Eliana Willis

Nearly 80 years after her death, Beatrix Potter (1866–1943) remains among the world’s most beloved and popular children’s book authors, having sold 250 million copies of books such as The Tale of Peter Rabbit.
But a new show dedicated to the artist at London’s Victoria & Albert Museum aims to paint a much fuller picture of her life, highlighting Potter’s work in the natural sciences, her stewardship of the English landscape, and her accomplishments as a sheep farmer, as well as her literary success.
“Her legacy can be seen in more than one way,” Annemarie Bilclough, the show’s curator, told Artnet News. “We wanted take a broad view of her achievements beyond her storybooks, because there was such a wide range.”
“Beatrix Potter: Drawn to Nature” is so titled because “the theme of nature underpins everything she did,” she added.
Beatrix Potter, scientific drawings of a ground beetle (ca. 1887).Photo ©Victoria & Albert Museum, London, courtesy of Frederick Warne and Co. Ltd.
The show, which is accompanied by a gorgeously illustrated monograph published by Rizzoli, features 200 artworks, manuscripts, photographs, and other artifacts, including little-known scientific drawings. (For a time, Potter studied to be a mycologist.)
Though Potter lived until London until she was in her 40s, she grew up in a family that had a deep-seated interest in the natural world, fueling her interest in plants, animals, and the landscape. This passion is reflected even in her earliest artworks, a series of sketchbooks done when Potter was eight, nine, and 10 years old. She began formal art lessons at 12.
“She was already drawing scenes from nature, with flowers and landscapes, almost as part of homeschooling,” Bilclough said. “There is a page of caterpillars, and on the other side, she wrote notes about where they lived and what sort of things they ate and what they looked. But she finishes off mid-sentence, as if she forgot to finish her homework.”
Beatrix Potter, sketchbook kept at age nine, dated March–April 1876. Photo ©Victoria & Albert Museum, London, courtesy Frederick Warne and Co Ltd.
That careful observation of living things is at the heart of “Drawn to Nature,” which is organized in partnership with the National Trust, to which Potter had left the bulk of her manuscripts and watercolors, as well as 4,000 acres of the rural Lake District in northwest England’s Cumbria region.
As a teenager, Potter began vacationing in the area, and fell in love with the picturesque countryside. In 1905, she purchased and moved into the 17th-century farm Hill Top, the first of many properties she bought in the district as part of her efforts to protect the landscape there. (Later in life, Potter actually became a prizewinning breeder of Herdwick sheep.)
Hill Top, the 17th-century farmhouse that was Beatrix Potter’s first property in the Lake District, now a historic site run by the National Trust. Photo ©National Trust Images.
Potter often based her drawings on her real-life pets. During her lifetime, she had 92 of them, including rabbits Peter Piper and Benjamin Bouncer, who became Peter Rabbit and Benjamin Bunny, perhaps her best-known characters.
Rupert Potter, Beatrix Potter, aged 15, with her dog, Spot (ca. 1880). Photo ©Victoria & Albert Museum, London, courtesy Frederick Warne and Co Ltd.
Designed to appeal to Potter fans all ages, the exhibition includes interactive elements and, if you listen carefully, a cheeky soundtrack of mice scrambling in the walls, as if her characters are getting into mischief just out of view.
See more of Potter’s work below.
Beatrix Potter, The Mice at Work: Threading the Needle from The Tailor of Gloucester artwork (1902). Courtesy of Tate, London.
Beatrix Potter, Examples of a Yellow Grisette (Amanita crocea) (1897). Photo ©Victoria & Albert Museum, London, courtesy Frederick Warne and Co Ltd.
Beatrix Potter, Studies of bees and other insects (ca. 1895). Photo ©Victoria & Albert Museum, London, courtesy Frederick Warne and Co Ltd.
Beatrix Potter, Cornflowers (ca. 1880). Photo ©Victoria & Albert Museum, London, courtesy Frederick Warne and Co Ltd.
Beatrix Potter, illustration for Jemima Puddle-Duck (1908). Photo ©National Trust Images.
Beatrix Potter, illustrated letter to Nancy Nicholson (ca. 1917). Photo ©Victoria & Albert Museum, London, courtesy Frederick Warne and Co Ltd.
Beatrix Potter, Water lilies, probably on Esthwaite Water (ca. 1906). Photo ©Victoria & Albert Museum, London, courtesy Frederick Warne and Co Ltd.
Beatrix Potter, Four rabbits in a burrow (ca. 1895). Photo ©Victoria & Albert Museum, London, courtesy Frederick Warne and Co Ltd.
Beatrix Potter, View across Esthwaite Water (1909). Photo ©Victoria & Albert Museum, London, courtesy Frederick Warne and Co Ltd.
Beatrix Potter, illustrated letter to Noel Moore from Heath Park, Birnam, Scotland (1892). Photo courtesy Princeton University Library.
“Beatrix Potter: Drawn to Nature” is on view at the Victoria & Albert Museum, Cromwell Road, London SW7 2RL, February 12, 2022–January 8, 2023. 
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The interactive exhibition Color Factory, known for its photogenic displays and massive ball pits, is opening its third permanent location, inside Chicago’s Willis Tower.
The 25,000-square-foot space—the Color Factory’s biggest to date—will feature artists from around the world, including Camille Walala, Yuri Suzuki, Tomislav Topic (of the artist duo Quintessenz)  Liz West, Anne Patterson, Christine Wong Yap, Harvey and John, and Michele Bernhardt, as well as four artists with ties to Chicago in Edra Soto, Akilah Townsend, Adrian Kay Wong, and Emilie Baltz.
Longtime Color Factory fans can rest assured that their favorites installations, such as Confetti Accumulation, which constantly rains confetti, will appear in new forms.
“There are certain things that we cannot take off the menu—there would be a revolt if we did not have a ball pit!” CEO Tina Malhotra told Artnet News. “There’s going to be familiar rooms, but with a completely new design and color story, and new concepts with new artists. We like to give our artists the freedom to bring their own perspective and color story.”
Confetti Accumulation at the Color Factory in New York. Photo courtesy of the Color Factory.
Putting together the lineup, Malhotra said she was looking for “artists who are eager to step outside the traditional museum and gallery world,” she said. “When we’re picking artists, we want people who believe in our mission of inspiring joy through the combined power of art and color, and making art accessible.”
For Walala, a French artist who lives in London, the idea of making an interactive installation for the Color Factory was instantly appealing. She’s planning a mirrored maze featuring colorful, geometric patterns, similar to a 2017 installation she did at Now Gallery in London, but inspired by architectural details from important Chicago buildings.
“What I would love to do is bring back your inner child. When you go to the Color Factory, that’s exactly what you get—the excitement of being a child again,” Walala said. “A lot of people are quite intimidated going to art spaces. I want people who come not to feel the pressure of expressing what the art means to them. It’s more about emotion.”
Tomislav Topic, of the artist duo Quintessenz, Central Color Station. Photo courtesy of the Color Factory.
The Color Factory has spent the past two-and-a-half years planning the new space, which will join two other large-scale art installations in Willis Tower. Olafur Eliasson’s mosaic of curved metal tiles, Atmospheric Wave Wall, was unveiled on the building’s facade in January 2021, and Jacob Hashimoto’s In the Heart of this Infinite Particle of Galactic Dust, a hanging sculpture of paper kite discs hanging from the lobby ceiling.
The Color Factory also has spaces in New York, which opened in 2018, and Housto which followed in 2019. The original Color Factory was unveiled as a pop-up space in San Francisco in 2017, when the craze for immersive art experiences—or Big Fun Art—was still in its infancy. It was an instant hit, extending its planned one-month run to eight-and-a-half months.
“It blew up,” Malhotra said. “It broke the Eventbrite site we were using. The tickets were $30, and they were going on Craigslist for $300!”
In the five years since, the appetite for engaging art experiences has only grown.
“We stand out,” she said. “We’re different from conventional museums. Our experiences really engage all the senses. Smell, touch, taste, sight, sound—and it’s all connected to the art.”
See more works from the featured artists below.
Anne Patterson, Pathless Woods. Photo courtesy of the Color Factory.
Tomislav Topic, of the artist duo Quintessenz, Chang(n)ing Colorways. Photo courtesy of the Color Factory.
Liz West, An Additive Mix. Photo by Stephen Iles, courtesy of the Color Factory.
Liz West, Our Colour. Photo courtesy of the Color Factory.
Yuri Suzuki, The Welcome Chorus. Photo by Kate Radiomargate, courtesy of the Color Factory.
The Color Factory will be on view at Catalog at Willis Tower, 233 South Wacker Drive, Chicago, beginning in June 2022. 
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Dorothea Tanning is known as one of the great Surrealists, but a new show at New York’s Kasmin Gallery reveals a very different side of the artist.
In the artist’s biggest U.S. show in decades, the New York gallery has staged a remarkable showcase of Tanning’s work from between 1947 and 1987. Many of the dreamlike canvases, in washes of color and light, blur the boundaries of figuration and abstraction with fragmented imagery.
The show, titled “Dorothea Tanning: Doesn’t the Painting Say It All,” features works dating from 1947 to 1987. O`rganized in conjunction with the Dorothea Tanning Foundation, it brings together 19 loans, including the show-stopping 1962 canvas Aux environs de Paris (Paris and Vicinity), from the Whitney Museum of American Art.
As in many of the works on view, mysterious figures seem to shimmer in and out of focus in the painting. Hazy body parts emerge piecemeal from swaths of vibrant colors.
“Around 1955 my canvases literally splintered,” Tanning wrote in her memoir. “I broke the mirror, you might say.”
Dorothea Tanning, Aux environs de Paris (Paris and Vicinity), 1962. Collection of the Whitney Museum, New York. Photo courtesy of the Dorothea Tanning Foundation, ©2022 the Destina Foundation/Artists Rights Society, New York.
Yet Tanning, who died in 2012 at the age of 101, remains almost exclusively associated with Surrealism, and for works like her haunting Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, an unsettling interior scene of a girl whose hair stands on end, a life-sized doll in a state of undress, and a massive sunflower.
“Dorothea would say, ‘I am a Surrealist, but my art is not necessarily Surrealism,’” Kasmin Gallery director Emma Bowen told Artnet News. “What you think of with Surrealism are these dreamscapes that don’t really make any sense, that are highly figurative and highly rendered.”
But while Tanning’s best-known work tends to be from the 1940s, there’s little knowledge of the very different styles she was working in for most of her life. The show encapsulates her growth over the later years of her career, including after the death of artist Max Ernst, her husband of 30 years, in 1976.
“While she didn’t want to subscribe to specific genres of paintings, she kind of hits them all,” Bowen said. “There’s Expressionism and abstraction and figuration and Mannerism and Impressionism—she’s not doing any of those things specifically, but she’s pulling from them.”
See more works from the show below.
Dorothea Tanning, Pour Gustave l’adoré (1974). Photo by Diego Flores, courtesy of Kasmin Gallery, New York, ©2022 the Destina Foundation/Artists Rights Society, New York.
“Dorothea Tanning: Doesn’t the Painting Say It All” at Kasmin Gallery, New York. Photo by Diego Flores, courtesy of Kasmin Gallery, New York, ©2022 the Destina Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
Dorothea Tanning, Far From (1964). Photo by Diego Flores, courtesy of Kasmin Gallery, New York, ©2022 the Destina Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
Dorothea Tanning, Philosophie en plein air (1969). Photo by Diego Flores, courtesy of Kasmin Gallery, New York, ©2022 the Destina Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
Dorothea Tanning, Portrait de famille (1977). Photo by Diego Flores, courtesy of Kasmin Gallery, New York, ©2022 the Destina Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
“Dorothea Tanning: Doesn’t the Painting Say It All” is on view at Kasmin Gallery, 509 West 27th Street, New York March 3–April 16, 2022.
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The Mauritshuis museum in the Hague is in full bloom. To celebrate the 200th anniversary of its opening to the public in 1822, the museum has been transformed into a living bouquet, inside and out.
A floral installation on the Dutch classical facade will be replenished throughout the exhibition’s run, and inside, an exhibition titled “In Full Bloom” features some of the most famous still-life works of the Dutch Golden Age. (As an added bonus, visitors with flower names—attention Lilys, Roses, and Violets—get free entrance to the exhibition.)
Originally built as a private residence, the two-story building has 16 intimately scaled jewel-box galleries, where the paintings of lush bouquets and plants are on view. The walls where the paintings are hung are also part of the show: they are covered in a sustainable material made from flower waste, imprinted with the flowers.
One of the flowers used is the Rembrandt tulip, bi-color flowers with a base color and accent “flames” of secondary hues. Those pigments give the exhibition walls their deep saturated color. At the end of the exhibition’s run, the wall panels will be turned into pieces of furniture available to purchase.
Ambrosius Bosschaert, Vase of Flowers in a Window (c. 1618). Courtesy of Mauritshuis, The Hague.
The interest in collecting and documenting exotic flowers and plants began around 1600, and the first botanical garden in the Netherlands, Hortus Botanicus, was established in the late 16th century. Many of the first canvases depicted “impossible” bouquets, juxtaposing flora that would not have ever bloomed at the same time, and arranging it in such a way that would surely have toppled the gilded vase holding the sumptuous bouquet as in Amborsius Bosschaert’s Vase of Flowers in a Window.
Throughout the century, artists became almost clinical in their treatment of each individual petal and leaf, though the compositions transitioned from impossibly staged bouquets to more messy and lifelike arrangements. Around 1630, a phenomenon known as tulipmania took hold of the Netherlands, as the price of tulip bulbs skyrocketed, converging with a skyrocketing price for bulbs, leading to mass speculation and, ultimately, a financial crisis.
There are darker themes embedded in the flora and fauna of still lifes. Rachel Ruysch, the daughter of botanist Frederik Ruysch and one of the most successful female artists in 17th-century Dutch circles, cast darker palls over her compositions, often populated by creeping insects. Though tulipmania had come and gone by 1700, Vase with Flowers includes one of the flamed tulips that had sense fallen out of fashion, as well as an iris, both well past their prime. Ruysch also included an empty stem in the center of the grouping, with its blossom severed, a not-so-subtle allusion to the ephemerality of the bouquet, and life. Like the memento mori, vanitas still-life paintings often held grim references to remind viewers of the preciousness, and precariousness, of beauty.
“In Full Bloom” at the Muritshuis is on view through June 6, 2022.
Rachel Ruysch, Vase with Flowers, (1700). Courtesy of the Mauritshuis, The Hague.
Anna Ruysch, Woodland Scene with Flowers, (1685-1687). Courtesy of the Hoogsteder Museum Foundation, The Hague.
Jan Brueghel I, Flower Still Life (c.1605). Courtesy of Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.
Maria Sibylla Merian, Metamorphosis of the Oak Eggar on a Sprig of Gooseberry Blossom. Courtesy of the Mauritschuis, The Hague.
Maria van Oosterwijck, Flowers in an Ivory Cup (c. 1670-1675). Courtesy of the Mauritshuis, The Hague.
Hans Bollongier, Still Life with Flowers (1639). Courtesy of the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.
Willem van Aelst, Flower Still Life with a Timepiece, (1663). Mauritshuis, The Hague.
Installation view, “In Full Bloom” at the Mauritshuis, The Hague.
Installation view, “In Full Bloom” at the Mauritshuis, The Hague.
Installation view, “In Full Bloom” at the Mauritshuis, The Hague.
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