Eliana Willis

In a 2014 article for New York magazine, critic Jerry Saltz described Artforum‘s ads as “the porn of the art world.” The glossy promotions comprised around 70 percent of the magazine’s pages. But these weren’t your typical ethereal, aspirational ads for perfume or jewelry. These are ads for art, after all.
Artforum ads are often confrontational, cheeky, even raunchy. They are designed to start a conversation—and some have even earned their own places in art history.
The Brooklyn-based Gallery 98, which specializes in art-world ephemera like announcement cards and gallery posters, recently got ahold of a cache of old Artforum magazines, from which they culled some of the most interesting and emblematic ads over the decades. Now available online to peruse or purchase is a wide swathe from 1970 to 2010 that feature portraits of artists.
The resulting images are a delightful time capsule of different decades in the art market: there’s a then-considerably-less-successful Ed Ruscha in bed with two women, shot by Jerry McMillan in 1967; Judy Chicago’s debut both in Artforum and the broader art world under her new name, in 1970; and an ad for a show of then 25-year-old Dash Snow at Peres Projects two years before he died.
See more selections from Gallery 98 below.
Ed Ruscha, Wedding Announcement (Ed Ruscha Says Goodbye to College Joys), Artforum Advertisement, 1967. Courtesy online Gallery 98.
Absolut Vodka, Nam June Paik, Absolut Paik, Artforum Advertisement, 2002. Courtesy online Gallery 98.
Cindy Sherman, A Play of Selves, Artforum Advertisement, Metro Pictures, 2006. Courtesy online Gallery 98.
Matthew Barney, Cremaster 5, Artforum Advertisement, Barbara Gladstone Gallery, 1997. Courtesy online Gallery 98.
Dash Snow, Artforum Advertisement, Peres Projects Los Angeles, Artforum Advertisement, 2007. Courtesy online Gallery 98.
Judy Chicago, One Woman Show, Artforum Advertisement, Jack Glenn Gallery (California), 1970. Courtesy Gallery 98 online.
Kara Walker, Sikkema Jenkins & Co, Artforum Advertisement, 2006. Courtesy online Gallery 98.
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Even authors who create elaborate fictional landscapes need directions sometimes. That much is clear in “Mapping Fiction,” a new exhibition at the Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens in California, which examines the ways authors and cartographers have mapped out fantastical worlds both like and unlike our own. 
The show coincides with the centennial of James Joyce’s opus, Ulysses, and sure enough, several relics related to the book—including a first edition copy, a typescript draft of one of its chapters, and various intaglio prints of Dublin as described by the author—are on display. 
But it wasn’t just the anniversary of Joyce’s novel that inspired the show, explained Karla Nielsen, the Huntington’s curator of literary collections who organized the effort.
“Joyce adamantly did not want Ulysses published with a schema, a map of Dublin, any type of explanation really,” Nielsen said in a statement. “His resistance provoked me to think about how maps function when inset into a print novel. How do they influence how readers imagine the narrative?”
Octavia E. Butler, Map of Acorn from notes for Parable of the Talents (ca. 1994). © Octavia E. Butler. Courtesy of The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens.
Some 70 items gathered from the museum’s collection offer viewers answers to the curator’s prompt. Among the highlights are elaborate maps that accompanied early editions of J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy, Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island and Kidnapped, and George R. R. Martin’s A Game of Thrones. Meanwhile, Octavia E. Butler’s hand-drawn—and unpublished—diagrams of her own imagined landscapes provide a peek into her processes of writing Parable of the Talents and Parable of the Trickster (which was never published).
There are plenty of treats for rare book fans, such as early editions of Miguel de Cervantes’s El Ingenioso Hidalgo Don Quixote de la Mancha (The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha), Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, and Jules Verne’s Around the World in 80 Days. The latter is presented next to a vintage board game inspired by Nellie Bly, a journalist who herself circumnavigated the world following the publication of Verne’s novel. (It only took her 72 days).
See more images from “Mapping Fiction” below.
Map from front endpapers to The Odyssey of Homer (1935). © Oxford University Press, Inc. Courtesy of The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens.
D.W. Kellogg & Co., The Open Country of a Woman’s Heart (1833-42). © Nancy and Henry Rosin Collection. Courtesy of The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens.
Map from Ludvig Holbergs Nicolai Klimii iter svbterranevm (1741). © The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens.
David Lilburn, “The Quays” from In medias res (2006). © David Lilburn, 2021. Courtesy of The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens.
A map from Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island (1883). Courtesy of The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens.
McLoughlin Bros., “Round the World with Nellie Bly” (1890). Courtesy of Jay T. Last and The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens.
“Mapping Fiction” is on view through May 2 at the Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens in San Marino, California.
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They may have been created decades ago, but Op Art pioneer Victor Vasarely’s dizzying geometric shapes and colorful graphics have never felt as relevant as they do now, in the age of digital art and NFTs. At least, that’s what an exhibition opening on Thursday at one of London’s biggest department stores strives to demonstrate.
Running until March 31 at Selfridges, the show features a total of 55 works ranging from canvases to ceramics and tapestries. It marks the first display of work by the late French-Hungarian artist in the United Kingdom in more than 50 years.
But the exhibition isn’t just about exposure—it’s also about raising money. Thirty-seven of the works—together with a series of freshly minted NFTs created by London-based NFT platform Substance—are available for sale. Proceeds will go toward the restoration of monumental works at the Fondation Vasarely Museum in Aix-en-Provence, France.
The show also features a creative partnership with fashion brand Paco Rabanne, which will be launched in a new 2022 collection inspired by Vasarely’s art at the Oxford Street store.
Victor Vasarely at Selfridges in London’s Oxford Street. Photo credit: Andrew Meredith and Selfridges.
The exhibition strives to bring the legacy of the Op Art movement pioneer to life while introducing him to a younger audience, said Pierre Vasarely, president of Fondation Vasarely.
“He wanted to promote art [through] architecture, urbanism, music, fashion, just like the way people think in recent years,” Vasarely told Artnet News. “He wanted to bring art to the city, to the streets, to everyone.”
Pierre Vasarely said his grandfather originally created the works on view, including the geometric designs gracing the storefront, by hand, before the introduction of computers. “It was revolutionary,” he said. “The NFT trend today is heading toward this direction.”
Victor Vasarely, Okta Cor (1973) Acrylic on canvas. Photo: Fabrice Lepeltier and Fondation Vasarely.
The physical works available for sale, including 15 unique works and 20 silkscreen prints, originally belonged to French collectors. A total of 12 Vasarely NFTs attached to Vasarely’s monumental works at the foundation will be released, with the first batch of six going live on February 16 and the remaining six available on March 12. Each NFT can be purchased at the London store in person or online on Subtance’s platform (and can later be accessed in the metaverse, naturally). Prices have yet to be announced.
Born in Pécs, Hungary, in 1906, Vasarely first studied medicine before venturing into painting. He moved to Paris in 1930 and began experimenting with Surrealism and Abstract Expressionism before developing his signature checkerboard paintings in the 1940s. He died at the age of 90 in 1997. He was the subject of a retrospective at Paris’s Centre Pompidou in 2019.
Victor Vasarely, Bleu n° IIIV (1970-2009). Photo: Fabrice Lepeltier and Fondation Vasarely
The artist built Fondation Vasarely between 1973 and 1976. It was declared a historic monument in 2013 and has annual attendance of around 100,000 visitors. The foundation is not the first to create NFTs based on a late artist’s work: Alphonse Mucha’s foundation debuted its own line of NFTs at the end of last year.
Pierre Vasarely said he has “no idea” how much money the sales will raise, but he hopes the project will allow more people to see Vasarely’s art, particularly in a moment when travel and gathering indoors is difficult.
“We make this exhibition at Selfridges with technology to show how contemporary his work still is today,” he said. “It is a good opportunity to imagine what Vasarely would’ve done if he had access to computers back then.”
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Prince Charles has commissioned seven leading artists to paint portraits of Holocaust survivors as a gesture of tribute to the aging generation. The portraits will be unveiled at the Buckingham Palace towards the end of this month.
The established artists participating in the project include the most expensive living female artist Jenny Saville, BP Portrait Award-winner Clara Drummond, original member of the Young British Artists Stuart Pearson Wright, and painters Paul Benney, Peter Kuhfeld, Massimiliano Pironti, and Ishbel Myerscough, according to the BBC.
“As the number of Holocaust survivors sadly but inevitably declines, my abiding hope is that this special collection will act as a further guiding light,” Prince Charles told the BBC, adding that the portraits will also serve as a reminder of “history’s darkest days.”
Most of the Holocaust survivors featured in the portraits are more than 90 years old. They were imprisoned in concentration camps during their childhood years and are living in Britain as adults.
The survivors depicted include Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, a 96-year-old musician from a German Jewish family who played in an orchestra of prisoners at the Auschwitz concentration camp, and was later held in the Bergen-Belsen camp in Germany. Her portrait was painted by Kuhfeld. Benney has painted Helen Aronson, 94, a survivor of the imprisonment of Jewish people in Nazi-occupied Poland’s Lodz ghetto.
The paintings, which will be featured at the Queen’s Gallery at Buckingham Palace from January 27 to February 13, and the Palace of Holyroodhouse in Edinburgh from March 17 to June 6, are hoped to serve as a reminder of not just one of the darkest chapters in history, but also to show “humanity’s interconnectedness as we strive to create a better world for our children, grandchildren and generations as yet unborn,” Prince Charles said, adding that this world should be “one where hope is victorious over despair and love triumphs over hate.”
The paintings will also be featured in a BBC Two documentary that will air on January 27 to mark Holocaust Memorial Day. It will include interviews with the survivors, who will share their experiences of events during the Nazi era.
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