Eliana Willis

A new exhibition at Prague City Gallery’s Stone Bell House arrays hundreds upon hundreds of Bruce Weber’s photographs. They represent the iconic body of work he’s created over a six-decade career, capturing his fashion photographs, magnetic images of celebrities, photojournalistic outings, and sweeping landscapes.
Installation view of “Bruce Weber: My Education” at Stone Bell House, Prague. Photo: Noe DeWitt, courtesy of Stone Bell House.
It’s an unlikely venue for a photographer who has long been entwined with American culture—from his portraits of such figures as Madonna and Joan Didion, to his commercial work with the likes of Calvin Klein, to his cinematic tribute to Chet Baker. Yet, over email, Weber, now based between Miami and New York, professed an abiding connection to the Czech capital, one that’s only grown since he first alighted on the city to photograph Heath Ledger for Vanity Fair 25 years ago.
“In his downtime, Heath would wander around the city taking pictures and chatting with people. I thought about him a lot when I was there this fall, his open and easy way,” he said about the late actor. “Prague has so many beautiful bridges over the River Vltava, which felt a nice metaphor for the connections we’re always trying to make as photographers.”
Bruce Weber outside the Stone Bell House, Prague. Photo: Noe DeWitt, courtesy of Stone Bell House.
At the retrospective, titled “My Education,” Weber’s variously energetic and intimate photographs make for a stunning juxtaposition against the gallery’s Baroque architecture.
Here, his images are grouped less by subject than textures: his reportage works butting up against celebrity portraits, his nature scenes meeting his dynamic nudes, his color images popping up amid his grainy black-and-whites. A separate room screens his films. Gathered in display cases and shelves around the gallery are the many, many books and magazines he’s filled with his photography. They’re testament to an ever-seeking eye.
Installation view of “Bruce Weber: My Education” at Stone Bell House, Prague. Photo: Noe DeWitt, courtesy of Stone Bell House.
“I could meet a farmer out in the countryside of Nebraska or be at Keith Richards’s house in the islands with his extended family—my curiosity is the same, and more often than not, something simple will happen that reminds me of what connects us on a human level,” he said.
Installation view of “Bruce Weber: My Education” at Stone Bell House, Prague. Photo: Noe DeWitt, courtesy of Stone Bell House.
Born in Greensburg, Pennsylvania in 1946, Weber rose through the ranks of the fashion world throughout the 1970s and ’80s, during which his work appeared in fashion catalogues and magazines including GQ, British Vogue, and Interview. He would go on to establish the rare practice that spans the commercial and fine art realms, while creating some of the most enduring, if not iconic, photographic images.
“I’ve never photographed somebody just because they were famous,” explained Weber. I have to be interested in what they’re passionate about, or how they put their own life experience into what they do.”
Bruce Weber, Elizabeth Taylor and Bonkers, Thousand Oaks, California (2005). Photo courtesy of the artist.
Throughout the decades, he’s shot models, athletes, musicians, actors, politicians, and writers; lensed campaigns for Versace, Louis Vuitton, and Abercrombie & Fitch; and produced four feature-length films. In latter years, he’s seen his work collected by museums including New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art and the Art Institute of Chicago.
Installation view of “Bruce Weber: My Education” at Stone Bell House, Prague. Photo: Noe DeWitt, courtesy of Stone Bell House.
In 2017, Weber faced accusations of misconduct from no less than 15 male models, with at least two suits brought against him alleging inappropriate behavior. Weber denied what he characterized as “outrageous claims”; the cases were dismissed or settled out of court. The fallout saw a German museum scrap its Weber retrospective, with Vogue severing its relationship with the photographer “for the foreseeable future.”
The cancellation did not last long. In the time since, Weber has received assignments from Hercules and ICON magazines, dropped a new book, The Golden Retriever Photographic Society, the first dedicated to his images of dogs, and premiered his documentary on Paolo Di Paolo in Copenhagen. His latest Prague outing appears part of a reemergence—a reminder of an oeuvre that remains highly affecting.
Bruce Weber, Louise Bourgeois in New York, 1996. Photo courtesy of the artist.
“It doesn’t matter whether a particular photograph was taken as part of a fashion campaign, as a random photograph on the street, or for a magazine’s portrait series,” said the show’s curator Helena Musilová in a statement. “Everything is brought together by Weber’s ability to capture a profound emotional charge, moments of vulnerability, intimacy, intense experiences, joy, pain, fatigue, love, triumph…”
Installation view of “Bruce Weber: My Education” at Stone Bell House, Prague. Photo: Noe DeWitt, courtesy of Stone Bell House.
To Weber, the show also frames a personal journey, as hinted at in its title. He pointed out some wall text in the gallery that reads: “When a kid from a farm town in Pennsylvania ends up with his photographs on the walls of Prague City Gallery, you know he’s got a story to tell.” It’s a narrative he hopes might resonate, even this far from home.
“I hope I’ve successfully communicated what it’s like to travel and open my mind to the world around me,” he added. “I think it’s a common impulse to want to leave home and go away to the ‘big city,’ just as many of us want to return home and feel the earth beneath our feet. I don’t agree with Thomas Wolfe’s claim that ‘you can’t go home again.’ I believe we’re always going home.”
“Bruce Weber: My Education” is on view at the Stone Bell House, Staroměstské nám. 605/13, 110 00 Staré Město, Czechia, through January 19, 2025. More

One of the stars of the 2022 Venice Biennale—and the first Roma artist ever to represent a country at one of the exhibition’s national pavilions—Poland’s Małgorzata Mirga-Tas is making her U.S. debut on New York’s High Line.
The artist is known for transforming used clothing into monumental hand-stitched figurative fabric panels celebrating the Romani people. For the High Line, Mirga-Tas has created a billboard featuring a bucolic scene of the Roma on the road, enjoying their traditional itinerant lifestyle.
“This is a special one because it’s an outdoor scene where you see a procession or a caravan of people walking through the landscape,” Cecilia Alemani, High Line Art’s director and chief curator, told me. “I think it fits very well with the High Line and the city of New York. But it is also a departure from the more intimate domestic scenes that she often does of a family around the table having a meal or sharing stories. This is a much more epic depiction of her people.” (Alemani curated the international exhibition at the 2022 biennale, but was not involved in the Polish pavilion featuring Mirga-Tas.)
The work, titled Beyond the Horizon, is the second in the High Line’s revived 18th Street billboard series, which kicked off in September with a work by Glenn Ligon. Originally used for advertising, of course, the billboard was a regular High Line Art venue for the first five years after the park’s opening, but was torn down in 2015 due to construction. Now, the parking lot where it once stood is becoming a public plaza, and the art is back.
Małgorzata Mirga-Tas at Tate St. Ives, (2024). Photo by Lucy Green, ©Tate.
The piece is also the latest entry in Mirga-Tas’s “On the Journey” series, which reclaims art historical depictions of the Roma by subverting stereotypes portraying them as dangerous and frightening.
“This sort of iconography has not been created by the Roma people, but of course by other people, and so she’s trying to to completely turn it upside down and be more faithful to the joy of her own community,” Alemani said.
To date, most of Mirga-Tas’s career success has come in Europe, including three solo shows this year at the Västerås Konstmuseum in Sweden, the Bonnefanten Museum in Maastricht, and Tate St. Ives in Cornwall. She was also included in Documenta 15 in Kassel, Germany.
“I can imagine that her work would be very well received here,” Alemani said.
On the occasion of the work’s unveiling, I spoke with Mirga-Tas about her first stateside project, how art history informs her work, and how she turns discarded textiles into vibrant works of art.
Małgorzata Mirga-Tas, Beyond the Horizon (2024), adjacent to the High Line on the 18th Street Billboard. Photo by Timothy Schenck, courtesy of the High Line.
Had you ever visited the High Line before you were invited to do this billboard, and what do you think of the park? How does it feel to show in New York?
I never had a chance to visit High Lane, but when I was offered the opportunity to create a project for the billboard, I was really attracted by the idea and the place.
The idea of art in space, of sharing one’s work in a place where everyone can see it, is close to me. The proximity to the park, where whole families somehow mentally take part in this journey, is so symbolic. You have time to reflect and think.
With your first public artwork in North America, do you expect that your work will be viewed through a different lens here? Do you see any parallels between discrimination against and fear of the Roma in Europe and that of migrants in the United States?
In creating my work and choosing the subject that I am currently working on, I was motivated by the need to make visible how the Roma, Sinti, Travellers were historically portrayed: from the 15th century through the 20th century, the Roma image has been shaped in a stereotypical and stigmatizing way. Historically, we can see a similar treatment of other minority groups seen as “the Other,” including in the U.S., for example in how African Americans, Native Americans, or migrants were portrayed.
Through my work I reinterpret these historical images to retell the story of which I am a part. It is an act of artistic reappropriation.
I would like people to learn something about the Roma and Sinti, to take an interest in our community and to listen. After all, there are many Roma living in the U.S. too.
Małgorzata Mirga-Tas, Beyond the Horizon (2024), adjacent to the High Line on the 18th Street Billboard. Image courtesy of the artist.
When did you start the “On the Journey” series and what inspired you to use works from art history to help reclaim representation of the Roma?
I have been working on this series for some time now, I think, since 2019. At the time, I relied on the famous 17th-century series of engravings, “Les Bohemiens” by Jacques Callot, which depict the Roma in a stereotypical way. I decided to change his narrative on Roma and Sinti to reclaim the image of the Roma, reappropriating what has been seized from us and what has stigmatized us through these images for centuries.
Let us remember that until the 20th century, all images about Roma were created by non-Roma, from an external perspective—stereotypical, damaging, often racist. They were and continue to be the basis for anti-Gypsyism.
Searching for similar depictions in museum collections in other countries, I realized that these images of the Roma, regardless of the country, are identical. Despite the difference in time, place, and group, they are all copies of each other. Having regained control over my image and representation, I decided to sew them back together, warm them up, dress them up and imbue them with Roma history.
For me, it is important to work in a certain way, choosing carefully how I reinvent these images and how I talk about them. The lives of the Roma people were not easy, so recreating their journeys does not have to be done in an aura of negative texts, emotions, or fear.
Reclaiming our subjectivity is a priority for every human being, to be able to speak for ourselves and decide our future and how we are spoken about. Art helps to reclaim representation and offers opportunities to retell one’s own story and perspective.
What are your first memories of seeing art and how did you decide to go to art school?
My first memories are of sculpture, liking gluing and chiseling something. I was drawing and sketching, and I don’t think I thought about art school at the time. It was only at the age of 15 that I decided to go to art school. I couldn’t imagine any other place for myself. To tell you the truth, my mother didn’t see me anywhere else either. 
But sculpture has always been close to me, so I decided to study sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Krakow.
Małgorzata Mirga-Tas, Beyond the Horizon (2024), adjacent to the High Line on the 18th Street Billboard. Photo by Timothy Schenck, courtesy of the High Line.
Did you learn to sew from your family members?
I don’t think it was our tradition to sew, but surely manual skills helped.
My mother told me that after the war my grandmother sewed all her clothes by hand, and later also for her children. This was due to the lack of money for a wardrobe during the difficult communist times. If she had fabric or used clothes, she could alter or sew something herself.
I also remember the gatherings of all the women in our family who worked together to do things (me, my sister, and my cousins were small), such as peeling feathers for pillows or sewing duvet covers or pillowcases, with frills and lace. Such memories of collective work always stay in my mind.
How big is the team who helps you sew today? Are many of them family members?
Since the start of the project “Re-enchanting the World,” I have been working regularly with three assistants: Halina Bednarz, Gosia Brońska, and my aunt Stasisława Mirga. Of course, I can also count on the support of my whole family, especially the women in my family: my mum, my aunts, my cousins, my sister, and so on, to carry out projects for the Roma community. Sometimes I also work with friends from Roma organizations. It depends on the project.
“Małgorzata Mirga-Tas, Beyond the Horizon: A High Line Billboard” is on view adjacent to the High Line at 10th Avenue and 18th Street, New York, December 13, 2024–February 2025. More

Open now at the Guggenheim in New York, “Harmony and Dissonance: Orphism in Paris, 1910–1930” sees over 90 artworks from this fascinating historical moment, displayed in the museum’s iconic rotunda. The exhibition explores the international movement as it took shape in the French capital, looking at the impacts of art forms such as dance, music, and poetry on artists working in this mode.
Orphism was a short-lived, Cubist-inspired movement founded in Paris in the 1910s, as the advances of modern life were overturning traditional conceptions of time and space and artists, per the museum’s description, “engaged with ideas of simultaneity in kaleidoscopic compositions, investigating the transformative possibilities of color, form, and motion.” The poet Guillaume Apollinaire gave the movement its name in 1912, referring to the Greek musician and poet Orpheus, whom he saw as the representation of pure artistry.
Installation view,Harmony and Dissonance: Orphism in Paris, 1910–1930 at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York City. Photo: David Heald ©Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York
In 1936, the founding director of New York’s Museum of Modern Art, Alfred J. Barr Jr., included Orphism in his famous flow chart, which traced the flow of influence between Modern art movements from 1890 to 1935. Orphism was the only one not indicated in Barr’s chart to have influenced any other artistic movements: it’s a dead end. The Guggenheim bills its exhibition as the first in-depth examination of Orphism, and, by contrast with Barr’s estimation, it makes an effort to demonstrate the enduring impact of this often-overlooked movement.
“We wished to frame the emergence of abstraction in Paris at a transformative and optimistic moment in time when myriad innovations altered conceptions of time and space, placing the notion of ‘simultaneity’ at center stage,” exhibition curator Vivien Greene told me in an email. “While art history generally considers many of these artists individually or in small subsets, and they often resisted labels, this endeavor allowed us to connect a transnational constellation of figures (many of whom were not French), and explore commonalities and differences between them.
“Ultimately,” Greene added, “we were most fascinated by all they shared: an investment in color theory, the commitment to expressing the experience of modernity and simultaneity, an interest in how other disciplines could play a tangible role in visual art—notably music, dance, and poetry—and the aspiration that painting could transcend the canvas and elicit multisensory effects.”
But who was at the center of Orphism? Here are five of the movement’s key players, all of them included in the exhibition.
Robert Delaunay, Circular Forms (1930). Photo: Kristopher McKay, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York.
Robert Delaunay
One half of one of art history’s famous couples, Robert Delaunay met the artist born Sonia Terk in 1909 while he was a young artist establishing himself in the French capital. Sonia amicably left her marriage of convenience to the art dealer Wilhelm Uhde, and the pair married in 1910. In the decade he and Sonia would create their Orphist masterpieces, and he was also a member of the Munich-based Blaue Reiter movement, led by Wassily Kandinsky.
Sonia Delaunay
Born in 1885 in modern-day Ukraine, Sonia Terk was adopted as a child by a wealthy uncle who afforded her a lifestyle marked by travel and access to culture, setting her up for her artistic training in Germany at the turn of the 20th century. Sonia was more likely to refer to herself as a Simultanist than an Orphist. (In 1925, the Delaunays even trademarked the term Simultanism, which they preferred when describing their work. Simultanism referenced the visual impact of the color combinations they placed boldly together.) Her designs were not limited to canvas: her work was seen on catwalks and cars, film sets, and furniture. In 1917 she created the costumes for art critic and ballet impresario Sergei Diaghilev’s production of the ballet Cleopatra (with Robert creating the stage designs), and she opened several fashion studios in her lifetime.
František Kupka, Disks of Newton (Study for “Fugue in Two Colors”) (1912). © 2024 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris. Photo: Philadelphia Museum of Art.
František Kupka
Born in the Czech Republic in 1871, František Kupka studied at Vienna’s Academy of Fine Arts and Paris’s École des Beaux-Arts before becoming an illustrator in Paris. Deeply spiritual and fascinated by philosophy and theosophy, he meshed his interest in color theory and musical harmony with art. He began creating color wheels in the 1910s, inspired by Sir Isaac Newton’s 17th-century discovery that sunlight is made up of seven colors. This resulted in Kupka’s series of Orphist masterpieces, the Disks of Newton, some examples of which appear in the Guggenheim exhibition. Kupka’s Divertimento I (1935) was also restored especially for the show.
Amadeo de Souza-Cardoso
The Portuguese artist Amadeo de Souza-Cardoso was born in 1887 and died just 30 years later of Spanish flu. In his short life, he managed to build a reputation as a pioneer in Portuguese Modernism, and surrounded himself with Europe’s cutting-edge artists, becoming close friends with the Delaunays, whom he met while the couple lived in Portugal briefly during World War I. Like Robert Delaunay, De Souza-Cardoso exhibited in the 1913 Armory Show, displaying paintings that were heavily inspired by Cubism and Italian Futurism. Defying strict categorization, De Souza-Cardoso’s works in the Guggenheim show make clear the boundaries of Orphism and its place in an ever-evolving Modern art style.
Mainie Jellett, Painting (1938). Photo: National Museums NI.
Mainie Jellett
Creating her most significant works in the 1930s, Mainie Jellett is celebrated in “Harmony and Dissonance” as an artist who kept the Orphist style alive 20 years after the movement’s conception. Born in 1897 in Dublin, Jellett studied at the Metropolitan School of Art in the Irish capital. It wasn’t until she worked with Post-Impressionist Walter Sickert at the end of the 1910s that Jellett committed to a career as a painter, having continued piano lessons up until then with the hope of becoming a concert pianist. Jellett’s works are among several in the exhibition that were created in the 1930s and beyond, demonstrating the lasting influence of Orphism on young artists, long after the death of Apollinaire.
“Harmony and Dissonance: Orphism in Paris, 1910 – 1930” is on display at Guggenheim Museum, 1071 Fifth Aven, New York, until March 9, 2025. More

This year’s wide-ranging Surrealism celebrations have explored aspects from feminism to the African diaspora. Few, though, have highlighted how the advent of modern photography helped shape the movement.
Now, the Dalí Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida has opened “The Subversive Eye: Surrealist and Experimental Photography from the David Raymond Collection,” a sprawling display of rare Surrealist photographs from the noted connoisseur’s collection.
Man Ray, Self Portrait, Distortion (1928 or 30). Photo: Collection of David Raymond, © Man Ray 2015 Trust / Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY / ADAGP, Paris 2024.
“The Subversive Eye” offers over 100 works made by more than 50 artists hailing from Surrealism’s European core and beyond, such as Japanese photographer Osamu Shiihara, between the 1920s and 1940s.
Gygöry Kepes, Woman with Guitar (1939). Photo: Collection of David Raymond, © Estate of György Kepes (Imre Kepes and Juliet Kepes Stone).
The exhibition catalogue includes an essay by British art historian Dawn Ades, who also contributed to the catalogue for the Corcoran Gallery of Art’s groundbreaking 1986 Surrealist photography show “L’Amour Fou.” Inside, David Raymond himself recounts his decades-long engagement with the subject. Raymond famously donated his entire Surrealist photography collection to the Cleveland Museum of Art in 2007, only to start amassing another soon after.
Jaroslav Rössler, Multiple Exposure of a Woman (early 1930s). Photo: Collection of David Raymond & Kim Manocherian,© 2024 Jaroslav Rössler—heirs.
One might expect that Surrealism and photography should be opposites. One captures reality, it could be argued, while the other distorts it.
Jaroslav Rössler, Self-Portrait (1929). Photo: Collection of David Raymond,© 2024 Jaroslav Rössler—heirs.
But, as “The Subversive Eye” posits, handheld cameras and easier printing processes didn’t just provide Surrealist artists with new tools to alter their images through techniques like collage, solarization, and multiple exposures. In fact, photography itself captures a kind of parallel reality.
Georges Hugnet, Statue and Crawling Woman (1936). Photo: Collection of David Raymond, © 2024 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
“The Subversive Eye” explores this thesis through six thematic sections. “Transformations” demonstrates how Surrealists materially altered their photos. “Enigma of the Ordinary” then shows how they pictured mundane objects without amendments in order to highlight life’s absurdity.
Brassaï, Young Couple Wearing a Two-in-One Suit at the Bal de la Montagne Sainte-Geneviève (c. 1931). Photo: Collection of David Raymond,© Estate Brassaï –RMN-Grand Palais.
Next, “The Visible Woman” highlights how photography advanced the Surrealist aim to liberate desire. A range of female nudes appear here—some tender, some shocking, like Hungarian-French photographer Brassaï’s phosphorescent pants-down portrait Ass (1932). A cache of images by French artist Dora Maar (also Picasso’s lover and muse) temper such examples. Several of Maar’s works feature Nusch Éluard, the late wife of French poet Paul Éluard. The floral pattern from his mournful book Time Overflows covers an entire wall, lending this section a poignantly pretty atmosphere.
Manuel Alvarez Bravo, Parabola Optica (1931/38-39). Photo: Collection of David Raymond, © Archivo Manuel Álvarez Bravo, S.C..
“Poetic Objects” illustrates how Surrealist photographers imbued everyday objects with symbolic power through zooming or strategic cropping. “Automatic Sculpture” shows how photography allowed for an otherwise impossible form of sculpture through its ability to immortalize the momentary coalescence of objects, like a pile of metal fragments that Mexican photographer Manuel Alvarez Bravo shot at an industrial site.
Dora Maar, Leaf Abstraction (1930s). Photo: Collection of David Raymond, © 2024 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris.
Finally, “Urban Mysteries” offers imagery captured through the Surrealist exercise of Parisian night strolls.
“The Subversive Eye” also allows guests to test these techniques for themselves. A photo studio features wooden mannequins, geometric metal boxes, coiled metal springs, and moveable light sources so attendees can stage shoots using their smartphones.
Umbo (Otto Umbehr), Mannequins (1929). Photo: Collection of David Raymond, © 2024 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
In this way, “The Subversive Eye” ensures that the tradition of Surrealist photography outlives this year’s celebrations.
“The Subversive Eye: Surrealist and Experimental Photography from the David Raymond Collection” is on view through May 4, 2025 at The Dalí Museum, 1 Dali Blvd, St. Petersburg, Florida. More

It whirs, it clangs, it sighs and scrapes. Of course it does! This is “Jean Tinguely” at Pirelli HangarBicocca in Milan, showcasing 40 works by the Swiss artist who transformed mechanical parts, toys, skulls, and other detritus into monumental kinetic sculptures that influenced generations of artists. It marks his first major exhibition in decades (the last was at Palazzo Grassi in 1987) and arrives just ahead of his centenary next year.
Tinguely’s spectre looms large. It’s hard to look at Theo the dog—a wooden articulated toy, activated by a metal skewer stuck into its behind—without thinking of Paul McCarthy; or the clusters of glowing lamps and steel bars without Jason Rhoades coming to mind. Michael Landy’s debt was revealed in the credit card-crunching machine he created for Frieze London in 2011. (The British artist later staged his own show at the Tinguely Museum in Basel in 2016, as an ultimate homage).
“Jean Tinguely” runs through February 2, 2025. Here at the HangarBicocca, the curators have taken Tinguely at his word, and used the 5,000 square meters of its vast Navate gallery, to evoke the “anti-museum” of which the artist spoke frequently before his death in 1991, aged just 66. He described art as “a form of revolt, total and complete”, and that included its display.  In 1988, he had taken over a huge abandoned glass factory between Fribourg and Lausanne, Switzerland, and intended to turn it into the invitation-only Torpedo Institut, filled with his animated machines and explosive performances.
Jean Tinguely, Méta-Maxi (1986) Installation view, Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan, 2024 On loan from the Mercedes-Benz Art Collection Courtesy Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan Jean Tinguely: © SIAE, 2024 Photo: Agostino Osio
Machines in Motion
Alas, that never came to pass, but homage is paid here in in Milan, where there is nothing on show but the work itself. (Interpretation is provided by a map and a booklet that visitors can read or not.) In the dark industrial space, most works sit on the concrete floor, and those that can, still whir and clang, suddenly springing to life every 20 minutes or so.
“It’s more like a ballet between the pieces,” says Lucia Pesapane, one of the curators, who had already spent years working on a Tinguely exhibition for the Grand Palais, which ended up never happening. “Once Vicente Todoli [the artistic director of HangarBicocca] agreed to bring it here, it changed completely,” she says. “In Milan, we could use the quality of the space to evoke the spirit of Tinguely. It’s not a proper retrospective.”
Jean Tinguely, Requiem pour une feuille morte, 1967 (detail), Installation view, Palazzo Grassi, Venice, 1987 Collection Fonds Renault pour l’art et la culture, France Courtesy Magnum Photos, Jean Tinguely © SIAE, 2024 Photo: René Burri
The fruits of her extensive labors are very clear, though. These are 40 exceptional works and include loans from several private collectors including Larry Warsh in New York and Esther Grether in Switzerland.
The scene is set with two key works—Cercle et carré-éclatés (1981) and Meta-Maxi (1986). Both are multi-colored assembly lines of wheels, spokes, work benches, pistons and random parts that create their own musique concrete as they grind into motion. The critic Pierre Restany and artist Yves Klein had established the Nouveau Realiste movement in Paris in 1960, advocating “a poetic recycling of urban, industrial and advertising reality”. Tinguely was one of its finest exponents, as he aimed to rearrange the micro parts of the industrial world into machines that developed their own self-expression, beyond human control.
He also believed in taking art out of the gallery: a film running on a black and white TV screen shows Tinguely and friends pushing one of his contraptions, Gismo, through the streets of Paris in 1960. It is as much carnival as performance art. The players in the accompanying brass band are dressed in carefully curated stripey tops and bowler hats, and cute blonde girls in big white dresses are leading the way. Tinguely, for all his political critique of the postwar, machine-led, sociologically fragile world, simply can’t supress his showman tendencies.
Exhibition view, Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan, 2024 Foreground: Sculpture méta-mécanique automobile (1954) Collection Centre Pompidou, Paris, Musée national d’art moderne-Centre de création industrielle Background: Méta-Matic No. 10 (1959). Replica (2024) Museum Tinguely, Basel. Courtesy Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan Jean Tinguely: © SIAE, 2024 Photo: Agostino Osio
Meanwhile, a drawing machine (Meta-Matic no. 10, 1959) fully develops the Duchampian idea of the audience completing the artwork and the concept of chance.
At the behest of the visitor, the machine is set in motion and colored pens, held in metal grips, begin to make lines on a sheet of white paper. A white wall behind it is designated for display of the final “artworks”, though on the day of my visit, most participants had opted to take theirs home.
Not all work sits comfortably in the present day. A suspended ensemble, called Le Ballet des Pauvres,appears to represent womanhood as a distressed and chaotic state, as dishevelled clothing and domestic objects dance chaotically from the ceiling. Its debt is, of course, to Dada, another anti-art movement that railed against aesthetics, logic, and the bourgeoisie and that Tinguley discovered while at art school in Basel. The onomatopoeic nonsense names of works like Rotozaza (one here, no.2 from 1967, is a hectic assemblage of bicycle chains, plexiglass and rubber belts that grinds up green glass bottles) reflects that heritage too.
Jean Tinguely, Swiss sculptor and painter. (Photo by Monique JACOT/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images)
Perhaps with the passing of time it is hard to see the freshness that would have emanated from the work in its day. Now the idea of the machine—dancing or not—is one of increasing obsolescence, rather than something at odds with human intellect. It is the digital world that threatens us more. And a certain machismo hangs in the air – what is it with all the priapic, outsized drill bits? It really is hard to see Tinguely as a feminist, even if La Vittoria—the 1970 performance work in Milan, where a 10m high phallus spurted out fireworks from its tip for half an hour—is proclaimed as “a feminist public statement” in a catalogue essay.
Tinguely loved Formula 1and drove a Ferrari. A particularly unsettling work is Pit-Stop (1984) —an exploded Renault RE40 driven by Eddie Cheever and Alain Prost that looks to me like a veneration of the fatal nature of motor sports. The work was actually sponsored by Renault itself. Times have changed.
Jean Tinguely, L’Odalisque (1989). Installation view, Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan, 2024 Bischofberger Collection, Männedorf-Zurich, Switzerland. Courtesy Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan Jean Tinguely: © SIAE, 2024 Photo: Agostino Osio
Let There Be Light
Still, the artist wasn’t impervious to the mortal coil. With his health in poor shape by the mid-1980s, his world—and this exhibition—darkens. Movement is replaced by glowing lights; great philosophers are conjured up in a baroque series of portraits, made of salvaged metal, feathers and fur.
The exhibition finishes with a literally dazzling work created by Tinguely and his sometime partner in life, and eternal partner in art, his wife Niki de Saint Phalle.
Jean Tinguely and Niki de Saint Phalle in their studio at La Commanderie des Templiers a Dannemois, France,1964 RMN-Grand Palais / Fonds Shunk et Kender / RMN-GP / Dist. Photo SCALA, Firenze
Niki de Saint Phalle and Jean Tinguely were married from 1971 until Tinguely’s passing in 1991. Their enduring and unconventional relationship blended personal and professional bonds, marked by mutual respect and numerous collaborations. It was de Saint Phalle who delivered the Tinguely Museum in Basel after his death. He bequested her his entire estate.
In a massive mushroom sculpture, the couple are seen intertwined, her fecund and him aroused, covered with mirrored mosaic in which the viewer becomes equally absorbed. It’s a testament to creativity and collaboration. It’s a good way to end. More

Art about art is catnip for aesthetes. Art about art magazines is sure to be a magnet for people like me—I spent a decade in the trenches at Art in America. So over the years, I’ve always loved seeing California artist Marlon Mullen’s painted interpretations of covers and advertisements from publications like Artforum, Art in America, and Frieze. Seeing the covers is like seeing old friends, and witnessing his visual commentary on them, the way he transforms them with graphic riffs in vivid colors, well, it’s like seeing an old friend who is trying out a dashing new style that really suits them.
So when New York’s Museum of Modern Art announced in the fall that it would organize a Mullen solo show in its Projects gallery, which is open to the public free of charge, it was great news. The show itself is even greater news. With a daring installation based on input from the artist himself and some judicious choices in terms of didactic material, the whole show, organized by chief curator of painting and sculpture Ann Temkin with support from curatorial assistant Alexandra Morrison, is a triumph. 
Installation view of “Projects: Marlon Mullen” at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Photo courtesy of MoMA.
The show is a joyous occasion partly because he’s not the kind of artist you might expect to see in a solo show at one of the world’s greatest museums. Born in 1963 in Richmond, California, Mullen has long been based at his hometown’s NIAD Art Center (“Nurturing Independence through Artistic Development”), which hosts and supports Bay Area artists with developmental disabilities; in fact, this is the first MoMA showcase for an artist with such disabilities. As it happens, the museum has a long history of showing folk art, Outsider artists, and untrained practitioners—favored terminology has changed over time—so while this is a special high water mark, it doesn’t come completely out of the blue.
Marlon Mullen, Untitled? (2024). Courtesy of the artist, NIAD Art Center, and Adams and Ollman. Photo: Chris Grunder.
The paintings are a delight. Mullen’s rendition of an advertisement for a show of early Warhol paintings at New York gallery Blum Helman, for example, plays havoc with the unmistakable face of Marilyn Monroe: her sexy, slight smile and heavy-lidded gaze turn into a look of shock, mouth seemingly agape, painted brows hovering far above her eyes. And “Warhol” appears not above her face, as in the ad, but rather superimposed on her hair, as if the shadows between her blonde locks formed the Pop artist’s name.
Marlon Mullen, Untitled (2017). © 2024 Marlon Mullen.
Mullen takes even greater liberties with a February 2004 Art in America cover featuring a detail of James Rosenquist’s painting House of Fire (1981), in which multiple tubes of lipstick seem to bear down like rockets on a bucket that floats in front of a window. None of those motifs survive Mullen’s treatment, which imposes a square shape on the magazine’s rectangular layout and preserves only the deep reds and various shades of blue in what has, apart from the magazine’s title, become an abstract composition.
Installation view of “Projects: Marlon Mullen” at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Photo courtesy of MoMA.
In a thoughtful addition, the museum has included a display case with a handful of the very copies of the magazines Mullen himself works from, so his innovations are plain to see. It’s illuminating to look at the May 1997 Artforum cover in which a gawky teenager stares out at us from Rineke Dijkstra’s 1992 photo Kolobrzeg, Poland, and then turn around and see Mullen’s interpretation, where the magazine’s logo and even the girl herself have shrunk, while a brushy version of the sky dominates—even as a UPC barcode encroaches from the corner.
Marlon Mullen, Untitled (2024). © 2024 Marlon Mullen. Photo: Silvia Ros.
But I’m able to make those comparisons I made earlier because the museum has also provided a website where each painting is lined up next to its source. It is not just illuminating but also hilarious to regard the September 2015 Artforum cover where a beatifically glowing infant gazes out from Torbjørn Rødland’s photo Baby (2007), and then look, high up on the wall, to see Mullen’s untitled 2015 interpretation, in which the baby has fattened up into something resembling an infant Jabba the Hutt, and is seemingly covered in pimples. 
Marlon Mullen. Courtesy the artist and NIAD Art Center.
It’s also great fun to know, if you can’t figure it out from the paintings themselves, just how many artists’ work—not to mention the art designers’ treatments of the images and the cover texts—come in for Mullen’s revamps: Jean-Michel Basquiat, Bernd & Hilla Becher, René Magritte, Kerry James Marshall, Claes Oldenburg, Jenny Saville, and Sarah Sze are among them.
Besides the joy of the paintings and the edification of the side-by-side comparisons, the show is notable for being so successful even in a challenging space. Its ceiling is over 26 feet high, but the paintings, even at modest scale, command the eye. In a quirky idea that came straight from the artist, three paintings hang very high on the wall just to your right as you enter, and the far wall has an effective salon-style hang.
Installation view, “Projects: Marlon Mullen,” at the Museum of Modern Art, New York.
MoMA also went the extra mile to make the space welcoming. Museum environments can be unforgiving, especially in sonic terms, with all their hard surfaces making for an unpleasant experience for anyone—not to mention neurodivergent people who might be especially sensitive to sound. The museum accounted for those visitors in spades, with a not-unappealing gray carpet that goes a long way to deaden sound, and downright attractive “acoustic sofas” from Snowsound that absorb noise and that you can even carry to your preferred spot for viewing the show. They really ought to carry them in the MoMA Design Store across the street.
“Projects: Marlon Mullen” is on view at the Museum of Modern Art, 11 West 53rd Street, New York, through April 20, 2025. More

Five years ago, almost no living people had ever laid eyes on the storied Torlonia Marbles—the most important collection of ancient Roman sculpture in private hands. Now, a selection from the 620-piece trove is preparing for its first-ever traveling show. “Myth and Marble: Ancient Roman Sculpture from the Torlonia Collection” will touch down at the Art Institute of Chicago in May, then open at Fort Worth’s Kimbell Art Museum in September. Its sojourn will conclude at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts in July 2026.
The exhibition will mark the first time that many of these relics have left Rome, let alone set out for America. It will also mark the first showcase of ancient Roman sculpture at the Kimbell in the museum’s 52-year history, and the first time the Art Institute of Chicago will show such work in its modern wing.
Statue of a Goddess, known as the Hestia Giustiniani (ca. 470 B.C.E.). Photo: Lorenzo De Masi, © Torlonia Foundation.
The sprawling collection takes its name from the Torlonia family, who got rich handling the Vatican’s finances during the 18th and 19th centuries and bought many of its specimens from other Italian aristocrats who were facing financial hardships. In 1876, Prince Alessandro Torlonia created a museum to house the collection, which hosted small groups until the start of World War II, when the works went into storage. They didn’t re-emerge until 2020, when they went on show in Rome. Since then, one of the family’s Venuses joined the Basquiat exhibition at Gagosian’s Los Angeles gallery earlier this year, and a wider selection of Torlonia marbles is currently on view at the Louvre.
Lisa Ayla Çakmak, the Art Institute of Chicago’s Chair and Curator of Arts Greece, Rome, and Byzantium, and Katharine A. Raff, a curator in the same department, have planned an entirely new spectacle using the Torlonia collection. They’ve chosen 58 sculptures spanning nine centuries for “Myth and Marble,” 24 of which have been newly restored through the collection’s ongoing partnership with Bvlgari.
Portrait of a Young Woman (ca. 60 B.C.E.). Photo: Lorenzo De Masi, © Torlonia Foundation.
Their take will play out over six thematic sections, starting with some of the collection’s most famous holdings. “The primary thesis of the exhibition is about how both in antiquity and today we live in a world surrounded by images and those images communicate messages about identity, status, power, etc.,” Çakmak told me over email.
Portrait of Hadrian (ca. 130 C.E.). Photo: Lorenzo De Masi, © Torlonia Foundation.
“Where we really focused our efforts was in the areas of portraiture and gods and goddesses,” she continued. “We wanted to highlight the emperors of the 2nd century C.E. because there is significant name recognition here, such as Marcus Aurelius.”
“The Torlonia Collection also has a good number of female portraits from the same time period,” Çakmak added, “so it gave us the opportunity to highlight the role of imperial women in the dynastic structures of the period.” Most Roman women of this era were relegated to the roles of wives and mothers, but exceptions abound—like Livia Drusilla, Rome’s first empress, and Julia Domna, who mediated the co-emperorship of her two sons 200 years later.
Statue of Artemis Ephesia (ca. 2nd century C.E.). Photo: Lorenzo De Masi, © Torlonia Foundation.
In terms of ancient deities, Çakmak feels especially fond of a newly restored statue of Athena holding an owl in her outstretched hand. (Works restored previously, like an imperial-era goat that Gian Lorenzo Bernini attended to during the 17th century, will also appear.) Raff, meanwhile, is partial to the Statue of Artemis Ephesia, since it’s “stylistically quite different from most Roman depictions of the goddess of the hunt.”
Funerary relics like the collection’s oldest piece, Attic Votive Relief (ca. 5th century B.C.E.) prove a strong point of the collection. Most ancient Roman graves were dug on the outskirts of the city for health reasons—in areas the Torlonias bought up en masse throughout the 19th century, alongside their land in Porto, Italy. These mesmerizing adornments promise to help bring this ancient era to life for an entirely new audience.
Statue of a resting goat (ca. 1st century C.E.). Photo: Lorenzo de Masi, ©Fondazione Torlonia.
“Myth and Marble” will be on view March 15–June 29, 2025 at the Art Institute of Chicago, 111 S Michigan Ave.; from September 14–January 25, 2026 at the Kimbell Art Museum, 3333 Camp Bowie Blvd., Fort Worth, Texas; then March 14–July 19, 2026 at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, 1380 Sherbrooke St W, Montreal, Quebec. More

For his latest project, actor James Franco is returning to the role of artist.
This month, Franco opens “Hollywood is Hell” at Galerie Gmurzynska in Zurich. The exhibition will debut a never-before-seen series of 28 wall-hanging assemblages and “objets d’art,” as a press release calls them, all created over the past two years. The opening date arrives just weeks after the debut of Hey Joe, the first U.S. release that Franco has starred in since allegations of misconduct forced his career into a hiatus in 2018.
Franco has made numerous artistic efforts over the years. His paintings of the late aughts and early 2010s easily evoke Jean-Michel Basquiat. In 2014, he re-staged Cindy Sherman’s “Untitled Film Stills” for a widely panned show at Pace. He painted $10 portraits for charity in 2016, collaborated by painting clay sewer pipes with his brother in 2017, and staged a multidisciplinary solo exhibition titled “The Dangerous Book Four Boys” at New York’s Clocktower Gallery in 2019, which New York Times critic Roberta Smith called “a confusing mix of the clueless and the halfway promising.”
Now, in “Hollywood is Hell,” Franco appears to channel Robert Rauschenberg—particularly the artist’s noted combines. It’s not Franco’s first exercise in amalgamation, however. His 2011 performance Collage, for instance, layered live acting with video projections. Franco’s career itself is a patchwork of different mediums and businesses—including his new punk-inspired streetwear label, Paly Hollywood.
James Franco, 2 Houses, 1 Castle (2022). Photo: Galerie Gmurzynska.
His artworks slated for Zurich consist of singular, collaged objects that contemplate life in Los Angeles, particularly through the lens of the pandemic. “The streets were empty, the posters damaged on the walls,” Franco recounted in a statement. “I lived at that time near the Hollywood cemetery, where so many stars are buried, and I was walking there. Dreamland had became for me a waste land.”
L.A. icons like helicopters and Disney characters pop up. In He Smelled So Bad (2022), Franco’s scrawl states the work’s titular phrase atop a photograph of a cop car perched ambiguously behind a civilian vehicle. No matter who “he” is to Franco, the piece conjures one of L.A.’s most heart-wrenching calling cards, its immense population of unhoused people.
James Franco, He Smelled So Bad (2022). Photo: Galerie Gmurzynska.
Franco’s recent years have proven bumpy. In 2019, he settled two lawsuits alleging he’d taken advantage of female pupils at his  Studio 4 acting school. “Hollywood is Hell,” however, marks Franco’s first art show since he finally admitted to wrongdoing on SiriusXM’s Jess Cagle Show in 2021. In a recent conversation with Variety, the actor discussed how cancellation shaped him. “Being told you’re bad is painful,” he said. “But ultimately that’s kind of what I needed to just stop going the way I was going.”
The collages in “Hollywood is Hell” seem to synthesize Franco’s many disparate components. The bit of Gucci paraphernalia in He Smelled So Bad, for instance, highlights his friendship with the Italian fashion house. Bright colors and gestural accents retain bits of his Basquiat knockoffs. Comic book heroes and readymade lockers evoke the fixation with male youth that defined “The Dangerous Book Four Boys.” The show’s press release noted that “Masculinity is devastated” in this series, “as one of the pillars of a decadent mass entertainment culture.” Perhaps through these constructions of decay, the artist has worked at understanding how, exactly, he became a man who had to change.
James Franco, This is what the World’s Greatest Navy Mom Looks Like (2022). Photo: Galerie Gmurzynska.
Franco even returned to touch up artworks he’d made at age 20 for this show. “Half of the series are therefore like double works: two works in one each time,” the release stated.
“It is really my young actor self being sort of repurposed and put in to the collages,” Franco added.
Gmurzynska has not responded to a request for comment regarding whether Franco’s tumultuous recent past provoked any pause ahead of his show. Additional questions remain. For example, has Franco’s soul searching helped him find his voice? And, will the art world grant him the acclaim he’s long pined after?
“James Franco: Hollywood is Hell” will be at Galerie Gmurzynska, Paradeplatz 2, Zurich, February 17, 2025. More