Eliana Willis

Strings first showed up in Barbara Hepworth’s practice in 1939—and remained threaded throughout her practice. To the British sculptor, they served her perceptual aims, allowing dramatic views of her carvings from every angle, while representing her connection to nature. Strings, she once noted, were “the tension I felt between myself and the sea, the wind, or the hills.”
Hepworth’s imaginative use of string is now getting the spotlight in a new show at London’s Piano Nobile gallery—the first exhibition to delve into this aspect of her oeuvre. “Barbara Hepworth: Strings” explores how the artist has woven the material into her famed sculptures, paintings, and drawings, including objects going on view in the U.K. for the very first time.
Installation view of “Barbara Hepworth: Strings” at Piano Nobile. Photo courtesy of Piano Nobile.
“Hepworth is known to us today for her adventurous use of metal and rock to break down the boundaries between space and mass, giving the same value to both,” said curator Michael Regan. “Equally, as this exhibition will show, she used strings to create in her sculptures the tension between light and darkness, presence and absence, solidity and weightlessness.”
The show arrives as Hepworth’s sculptures continue to command the art market. Her auction record is $11.5 million, according to the Artnet Price Database, achieved by her 1970 work The Family of Man: Ancestor II at Christie’s in 2023. The blockbuster sale of Paul Allen’s collection at the same auction house in 2022 saw Elegy III (1966) fetch $8.6 million, her second highest auction result; more recently, Sotheby’s sold Sea Form (Atlantic) (1964) for $5 million in June 2024.
Barbara Hepworth, Curved form (Wave II) (1944, cast 1959). Photo courtesy of Piano Nobile.
Born in 1903 in West Yorkshire, Hepworth moved just before World War II to St. Ives in Cornwall, where she found a studio that allowed her to “work in open air and space.” It’s here that she would commence her stringed works, inspired by the region’s natural landscapes. The exhibition features objects including Small Stone With Black Strings (1952), a dainty work that represents Hepworth’s only stringed stone sculpture, and Curved Form (Wave II) (1959), in which the strings enclose an organic form.
Barbara Hepworth, Small Stone With Black Strings (1952) on view at “Barbara Hepworth: Strings” at Piano Nobile. Photo courtesy of Piano Nobile.
Also included is an intriguing piece from Hepworth’s “Orpheus” series, based on the mythical bard and his trusty lyre. Theme on Electronics (Orpheus) (1956), in fact, was the first in the series, commissioned by electronics company Mullard for its London office. The sculpture went on view at the firm’s headquarters atop a motorized base—a display that, alas, failed to work to Hepworth’s satisfaction.
In letters recently unearthed by Piano Nobile, the sculptor wrote repeatedly to the company through the 1970s to lament the installation. In a 1966 missive, she noted that “the turntable never seems to work.” In yet another letter, she said, “during the last decade, I have often been very dismayed to find that either the work was not moving around, or, if it did, it jerked.”
Barbara Hepworth, Theme on Electronics (Orpheus) (1956). Photo courtesy of Piano Nobile.
After Mullard’s closure, then Hepworth’s death in 1975, ownership of Theme on Electronics was transferred to Philips, which had acquired Mullard. The work was deemed lost until the 2000s when it was snapped up by a private collector, who has loaned it out for its first exhibition.
Another sculpture making its U.K. debut is Pierced Hemisphere (Telstar) (1963). Drawing on the silhouette of the commercial satellite Telstar, it features strings emanating from one of Hepworth’s signature pierced forms.
Barbara Hepworth, Pierced hemisphere (Telstar) (1963). Photo courtesy of Piano Nobile.
Elsewhere in the show is a maquette for perhaps Hepworth’s best known stringed work, Winged Figure (1963). For decades, the 19-foot-tall sculpture has hung on the side of the John Lewis department store on London’s Oxford Street, its twin bladed wings webbed by intertwined stainless steel rods. The maquette on view, created with sheet metal and rods, was the model that John Lewis gave the nod to.
Barbara Hepworth’s Winged Figure on display the day after its installation on the side of the John Lewis department store in London, 1963. Photo: Roger Jackson / Central Press / Hulton Archive / Getty Images.
Strings and lines also found their way into Hepworth’s drawings, some of them sketches and studies for her eventual sculptures. The exhibition surfaces Oval Form With Strings (1960), an energetic swirl in which a network of lines appears to be consumed by an oval opening, as well as 1942 works Forms in Movement (Circle) and Lines in Movement, which offer vivid juxtapositions of lines, planes, and geometric shapes.
Barbara Hepworth, Forms in Movement (Circle) (1942). Photo courtesy of Piano Nobile.
“When I start drawing and painting abstract forms, I am really exploring new forms, hollows, and tensions which will lead me where I need to go,” Hepworth once reflected. Each element injects new dimensions into her work, she added: curves and planes offer “pure rhythm,” colors a “mood of place and time,” while strings “can twist one from the front to the back.”
“Out of all these components, I search for new associations of form and hollow and space,” she said, “and a new tautness and awareness for the growth of new sculptures.”
“Barbara Hepworth: Strings” is on view at Piano Nobile, 96 and 129 Portland Road, London, the U.K., through May 2. More

For the past five years, New York’s Hollis Taggart gallery has been championing the work of Michael (Corinne) West (1908–1991), a little-known Abstract Expressionist woman painter whose life’s work was fortuitously rescued from a city auction when her estate went unclaimed.
Now, the gallery is presenting its most ambitious showing of West’s work to date, taking a deep dive into the artist’s archives to present reproductions of her writings and other documentation related to paintings on view in “Chronicling an Artistic Practice: Michael West Paintings and Archives From the 1950s to 1970s.”
A photo of Michael Corrine West with her painting Vietnam Summer (1963) at her solo show at Granite Galleries in New York. Photo courtesy of Hollis Taggart, New York.
“We have photos, news clippings, notebooks, sketchbooks, a lot of stuff,” gallery director Kara Spellman told me at the show’s opening.
Spellman is currently overseeing the production of a catalogue raisonné of West’s work—something that could never have happened were it not for Stuart and Roberta Friedman, who fortuitously purchased a painting by West at a Westchester thrift shop in 1989. When they finally tracked down the artist to learn more about her, they discovered she had recently died, and the city of New York was about to sell her estate.
Michael (Corinne) West, Untitled (ca. 1960s). Photo courtesy of Hollis Taggart, New York.
The couple bought it all, some 110 paintings on canvas and 500 works on paper, in additions to the archives.
Since Hollis Taggart took over, all but about 40 of the paintings have been sold—but the gallery has been quietly buying up other West works, some of which are being sold for the first time in the current show, and considers its efforts to raise the artist’s profile as part of a longterm project.
Michael (Corinne) West, The Green Table (1966). Photo courtesy of Hollis Taggart, New York.
“I think it takes repetition to get an artist into limelight,” the dealer told me. “She’s a very important, undervalued, under appreciated artist—even now compared to other women artists of the same period who I see out there, like Lynne Drexler and Alice Baber who I don’t think are as important as she is, but have far greater market value.”
There are 14 oil on canvas works on view in the current show, priced starting at $45,000 for the 13-inch-tall Head, and up to $225,000 for the show’s only figurative painting, Flowers. (Most are between $100,000 and $165,000.) Works on paper range from $4,500 to $6,500. The artist’s auction high of $176,400, according to the Artnet Price Database, was set in 2022 at Sotheby’s New York, for roughly double the painting’s presale estimate. (Before 2019, her work had only hit five figures three times.)
Michael (Corinne) West, Flowers (1952). Photo courtesy of Hollis Taggart, New York.
West was one of Hans Hoffman’s first students at New York’s Art Students League in 1932. In the hopes of being taken seriously by the art world, she even adopted the male name Michael—she was born Corinne—at the suggestion of her close friend Arshile Gorky, who is said to have proposed to her, unsuccessfully, no less than six times. (West instead married war photographer and experimental filmmaker Francis Lee.)
Gorky’s love letters to West were—until Hollis Taggart became champions of her work—the main reason her name was known to art historians and scholars. Another was photographs of West by her friend Richard Pousette-Dart.
“Chronicling an Artistic Practice: Michael West Paintings and Archives From the 1950s to 1970s” at Hollis Taggart, New York. Photo courtesy of Hollis Taggart, New York.
But West was much more than a muse. Not only an artist in her own right, she was also a prolific writer and poet with strong opinions about art and creativity.
West’s “Notes on Art,” which she began keeping in the 1940s, identified the burgeoning Ab Ex movement as “The New Art” in 1948. She could also be quite cutting—one entry describes “third rate realism displayed in gold frames [that] looked like someone had just cleared the attic.”
Michael (Corinne) West’s archives include this note in which she writes critically of a realism exhibition. Photo courtesy of Hollis Taggart, New York.
“She had a lot of humor—a lot of comments about a lot of different styles of art,” Spellman said. “She was constantly seeing shows.”
The archives, which the gallery hopes sell to a U.S. museum also include West’s written records of her day-to-day life. There is her diary about going to see the doctor or needing to pay the rent—something that was often a struggle for West.
“She would write, ‘I got an eviction notice again. Do I pay rent or do I buy paint?’” Spellman said.
For while West was very much a part of the New York School, and was a working artist throughout her life, she never had a true breakthrough moment. Sadly, a solo show at a major New York gallery eluded West her entire career.
Michael (Corinne) West, Vietnam Summer (1963). Photo courtesy of Hollis Taggart, New York.
At times, West had seemed at the cusp of receiving greater recognition for her work. She was in a 1945 Pinacotheca Gallery exhibition that included artists such as Mark Rothko and Milton Avery. And in 1953, Flowers was part of the well-known Stable Gallery’s second annual exhibition alongside such luminaries as Willem de Kooning, Robert Motherwell, Franz Kline, and Joan Mitchell.
A career highlight was a studio visit from Jackson Pollock and Peggy Guggenheim, which West wrote of in her diary.
“Peggy told her that she paints life,” Spellman said.
Michael (Corinne) West’s recollections of the Abstract Expressionist movement in New York mention a studio visit from Peggy Guggenheim and Jackson Pollock. Photo courtesy of Hollis Taggart, New York.
But Guggenheim never exhibited West’s work. In 1957, the artist had an exhibition in the city at Uptown Gallery, followed by a 1958 outing at Domino Gallery in Georgetown, Washington, D.C. In the 1960s, she had two New York shows, at Granite Galleries and Imaginary Art, with her final exhibition in 1978 at the city’s Womanart Gallery. (Posthumously, West had a show at the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center in East Hampton in 1996 and New York’s Art Resource Group in 2010.) But other opportunities failed to materialize.
“She was asked to show in Paris, but with the expenses, she couldn’t pull it together,” Spellman added.
A flyer for Michael (Corinne) West’s final solo show during her lifetime, at New York’s Womanart Gallery in 1978. Photo courtesy of Hollis Taggart, New York .
Nevertheless, West estimated that she sold some 40 paintings, a slow but steady stream of sales that made it possible for her to continue working even as Pop art supplanted Abstract Expressionism as the leading art movement. Though her health declined following a series of strokes in her later years, West made work until the end, with her last drawing dated to 1991, the year of her death.
“She was just very dedicated,” Spellman said, “to making art.”
“Chronicling an Artistic Practice: Michael West Paintings and Archives From the 1950s to 1970s” is on view at Hollis Taggart, 521 West 26th Street, New York, New York, through February 22, 2025. More

Artist Christine Sun Kim used the word “homecoming” during the preview to her major new show at the Whitney Museum, titled “All Day All Night.” And it’s an apt one that takes on multiple meanings.
For starters, Kim—whose wide-ranging practice explores sound and the complexities of communicating in both her native American Sign Language (ASL) and written English—got her start at the Whitney as an educator in 2007. Kim, who was born Deaf, was instrumental in developing the museum’s programs and resources to support other Deaf audience members, notably the ASL vlogs that broadened access to the Whitney’s collection to a much wider audience around the world.
Installation view of “Christine Sun Kim: All Day All Night” at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 2025. Photo: David Tufino.
“Being an educator here at the Whitney had an effect on me as an artist,” said Kim, via an ASL interpreter. “Having access to the information that the museum has—meaning access to art history—was pivotal for me. I never had that kind of access in the past. Learning what I did here, I decided to go back to graduate school, which is how I got into sound and words. For me, this was a big push in becoming an artist.”
This marks the largest show to date for the artist, after she was included in the museum’s 2019 biennial and created the content for the outdoor billboard space in 2018. “All Day All Night” is as fascinating and thought-provoking as it is expansive. It occupies the lion’s share of the museum’s eighth-floor exhibition spaces, as well as galleries on the third floor and the first-floor lobby galleries to which admission is free.
Christine Sun Kim, Degrees of Deaf Rage in Everyday Situations (2018). Courtesy Y.D.C. © Christine Sun Kim. Courtesy François Ghebaly Gallery and WHITE SPACE
Fans of her work will recognize the razor-sharp commentary in the charcoal drawing Degrees of My Deaf Rage in the Art World (featured in the biennial) that takes aim at, for instance, “museums with zero deaf programming (and no deaf docents/educators)” with respective ratings of “full on rage” or “obtuse rage” depending on the specifics of the situation. Another large drawing, with the self-explanatory title, Shit Hearing People Say to Me, has an accompanying detailed pie chart. There are also sound experiments where vibrating surfaces on which items like paintbrushes or tacks are laid, then translated into visual marks and accompanying performance videos.
The artist uses “musical notation, infographics, and language to produce drawings, videos, sculptures and installations that often explore non-auditory political dimensions in sound,” said curator Jennie Goldstein. The works range in date from 2011 to 2024 and consider “these core concerns, as well as the importance of family, community, and the complex negotiations of shared social spaces.”
Christine Sun Kim, How Do You Hold Your Debt (2022) Collection of Jenny Osterhout and Santiago Martinez Govela. © Christine Sun Kim. Courtesy François Ghebaly Gallery and WHITE SPACE
The title “All Day All Night” refers to a motif in Kim’s work—the visualizing of ASL signs for the sun moving over the horizon and dipping below it—which has cropped up in her early drawings from 2012 as much as her recently executed canvases from 2023. The title “also points to the energy that Christine brings to her artistic practice,” Goldstein added. “She is relentlessly experimental, iterative, and dedicated to sharing her deaf-lived experience with audiences.”
L to R: Whitney curator Jennie Goldstein, artist Christine Sun Kim and Whitney director Scott Rothkopk at the opening of “Christine Sun Kim: All Day, All Night”
This is helped by Kim’s amazing ability to distill complex ideas in an accessible way, both in her work and in discussions about it. For instance, at the preview, she offered an rare view into her experience of the echo. “Yes, it’s a sound but it’s also a deaf experience that we go through,” she said. “My interpreter right now is echoing back what I’m saying… She’ll also echo what you’ll say into sign language… so my deaf experience is very echo-y.”
The artist said that despite studying graphic design for just one year, it has gotten into her mindset, and how she views the world. Perhaps not surprisingly, she nods to word-centric contemporary art star Ed Ruscha in one of the catalogue essays. The room erupted in laughter when Kim said she views the word “echo” itself as “a beautiful word,” and then added with a shrug: “It’s four letters, it’s very balanced. The E, the C, the H, the O are so cute.”
Installation view of “Christine Sun Kim: All Day All Night” at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 2025. Photo: Audrey Wang.
On the Whitney’s third floor, visitors will experience this exploration of echo as it is laid out visually in drawings and murals across the walls. “The arcing black forms visualize the shape of the sign for echo,” said Goldstein, “where four fingers of one hand contact the palm of the other and then move away in a motion resembling an illustration an echoing sound wave.”
The first floor gallery presents drawings, videos, and a large kinetic installation featuring large inflated red balloons shaped like arms that reach out to touch a stone-like object. The works “explore the interconnectedness of ASL and deaf culture,” said Goldstein. She noted that some drawings consider the role that sign language interpreters play in making the artist sound different ways, while other works compare specific written English words and phrases with their counterparts in Deaf English or short hand translations in ASL.
Installation view of “Christine Sun Kim: All Day All Night” at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 2025. Photo: Audrey Wang.
Kim pointed out that although this is her largest project to date, it’s “not a long-term survey. This is just a few years that we’re looking at here. I’m still getting going.”
She also noted that she left New York 12 years ago for Berlin and has now been there longer than she lived in New York. “So coming home does feel like an actual homecoming.”
Museum director Scott Rothkopf also noted in his remarks introducing the show, that Kim is the first artist-in-residence at Roy Lichtenstein’s former home and studio on nearby Washington Street, which was donated to the museum’s Independent Study Program two years ago, as a permanent home.
“The chapter that I got to have as an educator is now a full circle because I got here as an artist,” said Kim. “I am very touched and very happy to be here.”
“Christine Sun Kim: All Day All Night” is on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art, 99 Gansevoort St, New York, February 8–July 6. More

This week, the Victoria Beckham boutique on Dover Street in London is getting an arty makeover. Across the three-level Georgian building, the designer and collector has installed a selection of contemporary artworks, which appear right at home in the chic, well-appointed space. It is, she said, “a wonderful place to celebrate other people’s work.”
“If you can come into the store, and shop while looking at George Condo,” she told the Financial Times, “it absolutely doesn’t get any better than that.”
Installation view of Richard Prince, Untitled (2020) and George Condo, Artist and Muse (2015) at Victoria Beckham Dover Street in London. Photo courtesy of Sotheby’s.
The transformation of the flagship store comes by way of Beckham’s partnership with Sotheby’s. With help from the auction house’s specialist, the former Spice Girl has picked 11 artworks for display—pieces by Francis Bacon, Keith Haring, Yoshitomo Nara, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Joan Mitchell, Gerhard Richter, Yves Klein, and of course, Condo. The works are on view from February 6–10, before they head to the block at Sotheby’s forthcoming Contemporary auctions in London and New York.
This latest project follows Beckham’s 2018 project with Sotheby’s, when a selection of works by Old Masters—Fede Galizia and Elisabeth-Louise Vigée Le Brun among them—was similarly exhibited at her Dover Street boutique.
Installation view of Jean-Michel Basquiat, Red Joy (1984) at Victoria Beckham Dover Street in London. Photo courtesy of Sotheby’s.
“It has been such a joy to collaborate with Victoria, who has an incredible eye and a deep connection with storytelling through art and design,” said Haleigh Stoddard, Sotheby’s head of contemporary curated, in a statement. “As an established collector of contemporary art, Victoria is somebody who has never been afraid to try new things or to change and evolve or reinvent over time—an ethos which chimes so wonderfully with that of many of the artists presented in this exhibition.”
While Beckham admits to being no “great expert” in visual art, she boasts a deep love for the medium—and has the collection to prove it. She was introduced to collecting when she, along with her husband, football star David, visited Elton John at his home in Nice, France. There, she encountered a Julian Schnabel work, one that she remembered as “my first experience with art and really seeing it up close.”
Installation view of Keith Haring, Untitled (1983) at Victoria Beckham Dover Street in London. Photo courtesy of Sotheby’s.
From there, Victoria and David commenced building an art collection. They began with a piece from Schnabel’s “Sonanbul” series (the colors of which inspired the palette of Beckham’s Fall 2024 collection), before including works by Nan Goldin, Damien Hirst, Yayoi Kusama, Tracey Emin, and Nara.
“For David and I, collecting is about more than just investing or acquiring beautiful objects,” she said in a statement. “It’s about finding pieces that bring us real joy. The more I delve into art history and progress on my journey as a collector, the more captivated I am by it.”
Yoshitomo Nara, Cosmic Eyes (in the Milky Lane) (2005). Photo courtesy of Sotheby’s.
Nara, in particular, has resounded with the designer. The work by the Japanese artist currently on view at her store is the six-feet tall Cosmic Eyes (in the Milky lake) (2005), featuring one of Nara’s creepy-charming characters fixing the viewer with an unflinching gaze. To Beckham, “there’s a childlike innocence mixed with a real edge and an eeriness.”
“This is one of the things I Iove so much about Nara,” she added. “His images seem straightforward, but as you start to move closer, you realize they have so much more to say. Despite the sophistication of the muted color palette, he never loses that sense of playfulness which is something I always try to weave into my collections.”
Joan Mitchell, Pastel (1991). Photo courtesy of Sotheby’s.
Elsewhere in the temporary display are vibrant pieces from Basquiat’s 1984 jazzy, dynamic Red Joy to Mitchell’s Pastel, a dynamic abstract landscape from 1991 to two untitled Harings that speak to Beckham’s love for American Pop art. Richard Prince’s Untitled (2020), a large, energetic canvas, from his “High Times” series, takes pride of place.
Yves Klein, Bleu monochrome (IKB 296). Photo courtesyo f Sotheby’s.
Also included is a Richter that Beckham admires for its “luminosity” and one of Klein’s iconic Bleu monochromes, which she dubs “an instantly recognizable visual signature.”
Condo is represented by his abstract double portrait Artist and Muse (2015), believed to depict Picasso and his muse Sylvette. The painting’s contrasting tones and heavy brushwork, said Beckham, offer “beautiful and layered interpretation” of the connection between Picasso and his muse—and in turn, that of Condo and one of his key influences, Picasso.
George Condo, Artist and Muse (2015). Photo courtesy of Sotheby’s.
“Art has always been a source of inspiration and over the years, I’ve so enjoyed learning and educating myself,” Beckham said. “It has the power to spark ideas, evoke emotion—and in the case of contemporary art in particular—it speaks to the world around us.” More

The painter Sophie von Hellermann is known for loosely rendered, fantastical scenes inspired by fables and mythologies. In a new series of images, currently on view at Pilar Corrias in London, her painterly apparitions feel like fragments of a dream, bathed in pale moonlight and beamed from outer space.
The show, “Moonage,” which runs through March 22, borrows its title from David Bowie’s song “Moonage Daydream,” which in 1971 heralded the debut of the character Ziggy Stardust, dreamed up to bring hope to Earth in the form of an androgynous, alien rock star, with a bright red mullet and glamorous lightning bolt bodysuits. He came to personify the ceaselessly inventive nature of Bowie’s vision, and his embrace of the otherworldly. Von Hellermann pays tribute in one of the show’s standout works, Ziggy Stardust (2025).
Installation view of “Sophie von Hellermann: Moonage” at Pilar Corrias in London until March 22, 2025. Photography: Ben Westoby, courtesy the artist and Pilar Corrias, London.
The new show at Pilar Corrias features not only the canvases for which von Hellermann is best known but also painted objects, textiles, and pieces of design. It is as though the German artist’s brush has run free, sweeping over neighboring curtains and lampshades until they too are covered in generous swathes of zestful color. A similar effect was achieved for the gallery’s standout solo booth of von Hellerman’s works at Frieze London in 2023, when blue, orange, and purple pigment spilled out onto the carpet, unleashing the paintings’ playful whimsy.
The lampshades, an unusual addition to the gallery space, add to the exhibition’s mystical, midnight hour feel, where our perception of the real fades into a reverie. The gallery describes how the device is intended to make the paintings “glint and flicker, like a large-scale magic lantern that scatters dreams across the gallery.”
Sophie von Hellermann, Moonage (2023). Image courtesy the artist and Pilar Corrias, London.
Von Hellermann, who prefers not to over-explain her work, said only of the unique gallery space that “my hope was to create a dramatic installation that underlines the urgency in the paintings.”
The rest is left open to interpretation, as von Hellerman’s fluid application of pigment to build up painterly vignettes with just a light touch are an invitation to our imagination, or even our subconscious. Who is the mysterious couple in Moonage (2023), who seem to float on water while gazing up entranced at the full moon?
Sophie von Hellermann, Ziggy Stardust (2025). Image courtesy the artist and Pilar Corrias, London.
What would it feel like to journey into another universe? Paradoxically, Press Your Space Face Close to Mine (2025) evokes both a bold voyage into the unknown and the safe comfort of an intimate embrace. In dreams, perhaps both are possible, as the rocket’s vibrating outline fades into the starry sky.
“The paintings are tinted with emotion,” von Hellermann hinted in an interview last summer. “It helps communicate emotions to make something more vivid or warmer.”
Sophie von Hellermann, One Night at the Carlyle (2024). Image courtesy the artist and Pilar Corrias, London.
In compositions that discard the strictures of traditional genre, faces melt into flower bouquets. This hallucinatory effect is achieved by von Hellermann’s preference for what she describes as “fast painting. I need to have an image quickly.” In doing so, she allows the strange and unexpected to emerge unimpeded from her paintbrush. But, how does she know when a composition is done?
“Successful paintings are those where it all comes together,” said von Hellermann. “The moment, the materials, the light, and the idea. I bring everything into play and then it works and is communicated on the canvas.”
“Sophie von Hellermann: Moonage”  is on view at Pilar Corrias, 51 Conduit Street, London, through March 22, 2025.  More

Dozens of drawings Michelangelo made while planning the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel will go on view at the Muscarelle Museum of Art after a monumental feat in networking and logistics by the Williamsburg, Virginia museum ahead of the Renaissance master’s 550th anniversary.
Curator Adriano Marinazzo, an architect and Michelangelo expert, has organized a show that offers an extremely rare chance to see 25 drawings that were used to plan for the celebrated ceiling and another fresco in the Sistine Chapel known as The Last Judgment.
Of those drawings, seven have never traveled to the United States. Most have never been shown together. In total, some 38 objects are going on view, including a famous portrait of Michelangelo in the time between his work painting the ceiling and The Last Judgment by his contemporary Giuliano Bugiardini.
“What he likely did, and this is a typical fresco sort of process, is make large drawings, putting them up on the ceiling and likely poking holes at various inflection points in the drawing,” museum director David Brashear said in a video call.
Adriano Marinazzo is pictured in 2012 at Casa Buonarroti studying Michelangelo’s original drawings. Courtesy of the Muscarelle Museum of Art.
All of those “cartoons” were probably destroyed at the time they were used. In advance of those cartoons, he likely did hundreds, maybe thousands, of miniature drawing studies to work out compositional elements.
“He destroyed almost all of them before dying because he was feeling sick. He knew he was dying. He never created them for public display,” Marinazzo said. “Now less than 50 survive and we have almost half of those, and four in preparation for The Last Judgment.”
Brashear said the survivors, mostly preserved by Michelangelo’s nephew, are locked in dark boxes and only sanctioned by Italian authorities to leave for 12 weeks every few years. So Marinazzo painstakingly coordinated with Italian institutions and authorities to ensure the drawings would be available and not promised to another museum.
Michelangelo Buonarroti, Study for the Prophet Zechariah (1508). Courtesy of Gallerie degli Uffizi, Gabinetto dei Disegni e delle Stampe, via the Muscarelle Museum of Art.
One drawing Marinazzo sought could not be loaned for this show, Brashear noted, because it had already been promised to the British Museum. Nevertheless, he commended Marinazzo’s effective coordination in securing notable examples for the College of William & Mary museum.
Earlier in his career, the Italian curator worked with the Casa Buonarroti, a museum dedicated to Michelangelo in the home he bought for his family when he found success. Marinazzo became close friends with Casa Buonarroti’s late director, Pina Ragionieri.
“You have to make sure that you can reassure the lenders that all of the best museum practices will be in place as you have them in your custody,” Brashear said. “Then, of course, they travel with couriers and are guarded all the way. It’s a complicated process. It’s very different from collecting and hosting an exhibition on, say, Cézanne paintings.”
Michelangelo Buonarroti, Study for the Cumaean Sibyl (1510). Courtesy of Biblioteca Reale via the Muscarelle Museum of Art.
Brashear added that the exhibition will include massive recreations of scenes from the Sistine Chapel ceiling, a showcase that came about because of the Muscarelle’s partnership with the Vatican Museums. “We’re not getting any drawings from them,” he said, “but we are getting their highest level of detail image files that we’re allowed to use in the exhibition.”
“That’s where it’s really going to become powerful for viewers,” Brashear added. “Like, ‘this is the head of one of the figures in the Sistine Chapel ceiling frescoes’ and ‘this is what it looks like in the final form, as Michelangelo put it up on the ceiling.’”
The idea for this exhibition was born in 2012, while he worked in Casa Buonarotti’s dusty archives, Marinazzo said. As he read Michelangelo’s letters, he spotted a sonnet with a sketch underneath that the artist likely sent to his friend Giovanni da Pistoia.
Michelangelo Buonarroti, Self-portrait in the act of painting the Sistine ceiling with autograph sonnet (c. 1509–10). Courtesy of Casa Buonarroti via the Muscarelle Museum of Art.
“Nobody knew what it was. After a while, I understood, since I’m an architect, that this little sketch was the representation of a ceiling,” he said. “Eventually, I thought to put together ‘Michelangelo’ and a ‘ceiling’ and realized it might be a sketch for the Sistine Chapel.”
Experts consider it to be perhaps the first drawing Michelangelo made for the project. Another very famous sonnet in the exhibition, also likely sent to Giovanni da Pistoia, contains a self-portrait of Michelangelo painting the ceiling. The show marks the first time these two sonnets with sketches about the Sistine ceiling are together.
The exhibition features two drawings of apostles that “were almost forgotten by scholars” but are significant because they were ultimately not used in the ceiling. When Pope Julius II commissioned Michelangelo to design the ceiling, he asked him to paint the 12 apostles over the ceiling’s pendentives. Michelangelo started the sketches but ultimately told the pope he didn’t just want to paint the apostles, and they were scrapped.
Michelangelo Buonarroti, Study for a male face for the Flood (c. 1508–1509). Courtesy of Casa Buonarroti via the Muscarelle Museum of Art.
Marinazzo also described how the show’s organization directly led to a new discovery about the drawings. Scholars had previously thought that two little sketches on two different pieces of paper were probably part of the same sheet of paper.
“But we didn’t have any proof,” he said. Before such valuable drawings are shipped, their condition is checked by restorers. Restorers put them together and found the line where they were connected. “So, we are publishing this, too. The drawings will be framed together and presented for the first time in the exhibition together.”
The show is laid out through several galleries, Marinazzo said. The first three are dedicated to the ceiling, with the fourth dedicated to The Last Judgment, and the exhibition is capped with works by Marinazzo that contextualize Michelangelo’s work for the public.
Michelangelo Buonarroti. Study for the Prophet Jonah (1512). Photo courtesy of Casa Buonarroti via the Muscarelle Museum of Art
One of the topics is the relationship between the artist’s sculptural work on the tomb of Julius II and the painting of the Sistine ceiling. For this exhibition, Marinazzo prepared 3D renderings of what he believes the tomb would have looked like if completed.
He argued that the Sistine Chapel ceiling is inherently tied to the commission of the tomb, including its artistic design. In 1505, Michelangelo traveled to Rome. Pope Julius II requested that Michelangelo build a large tomb that would feature 40 statues. Although the original drawings are lost, the initial design is described.
Michelangelo went to Carrara to collect marble for the project and returned to Rome to request additional funds. However, Pope Julius II shifted his focus to constructing the new Saint Peter’s Church and was no longer interested in completing the tomb.
A comparison between Michelangelo’s sketch of the architectural outline of the Sistine Chapel ceiling and the actual ceiling view, digitally elaborated by Adriano Marinazzo. Courtesy of the Muscarelle Museum of Art.
Michelangelo felt slighted and returned to Florence. The pope sent emissaries to persuade him to return to Rome, emphasizing that his skills were needed. Initially, Michelangelo refused but eventually complied after further pressure from Florence’s ruler, who did not want conflict with Rome.
Ultimately, Michelangelo met Julius in Bologna, where they agreed he would resume work on the tomb and take on a new commission for the Sistine ceiling. The tomb as it was initially designed was not completed, but this established a connection between them.
“If you read the description of the tomb by Vasari, a biographer and contemporary of Michelangelo, it recalls the painted architecture in the ceiling,” he said. “So, I recreated the 3D structure over the architecture, and I use these architectural elements, combined with the description by Vasari, to make a reconstruction of the tomb that was never built.”
The show also includes an installation titled This Is Not My Art, made by the curator, that contextualizes the show.
Adriano Marinazzo, This is Not My Art. Courtesy of Muscarelle Museum of Art.
A memo Michelangelo wrote in 1508, when he moved from Florence to Rome to start to work on the ceiling, also appears. And the museum got ahold of a famous letter from Michelangelo’s friend, Francesco Granacci, that has never been on view. In the letter, Granacci whines about complications in recruiting assistants to paint the ceiling.
Brashear noted that, because of the significance of the exhibition, the museum coordinated with local authorities to plan for a major influx of visitors. Luckily, the city is already prepared for tourists because of the Colonial Williamsburg historical complex.
“When we previously did Italian master exhibitions, we shared them with MFA Boston, a museum much larger than us. We put the shows together and then they bought in and invested and took it for half of those 12 weeks,” Brashear said. “With the reopening of our museum, we wanted to be the sole venue and have it for the full 12 weeks.”
“Michelangelo: The Genesis of the Sistine” will be on view at the Muscarelle Museum of Art, 603 Jamestown Road, Williamsburg, Virginia, March 6–May 28. More