Eliana Willis

Essex-born artist and writer Stanley Donwood first met musician Thom Yorke when they were studying at the University of Exeter in the 1980s. Although they briefly lost touch after graduation, their paths crossed again in 1994, when Yorke asked Donwood to help him design a cover for The Bends, the second studio album of his up-and-coming rock band, Radiohead.
Their creative partnership was a tremendous success, with Donwood going on to design each and every one of Radiohead’s subsequent album covers. In 2025, his creative process will be laid bare in a new art exhibition at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford titled “This is What You Get: Stanley Donwood, Radiohead, Thom Yorke,” which will run from 8 August 2025 until 11 January 2026.
The first large-scale, public gallery exhibition of its kind, “This is What You Get” will not only showcase the finished album covers themselves, but also the work that went into designing them, including unused compositions, unpublished drawings, and never-before-seen song lyrics taken directly from Donwood’s own sketchbooks.
When Donwood first started working with Radiohead, he was working as an unpaid artist in an internet café out of the back of a bar. Although he didn’t have a computer, he volunteered to help Yorke put together a website for his band, something their record label—Parlophone—didn’t have much faith in at the time, considering the internet was still in its infancy.
Still, these kinds of initiatives paid off, as—according to music website Monster Children—Donwood’s role quickly evolved from “hired gun” into “an intrinsic part of the band” whose album covers are truly as “sweeping and complex as the records themselves.”
Anselm Kiefer is also getting a show at the Ashmolean next year. Installation view of “Anselm Kiefer: Fallen Angels.” Photo: Ela Bialkowska, OKNO Studio Ⓒ Anselm Kiefer.
Visitors of “This is What You Get” can expect to learn where Donwood gets his inspiration.
“The artwork for OK Computer was done in various places, but also at Thom’s house” the artist told Monster Children, taking its editors on a crash course through each Radiohead album he worked on. “He used to live in this little semi-detached suburban house with a view of some trees that was very nice. But I was in a bit of a dark place with making that artwork…” The final artwork’s mood is shaped by a surreal, almost apocalyptic vision of bare sticks and white ash.
Donwood’s album covers have since become as iconic and instantly recognizable as Yorke’s music, with framed reproductions adorning the dorm room walls of musically inclined college students across the world.
“This is What You Get” is one of several upcoming exhibitions at the Ashmolean dedicated to figures who the museum says have made “groundbreaking contributions to art, music and our contemporary cultural landscape.” Also planned for 2025 is “Anselm Kiefer: Early Works,” which—as the title suggest—will dive into the formative years of German artist Anselm Kiefer, a leading voice in the New Symbolism and Neo-Expressionist movements whose paintings recount significant events from German history. More

“Let them eat cake!” Whether or not Marie Antoinette truly uttered these infamous words, they have come to symbolize the extraordinary opulence of her life.
As Queen of France, her world was one of marbled palaces, lavish gowns, and glittering jewels, culminating in possessions so exquisite they continue to captivate centuries later.
Marie Antoinette’s possessions regularly smash records when they go up for auction, and not just because of their historical significance. As the daughter of Holy Roman Emperor Francis I and wife of French King Louis XVI, Antoinette’s clothing and jewelry were designed by the finest craftsmen and made from the most expensive materials.
Her three-strand pearl necklace, made up of 119 saltwater and freshwater pearls, sold for $2.2 million, while one of her many collections of diamonds went under the hammer for $9.3 million. One of her most cherished possessions, a pendant, raised a mind-boggling $36 million when Sotheby’s put it up for sale.
However, these items pale in comparison to her long-lost watch. Soon on display at the Science Museum in London as part of their “Versailles: Science and Splendour” exhibition, which explores scientific innovations sponsored by the French royal court, the No. 160 Marie Antoinette—as this timepiece is now referred to—fits the late queen’s exuberant style, sporting decorations of sapphire, platinum, ruby, and gold, as well as a crystal dial.
The No. 160 Marie Antoinette in all its glory. Photo: David Silverman/Getty Images.
Designed without a budget and comprised of no less than 823 moving parts, its creator is none other than Prussian watch wizard Abraham-Louis Breguet, whose Breguet company—now part of the Swiss Swatch Group—has been popular with European nobility for centuries.
The No. 160 Marie Antoinette may well be Breguet’s best work. In addition to sounding the hours, minutes, and seconds, a commendable feat for the time in which it was created, the watch came with a thermometer, a second hand that could be used as a stopwatch, and a calendar that corrected for leap years—features that earned it the nickname “the grand contraption.”
Considered the most valuable watch on the face of the Earth, one need not imagine the shock  when—in April 1983—employees of the L.A. Mayer Museum for Islamic Art awoke to find its display case smashed, and it missing alongside 106 other rare and antique watches.
The No. 160 remained missing for nearly two decades until 2004, when the thief, overcome with remorse in his final days, revealed its location—returning the masterpiece to the world and restoring its place in horological history. Now the watch is heading to London—its first international trip after being returned to L.A. Mayer in 2008.
While the No. 160 watch eventually found its way back into the spotlight, Marie Antoinette’s own story ended long before its completion. Commissioned in 1783, the watch wasn’t finished until 1827, after both Breguet and the Queen had passed—leaving behind a legacy of elegance and extravagance that still dazzles today. More

The Robert Rauschenberg Foundation is marking the artist’s 100th birthday with a slate of international events and exhibitions, as well as a series of grant-making initiatives. Launching in 2025 and continuing through 2026, the centennial activities will aim to highlight Rauschenberg’s forward-thinking ideas on art, technology, environmentalism, and social justice.
A genre-spanning giant of American postwar art, Rauschenberg, who died in 2008, is best known for his iconic “Combines” that blend the disciplines of painting and sculpture. He was also a firm believer in art as a catalyst for social change.
“Rauschenberg’s work broke boundaries and embraced the spirit of experimentation—qualities that remain profoundly relevant to artists and society today,” said Courtney J. Martin, the foundation‘s director. “This milestone allows us to reengage with his vision through fresh perspectives, reaffirming his role as a catalyst for innovation, and a beacon for social progress.”
The artist’s Stoned Moon Book (1970) will be included in “Five Friends.” Courtesy Robert Rauschenberg Foundation
The foundation has helped organize major exhibitions of his work at seven institutions across five countries. The first of these is “Five Friends,” which will go on view at the Museum Brandhorst in Munich, Germany in April 2025 before traveling to Cologne’s Museum Ludwig, which was the largest collector of his art in Europe while he was alive. It highlights Rauschenberg’s collaborations with other major artists of the time, including Cy Twombly, John Cage, Jasper Johns, and Merce Cunningham.
“This show really talks about that postwar period and the fact that there is this group between Abstract Expressionism and minimalism and that they share relationships with both camps,” Martin said. “But they’re also really doing their own thing. They’re the successors to one, the precursors of the other.”
Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns at Louis and Fance Stevenson’s home“somewhere up the Hudson”, 1954. Photo: Rachel Rosenthal, Courtesy Robert Rauschenberg Foundation

Two concurrent exhibitions will pay tribute to the artist’s use of photography, which began with his time at Black Mountain College between 1948 and 1952 and continued as his career gained steam during the mid-1950s in New York. “Robert Rauschenberg’s New York: Pictures from the Real World,” opening in September at the Museum of the City of New York will be followed by “The Use of Images,” opening in October at the Fundación Juan March in Madrid, which brought the first exhibit of Rauschenberg’s work to Spain in 1985.
Martin also noted that the artist’s extensive travels in Asia influenced his practice, from multiple trips to Japan beginning in the mid-1960s to a residency in India in 1975 and beyond. This theme runs through an upcoming exhibition at M+ in Hong Kong, opening in November 2025. The show is rooted in a program Rauschenberg personally developed shortly after his first trip to China in the 1980s, called the Rauschenberg Overseas Culture Interchange (ROCI), which was an effort to spark international dialogue using art.
Robert Rauschenberg, New York (1983).
“He was one of the first Western artists to show in China and becomes a huge influence for a generation of Chinese artists in the 1980s,” Martin said. “Just to give you a sense of what that would mean, many of those artists saw Rauschenberg before they saw Picasso.”
Other confirmed institutional exhibitions marking the artist’s centenary include “Fabric Works from the 1970s” at the Menil Collection in Houston (September 19, 2025–March 1, 2026), which explores his interest in dance and costuming, and “Image and Gesture” at Austria’s Kunsthalle Krems (March–October 2026).
Robert Rauschenberg, Mirage (Jammer), 1975. Robert Rauschenberg Foundation. © Robert Rauschenberg Foundation. Photo: Ron Amstutz
While one aspect of the foundation’s work is to support Rauschenberg’s legacy through research and exhibitions, another is philanthropically supporting the causes he held dear. Rauschenberg started an organization called Change Inc., which aimed to provide artists with direct monetary support through perils including medical and housing emergencies, as well as the loss of their studios.
To further the artist’s philanthropic spirit, the foundation will fund a round of centennial grants. To date, 22 institutions are confirmed to receive support related to programming, scholarship, and restoration. Among the recipients are Guild Hall and the Trisha Brown Dance Company in New York, the Honolulu Museum of Art, Stockholm’s Moderna Museet, and the Vancouver Art Gallery.
Several academic museums have also received grants, such as New York University’s Grey Art Museum and the Sheldon Museum of Art at the University of Nebraska. Other institutional grants and gifts will be announced in the coming months.
Robert Rauschenberg working on the Short Stories series at his studio,2000. Photo: Ed Chappell, ©Robert Rauschenberg Foundation
The foundation is also launching the first volume in its pioneering digital catalog raisonné and the first book collecting writings by Rauschenberg. A new book of Rauschenberg’s writings will debut in October, titled I Don’t Think About Being Great: Select Statements and Writings. Rauschenberg himself had set aside most of the selected writings before his death, Martin said.
“He did not publish any writing in his lifetime about his own work. So, this is really, truly revelatory,” she said. “One of the things that emerges out of our book is that Rauschenberg was incredibly funny.” The publication is spearheaded by Francine Snyder, the foundation’s archivist, and will also include writings by artist Martha Tuttle. More

In 2018, NASA launched the Parker Solar Probe, the first aircraft to fly through the sun’s upper atmosphere. It’s still up there, orbiting the sun, moving closer and closer, facing—as NASA’s website dramatically puts it—“brutal heat and radiation to provide humanity with unprecedented observations, visiting the only star we can study up close.”
A five-minute video of the rocket launching into the heavens is the first thing you see when you enter “Solid Gold,” the new exhibit that runs through July 6 at the Brooklyn Museum. This found footage sets the tone for an expansive, trippy show dedicated to the precious metal the Incas poetically called “the tears of the sun.” A pair of blindingly shiny outfits by the Belgian designer Walter Van Beirendonck stand nearby like sentries; they’re from his 2023 “Icarus” collection, named after the figure in Greek mythology who flew too close to the sun.
teamLab. Gold Waves, (2017). © teamLab, courtesy Pace Gallery.
About half of the show’s 500 objects come from the museum’s collection: ancient coins, Renaissance altar pieces, Japanese screens, shimmering couture dresses. The millennia-spanning exhibition commemorates the museum’s 200th birthday, a showcase for its vast holdings. “The idea came up about doing a show about one medium in the collection for its anniversary,” senior curator Matthew Yokobosky said during a preview last week. “And we had 4,000 works that are gold or have a gold element to them.”
But this isn’t some straightforward survey exhibition. It’s freewheeling, discursive, dizzying: jammed with many ideas and twinkling trinkets. “It is like looking at the sun,” Yokobosky mused. “Gold is always going to have some primordial attraction for us. We might not be able to verbalize why it is so dazzling, but it’s in there somewhere.” “Solid Gold” considers the subject in all its permutations: as an element, material, color, and symbol—of beauty, spirituality, wealth, and power, but also greed, hubris, and excess.
Installation view, “Solid Gold. Brooklyn Museum, November 16, 2024- July 6, 2025. Photo: Paula Abreu Pita.
The story—as the Brooklyn Museum presents it, using and forgoing chronology per its discretion—starts a long, long time ago: when ancient peoples discovered these shiny yellow flecks in river beds and streams. It took thousands of years of water eroding the rock to produce these gold particles, but to its earliest fans, it must have seemed like magic.
The ancient Egyptians believed it to be the “flesh of the gods.” The bulk of the exhibit’s first gallery centers around Egypt’s gold obsession, spanning both genuine artifacts, like a coffin adorned with gold chains, as well as contemporary homages. I liked jeweler Gabby Elan’s golden grillz from the 2000s, but John Galliano’s draggy lamé-and-lurex Egyptomania costumes that he designed for Christian Dior in 2004 now read as cheesy (even compared with the ridiculous necklaces Elizabeth Taylor wore in the 1963 biopic Cleopatra). A 2020 Balenciaga number resembles a crumpled Ferrero Rocher wrapper.
Installation view, “Solid Gold. Brooklyn Museum, November 16, 2024- July 6, 2025. Photo: Paula Abreu Pita.
The next room instructs viewers where gold comes from, the various (lucrative, often exploitative, and environmentally hazardous) ways we extract it, and how goldsmiths and artisans work with it. “You can do a lot with a little gold,” Yokobosky said. “It lasts forever. It doesn’t tarnish. It doesn’t rust. You can pound it and it doesn’t get brittle. It’s malleable. And it has so many meanings.”
Still, the metal never really shed its divine associations. Hindus crafted sculptures of their deities in gold. Muslims adorned their mosques and religious artifacts with it. Christians were initially skeptical of the stuff but then used gold leaf to give their altar pieces and holy pictures a heavenly glow. Some Catholic priests wore vestments woven from gold thread, to signal their godly status. There’s a stunning embroidered example from the mid-18th century; in the church’s dark candlelight it would have made its wearer glisten. In the dark ages, gold did provide sparkle and entertainment. Gleaming chalices, glimmering altarpieces, and illuminated prayer books made going to church a hell of a lot more interesting.
Nardo di Cione. Madonna and Child Enthroned with Saints Zenobius, John the Baptist, Reparata and John the Evangelist (mid-14th century). Courtesy of the Brooklyn Museum.
Gold “tinkles, it’s not static,” Yokobosky said. In a darkened chapel, “by the flickering of candlelight, it would have been like an early movie.”
Contemporary artists have played with gold’s religious associations in profound, sometimes subversive ways. The painter Titus Kaphar, for example, uses gold leaf for his luminous portraits of incarcerated Black men, painting them like Byzantine Christian icons. One of his diptychs is presented in “Solid Gold,” hanging in a dark room full of ground-gold religious paintings from Renaissance Italy. Later, past several rooms devoted to gold in fashion, in a spare white gallery, Marc Quinn’s 28-karat gold sculpture of Kate Moss in a pretzel-shaped yoga pose (Siren) sits among a smattering of Buddha sculptures—a new icon for our increasingly celebrity-worshiping culture.
Installation view, “Solid Gold. Brooklyn Museum, November 16, 2024- July 6, 2025. Photo: Paula Abreu Pita.
So much gold, however, can veer into bad taste. Among the oodles of jewelry and fashions, I couldn’t help but think of Trump’s gaudy gilded temples to greed and excess, of prankster Maurizio Cattelan’s golden toilet (entitled America), of the chemicals factories use to produce cheap sequins for mass-produced clothes and costumes. That’s the fascinating thing about gold. On one hand, it’s rare, precious, beautiful, everlasting. On the other, it’s kind of tacky. “Solid Gold” features some transcendent works of art and some ersatz trash. But that’s okay, even correct.
Hanging, France or Italy (circa 17th century). Silk, gilt metal, silver, and linen. Brooklyn Museum
There were two pieces in the show that wonderfully illustrated this tension between gold’s loftiness and its baseness. One was Michelangelo Pistoletto’s mixed-media sculpture Golden Venus of the Rags, from the late 1960s—featuring, yes, a golden statue of the goddess facing a pile of discarded clothing. The other was a draped silk ensemble by Canadian designer Claudio Cina, featuring a digitally printed collage of classical sculptures set against a background inspired by the swimming pool tiles of the famously overly-ostentatious Hearst Castle.
Yokobosky agreed: “When I saw that, I was like, ‘This is perfect!’” More

Lost artworks exert an almost ghostly power over the art historical imagination. One need only call to mind the dramatically empty frames hanging in the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum or the penetrating gaze of lost Raphael’s Portrait of a Young Man,  known today only through reproduction, to have a sense of this spectral power.
Adrian Ghenie, Auferstehung (2024). Courtesy of Infinitart Foundation.
Now, an evocative new exhibition “Adrian Ghenie—Shadow Paintings” at the Albertina in Vienna, dives deep into the psychological complexities of lost art (on view through March 2, 2025). For the exhibition, the Romanian painter Adrian Ghenie offers his visceral, often brutal responses to three lost masterworks by Austrian Expressionist Egon Schiele, works known as his “shadow paintings.” All three paintings are double self-portraits by the artist, which went missing during World War II and have remained missing for nearly 80 years. These paintings are now only known through grainy black-and-white photographs reproduced in a 1911 publication. Still, the might of these paintings has been powerful through their very absence, which Ghenie here examined.
The genesis for this exhibition was conceived by the collector and philanthropist Ciprian Adrian Barsan, who is known as C.A.B. The collector was moved by Ghenie’s masterpiece The Crucifixion on view at the Chiesa della Madonna della Mazza in Palermo and proposed the exhibition to the museum. “He used it as a conceptual anchor to conceive the idea of lost shadow paintings as a rebellious answer against fixed, regulated, plagiarized images embedded within our ghosts of perception, trapped in the paralyzed mimesis of the past that they seek to express,” explained a representative of the museum in an email.
Egon Schiele, Auferstehung. As seen in Albert Paris Gütersloh’s Egon Schiele. Versuch einer Vorrede, Wien, (1911) Photo © Kallir Research Institute.
The paintings on view are not homages to Schiele as much as Ghenie’s adaptation and response to the ways Schiele contorted and transformed depictions of the self in turn-of-the-century Vienna. In the painting Self-Seer (1910) for instance, Schiele presents two sinewy visions of himself, nude, kneeling, one behind the other. The figures are desexed and androgynous while remaining, as was always the case with Schiele, sexually provocative. This painting, in particular, is often interpreted as the struggle between the artist and depiction of the self.
Adrian Ghenie, Studie Nach Die Selbstseher (2024). Courtesy of Infinitart Foundation.
Ghenie was given no confines in how he chose to respond to Schiele’s “shadow paintings” and was asked only to evoke a “presence of absence.” There are parallels between the artists, however. “Ghenie and Schiele share an intense examination of the human body through a raw, disturbing, beautiful aesthetic. Both artists broke away from the imitation of real forms and anatomical accuracy, striving for an authentic, independent visual language,” the museum added.
Egon Schiele, Die Selbstseher. As seen in Albert Paris Gütersloh’s Egon Schiele. Versuch einer Vorrede, Wien, (1911) Photo © Kallir Research Institute.
In his own way, Ghenie captures the psychological and existential torque and even chaos that Schiele metabolized into his daring images; just as Schiele contorts and twists his likeness in these shadow paintings, here Ghenie morphs Schiele’s language so that the human figure becomes alien, surrounded by objects of our contemporary moment. These are wholly new images.
Adrian Ghenie, Niender Maennlicher akt mit Erhobenen Haendenr(2024). Courtesy of Infinitart Foundation.
Even so, Ghenie’s paintings remain psychologically shadowed by Schiele’s works through their very absence. The tension between these works can, as the museum said, “create a mirror in which we confront not only the conflicts arising from the fixation on imitation but also the confrontation with the shadows within our own ghost.” In this way, Ghenie builds on the spirit of rebellion that defined Schiele, refusing to imitate while acknowledging their spectral presence.
Egon Schiele, Die Weltwehmut. As seen in Albert Paris Gütersloh’s Egon Schiele. Versuch einer Vorrede, Wien, (1911) Photo © Kallir Research Institute.
Adrian Ghenie, Weltwehmut (2024). Courtesy of Infinitart Foundation. More

If pushed to name three Renaissance artists (or three Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles), Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Raphael are probably most people’s picks (sorry, Donatello). The three giants of the Renaissance are coming together in a new show at London’s Royal Academy of Arts, which examines their relationships with one another both personally and professionally during their shared lifetimes at the turn of the 16th century.
Leonardo was the eldest of the masters, born in Florence in 1452. He was a month off 23 when Michelangelo was born in Tuscany and 31 by the time Raphael came along in Urbino. There would only be 36 years where all three coincided on this planet, and just 20 years when all three were in adulthood.
Install shot of “Michelangelo, Leonardo, Raphael” (2024). Photo: © David Parry / Royal Academy of Arts.
Their relationships were laden with competition, as all were vying for commissions by powerful Florentine and Roman patrons. Michelangelo and Leonardo competed for the attention of the powerful Medici family, and after Raphael emerged on the scene he and Michelangelo fought for commissions from Pope Julius II. Michelangelo belittled the achievements of his younger rival after his early death, claiming, “everything he learned he learned from me.”
In “Michelangelo, Leonardo and Raphael,” the Royal Academy is showcasing some of the finest examples of Italian Renaissance drawing in the world. The exhibition has been organized in partnership with London’s National Gallery and the Royal Collection Trust, whose current exhibition “Drawing the Italian Renaissance” also features work by the three masters.
More than 40 works by Michelangelo, Raphael, and Leonardo are on display in London, and we took a deeper look at three works, one by each of the Renaissance rivals, all three unfinished and each a depiction of the Virgin Mary with Jesus and the Infant Saint John the Baptist.
Michelangelo Buonarroti, The Virgin and Child with the Infant Saint John (The “Taddei Tondo”), c. 1504–05
Michelangelo Buonarroti, The Virgin and Child with the Infant Saint John (The “Taddei Tondo”), c. 1504–05. Courtesy of the Royal Academy of Arts, London.
The Taddei Tondo—nicknamed after Taddeo Taddei, the wealthy cloth merchant who commissioned it—is the focal point of “Michelangelo, Leonardo, Raphael,” and the key artwork in the narrative of the exhibition’s accompanying book. The carving shows the infant Saint John the Baptist, Jesus’ cousin, offering his young relative a bird, designed as a symbol of the Passion of Christ and a foreshadowing of Jesus’ crucifixion. The tondo (a round artwork) is incomplete, likely because of a new commission which saw Michelangelo travel to Rome to create the tomb for Pope Julius II.
In Lives of the Artists, Vasari’s groundbreaking biographical art history (1550), the author mentions how the Taddei Tondo and a second marble tondo intended for patron Bartolomeo Pitti were both “roughed out but left unfinished.” The fact that Taddei’s commission hung in his house (and remained there until the early 19th century) despite being unfinished was testament to the quality of the piece, made by a 31-year-old Michelangelo at the height of his fame.
Leonardo da Vinci, The Virgin and Child with St Anne and the Infant St John the Baptist (“The Burlington House Cartoon”), c. 1506–08
Leonardo da Vinci, The Virgin and Child with St Anne and the Infant St John the Baptist (“The Burlington House Cartoon”), c. 1506–08. Courtesy of the Royal Academy of Arts, London.
Held in the collection of London’s National Gallery since 1791, the Burlington House Cartoon is the focus of the central gallery of the show. (Its name refers to the address of the Royal Academy itself, at Burlington House in central London.) Cartoons—full-size drawings created in preparation for paintings of frescos—would typically feature evidence of having been traced over or pin-pricked as part of the process of transferring the design from a sheet of paper to a wall, but the Burlington House Cartoon shows no such marks.
This suggests that the drawing was designed as a final artwork itself, and it highlights the importance of drawing in Renaissance artistic practices. The only evidence of manipulation shown on the drawing is that the cartoon is made up of several smaller sheets of paper glued together, due simply to the fact that sheets this large (about 56 inches high) were not available in the early 16th century. In the drawing, Mary, Jesus, and John are joined by Saint Anne, Mary’s mother. Certain areas are left unfinished, including Saint Anne’s arm, but the faces are completed in great detail using charcoal and chalk, with a softening sfumato technique (derived from the Italian word sfumare, meaning “to tone down” or “evaporate like smoke”), which is mostly closely associated with Leonardo and his followers.
Raphael, The Virgin and Child with the Infant St John the Baptist (‘The Esterhazy Madonna’), c. 1508
Raphael, The Virgin and Child with the Infant St John the Baptist (“The Esterhazy Madonna”), c. 1508. Courtesy of the Royal Academy of Arts, London.
The Esterhazy Madonna is testimony to an exciting point in Raphael’s life and career. It was begun in 1508, when the young artist was living in Florence, and was completed in Rome after Raphael was asked to travel there by Pope Julius II. The natural landscape is typically Florentine, but ancient Roman ruins have been added into the background. Art historians see this work as a marker of the end of Raphael’s Florentine period, and the beginning of his work in Rome, which was more adventurous when it came to stepping away from 15th-century standards of compositional harmony.
On loan from the Museum of Fine Arts in Budapest, the painting was previously in the collection of 18th-century Prince Esterházy, who gave the work its nickname. The Esterhazy Madonna is also evidence of the exchange of ideas between Renaissance masters, with the Virgin Mary’s pose taking direct inspiration from a work by Leonardo, itself made after an ancient sculpture.
“Michelangelo, Leonardo, Raphael” is on view at the Royal Academy of Arts, London through 16 February 2025. More

An expansive, hypnotic exhibition of American multidisciplinary artist Harmony Korine is on view in Paris, presented by the French fashion designer agnès b.—who owns the largest collection of Korine’s work in the world.
Korine (b. 1973) is best known for his independent films, particularly his directorial debut feature film 1997’s Gummo and 2012’s Spring Breakers starring James Franco and Selena Gomez. His first major cinematic milestone was writing the screenplay for Larry Clark’s cult classic Kids (1995) after meeting Clark while skateboarding in Washington Square Park. He is also an experienced fine artist, having had recent solo shows with both Hauser and Wirth and Gagosian. His approach welcomes humor, erraticism, experimentation, and improvisation, and he has called his art “mistakist.”
Harmony Korine, Zion’s Lament (2023). © Harmony Korine.
Agnès b. (b. 1941) was born Agnès Andrée Marguerite Troublé and opened her first fashion boutique in 1975 after a stint working for Elle after being headhunted for her fashion sense in a Paris flea market in her early 20s. In 1982 she opened her first international store in New York and demonstrated her love for art more broadly by displaying vintage movie posters throughout the store. That commitment to supporting artistic creation continues to this day.
La Fab, the designer’s library and gallery located inside a social housing project on the Place Jean-Michel Basquiat in the 13th arrondissement of Paris, is the headquarters for agnès b.’s endowment fund and has held public exhibitions, concerts, and screenings since February 2020. She spoke to Artnet News about her art collection when La Fab first opened, saying, “I made the collection by acquiring pieces by young, unknown artists—I never bought a Jeff Koons for $3 million…When I bought [a] Basquiat drawing it wasn’t expensive at all; I got it from his studio at the time, because of one piece I had seen in Paris. That’s why I wanted to know more about him, and we met later.”
Agnès b. and Korine first met in 1999 at the Venice Film Festival when the designer came to see Korine’s latest film, the experimental drama Julien Donkey Boy, after having been a fan of Gummo. The pair collaborated for the first time that same year when Korine was invited to contribute to issue #12 of agnès b.’s Point d’Ironie, a periodical she co-created with Swiss curator and critic Hans Ulrich Obrist and French sculptor and photographer Christian Boltanski.
Harmony Korine, Untitled n°2, from Trash Humpers, (2009) © Harmony Korine © Rebecca Fanuele.
The two struck up a lasting professional relationship and close personal friendship. “There is something between us, we become children together. It’s not about support, it’s about friendship”, agnès b. told The Independent in 2003. The feeling was mutual—”I liked her immediately,” said Korine, “She’s like a kindred spirit or something.”
It was at agnès b.’s Galerie du Jour on Rue du Jour in Paris—founded by the designer in 1984—where Korine had his first solo show, titled “The Sigil of the Cloven Hoof Marks Thy Path,” with a second show—featuring screenplay drafts alongside drawings and photographs—taking place in 2003. Galerie du Jour built its reputation on exhibitions of graffiti artists including Futura 2000, A-one, and Les Tétines Noires.
Harmony Korine, Untitled (Trouble Follows Me Always) (2010). © Harmony Korine © Rebecca Fanuele.
Korine’s fourth feature, Trash Humpers (2009), was co-produced by agnès b. through their joint production company O’Salvation. Speaking to the Independent about the foundation of O’Salvation, Korine said, “I didn’t want a movie production company because I’m just as interested in writing books or art shows, stuff like that. She understood that I wanted to go off in different directions. I needed something that whatever I wanted to do I could do and get it out there.”
The new show, “Harmony Korine in the agnès b. Collection Since 1997” is the first solo show of agnès b.’s collection to be hosted at La Fab. It features paintings, photographs, and prints by Korine, highlighting his artistic endeavors which have often been overshadowed by his reputation as a filmmaker. The exhibition is a celebration of the “artistic complicity” between the two, and a testament to their professional and personal relationship which has bolstered each other’s practices for a quarter of a century.
Harmony Korine, Revelator Maximus (2023).© Harmony Korine.
“Harmony Korine in Agnès B. Collection Since 1997” is on view at La Fab, Place Jean-Michel Basquiat, Paris from November 22 to March 23 2025. More

One of the world’s only green dinosaur fossils will soon go on view in a new wing of the Natural History Museum in Los Angeles.
“It’s pretty green. It’s not neon green. But it has a distinct green color… which is truly unique,” Luis M. Chiappe, the curator of the museum’s Dinosaur Institute, said in a phone interview. “There is no other dinosaur like that in the world.”
Gnatalie, measuring 75-feet long, is described as Diplodocus-like dinosaur—a typical dinosaur species in the same group as the famed Brontosaurus. It came from what the team calls the Gnatalie Quarry in southeastern Utah, not far from a town called Bluff. Chiappe said he believes Gnatalie is a new species, yet to be publicly named. “But the official name in the study has not been published,” he said. “So, at the moment, we’re just saying it is Diplodocus-like and leaving it at that.”
Gnatalie is seen mounted inside of a new wing at L.A.’s Natural History Museum. Photo courtesy of the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County
The skeleton appears to be a mix between two well-known diplodocids, a family of dinosaurs in the sauropod group. In this case, the green dinosaur appears to be a mix between Barosaurus and Diplodocus.
“The neck is much more like Barosaurus, and the hip and the tail are more like Diplodocus,” Chiappe said. “So, we’re naming a new species.”
The specimens used in the Gnatalie mount were discovered in 2007, buried in what was a riverbed in Utah about 150 million years ago, during the late Jurassic period. Other specimens from other dinosaur species were also found at the site, in digs led by Chiappe.
Preparators are seen working on Gnatalie. Photo courtesy of the Natural History Museums of Los Angeles County
To maximize the real bone in the skeletal mount, the paleontologists combined five or six specimens from the same species—but the bulk of the green dinosaur’s composition comes from two more-complete specimens. The Frankenstein-ed fossils all have a unique green color caused by the mineral celadonite infilling the bone during the fossilization process.
“By doing that, we end up with a mount that’s made of about 80 percent real bone. Otherwise, we would have had maybe 30 percent of a single individual of this species,” Chiappe said. “It’s what we call a composite and that’s something very typical of many dinosaur mounts around the world. Dinosaurs are very rarely found complete, particularly the big ones.”
He added that the Natural History Museum believes in authenticity and wants to show museum-goers the real thing, rather than replicated parts. Still, there’s about 20 percent of replica bones in the mount because the team didn’t have the pieces needed to complete it.
Gnatalie’s feet are seen at their arrival and installation. Photo courtesy of Natural History Museums of Los Angeles County
And though the name Gnatalie implies the dinosaur is female, Chiappe said “there’s no way to tell” its actual gender, especially since multiple specimens were used in its composition.
Before its display, Gnatalie’s specimens were packed and shipped to Ontario, Canada, for armature and “mount” fabrication. Over the summer, Los Angeles residents voted to keep the nickname long used by the dig team, which was plagued by “stinging gnats that pestered its excavators during the digs.”
NHM Commons exterior. Photo courtesy of the Natural History Museums of Los Angeles County © Benny Chan.
Gnatalie is considered one of the “star attractions” for the opening of the new $75 million NHM Commons wing and community hub on the southwest side of the museum’s campus on November 17. The massive new facility and its grounds will allow the museum to expand programming while offering open spaces for community use.
The expansion will also feature Barbara Carrasco’s once-censored mural L.A. History: A Mexican Perspective, which is woven with vignettes from the city’s history, with an emphasis on the perspectives of marginalized communities.
Judith Perlstein Welcome Center. Photo courtesy of the Natural History Museums of Los Angeles County © Benny Chan.
The day after opening, the museum will debut the film T.Rex 3D to share its latest research into the notorious terrible lizard, narrated by Sam Neill of Jurassic Park fame, followed by a new show featuring prehistoric and contemporary sea creature puppets on November 23.
“The Commons is a community space that allows us also to showcase some of our work that has been very community-based,” Chiappe said. “Hundreds of people over the years went to collect Gnatalie. The Carrasco mural also engaged lots of artists. So, the Commons is really a reflection of the community-based work that the museum does.” More