing of the Rubin’s physical location, the couple plans to sell the building.
If you can’t make it to see the shrine before the Rubin closes its doors, you can also experience it online, via a two hour streaming video the museum posted on YouTube during lockdown in 2020. More

When most think of Monet, their mind brings forth sunsets on the Seine or water lilies from his beloved flower garden in Giverny in northern France. Sooty scenes of industrial London may be a less obvious reference, but the Impressionist painter became enchanted by the Big Smoke on his first visit in 1870. Decades later, between 1899-1901, Monet returned three times to obsessively repaint the river Thames.
These works are the subject of a landmark exhibition “Monet in London: Views of the Thames,” opening at the Courtauld in London on September 27. It reunites 21 paintings that debuted as part of a larger group of 37 works in Paris in 1904. The artist’s intention to show the “Thames” series in London never came to be until now, some 120 years later.
Among the exhibition’s highlights is a historically significant view of Charing Cross Bridge once owned by Winston Churchill, which has recently been restored to its former glory after decades of the former prime minister’s cigar smoke was cleaned from it.
Of course, the Courtauld couldn’t be a more ideal location, being mere stone’s throw from the artist’s main subjects of Waterloo Bridge, Charing Cross Bridge, and the Houses of Parliament, and just a few doors down from his regular haunt: the Savoy Hotel. Contemporary viewers will see first-hand how the other-worldly smog that draped the city of Monet’s day has evolved into a lively cacophony of flashing lights and skyscrapers.
Installation view of “Monet and London: Views of the Thames,” at The Courtauld Gallery in London. Photo: © Fergus Carmichael.
What was it that kept Monet coming back to set up his easel along the same London riverbanks? It wasn’t the city’s stately monuments, which he makes hardly discernible beyond a hazy silhouette. Rather, the artist marveled at the city’s ever-changing atmospheric conditions.
“It has to be said that the climate is so idiosyncratic;” Monet wrote to his wife in 1900. “You wouldn’t believe the amazing effects I have seen in the nearly two months that I have been constantly looking at this river Thames.”
Years later, in 1920, he recalled how London’s “fog gives it its magnificent breadth. Its regular and massive blocks become grandiose within that mysterious cloak.”
Installation view of “Monet and London: Views of the Thames,” at The Courtauld Gallery in London. Photo: © Fergus Carmichael.
Though Monet returned relentlessly to the same locations, the weather and the time of day made each painting wholly individual. Responding to an unpredictable climate, Monet usually stopped and started sketching on several different canvases each day, eventually completing the unfinished works from his studio in Giverny.
“It may feel repetitive to represent the same thing over and over, but for him it wasn’t at all,” explained the Courtauld’s senior curator Karen Serres. “Every time he was seeing something completely different. He realized that to represent a specific site only once was not to do it justice.”
This effect is greatly emphasized when the works are viewed as a group. Even as Monet was working on the “Thames” series, he refused to send a single canvas to his dealer. “Seeing the complete series will be of far greater importance,” he insisted. As such, the Courtauld show presents a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to see together loans from as far afield as Ottawa, Atlanta, Zurich, and Dublin.
Here, Serres offers unique insights into exemplary works from each of Monet’s three preferred locations.
Waterloo Bridge
Claude Monet, Waterloo Bridge, Overcast (1903). Photo: Anders Sune Berg, courtesy of Ordrupgaard, Denmark.
From his suite on the top floor of Savoy, Monet could see a skyline of chimneys emanating steady plumes of smoke. As this pollution came into contact with vapor rising from the river, it enveloped the city in a delicate shroud of fleeting visual effects. For Monet, this presented an exciting challenge. “My practiced eye has found that objects change in appearance in a London fog more and quicker than in any other atmosphere, and the difficulty is to get every change down on canvas,” he told a journalist in 1901.
“This painting shows you all the activity on the river,” said Serres, noting how blobs of color represent horse-drawn double-decker buses making their way across the bridge as barges pass beneath. “Really, this is a reminder that the Thames is a working river and a thoroughfare.”
“Monet has rendered the semi-agitated river with just these very quick brushstrokes that are slightly pinkish ochre,” she added. “That really animates the river.”
Houses of Parliament
Claude Monet, London, Parliament. Sunlight in the fog (1904). Photo: Hervé Lewandowski, © Grand Palais RMN (Musée d’Orsay).
In February 2020, Monet began crossing over to the south bank and painting the Houses of Parliament from a private terrace in St Thomas’s Hospital. The dramatic neo-Gothic architecture cut a striking figure, looming out from the mist. Monet particularly loved when the sun, which he described as “a huge ball of fire,” began to sink behind the rooftops.
Of this painting, Serres notes how “the sun is just piercing through the clouds, illuminating the Thames in the foreground. Of course, Monet as a colorist uses complementary colors very well. The sunlight at dusk is very orange in contrast to the building, which is this purple-y blue.”
Charing Cross Bridge
Claude Monet, Charing Cross Bridge, the Thames (1903). Photo: Alain Basset, © Lyon MBA.
Everyday modern life is depicted in Monet’s studies of Charing Cross Bridge, a railway often populated by a passing train billowing clouds of steam. Serres praised how in these paintings Monet produced a “much more subdued sun that on the river sheds an orange light.” In some of these examples, “the fog has dissolved all the forms,” so that the composition “almost goes towards abstraction. But the more you look, the more you realize the subtlety in the sky and then you see these forms emerging from the fog.”
Another view of Charing Cross Bridge, dated 1902 but actually completed in 1923, was given to Winston Churchill in 1949 by his literary agent. It was accompanied by a note urging the ex-prime minister, at that time leader of the opposition party, to “dissipate the fog that shrouds Westminster,” a reference to the U.K.’s seat of power. It still belongs to Churchill’s country house Chartwell, now a National Trust property.
We can only guess at what Monet might have made of the changing atmospheric conditions to which this particular “Thames” study would continue to be subjected to, and eventually bear the traces of. The composition is primarily yellow, a reflection of Victorian London’s highly sulfurous air, but it has only recently regained the full effects of this sickly pale glow thanks to a recent restoration effort.
Among the sources of airborne grime to have accumulated on the painting’s surface? As well as soot from the fireplace, potentially smoke from Churchill’s ten Cuban cigars a day, National Trust conservator Rebecca Hellen told The Art Newspaper.
“Monet and London: Views of the Thames” is on view at the Courtauld in London until January 19.  More