Eliana Willis

Over her brief but dazzling life, Frida Kahlo was photographed by some of the greatest talents of her generation, from her lover Nickolas Muray to Edward Weston to her dear friend the Swiss artist Lucienne Bloch.  
Nickolas Muray, Frida Kahlo with Magenta Rebozo “Classic” (1939). Courtesy of Throckmorton Fine Art.
In the decades since her death in 1954 at the age of 47, Kahlo’s image has seemingly become an extension of her painting practice in a way unlike really any other artist. Her iconic brow and black coils of braided hair burned into popular consciousness, along with her self-adornment in indigenous dress and Aztec jewels. 
A new exhibition “Frida Kahlo: Forever Yours” at New York’s Throckmorton Fine Art makes the case that these photographic portraits of Kahlo are, in fact, a unique expression of the Mexican artist’s creative persona. 
The dazzling exhibition (through September 7) presents 50 high-quality photographs of Kahlo dating from 1929 to 1951, including iconic portraits, tender moments with her husband, the artist Diego Rivera, and playful, as well as irreverent moments with friends (Kahlo with a lampshade on her head? You bet.) The images represent just a small fraction of “Frida photographs” from the collection of dealer Spencer Throckmorton who started collecting photographs of the artist in 1977. 
Guillermo Kahlo, Portrait of Frida Kahlo, Oct 16, 1932. Courtesy of Throckmorton Fine Art.
“I have photographs of Frida since she was four years old,” he said in a phone interview earlier this month (you can see a video of the dealer discussing the show here). For Throckmorton, the show charts both the artist’s maturation over the decades but also her finesse and dexterity in engaging with the medium of photography. “Through these photographs see her become a totally self-assured and mature painter, believing in herself as she grows,” he said, “We see that the photographs are beautiful and beautifully posed—Frida had worked for her father who was a photographer when she was very young and he taught her how to pose for the camera.”  
A portrait of Kahlo by her father, Guillermo Kahlo, appears in the show—a piercing image that shows the young artist staring out from the camera with penetrating intensity. The portrait was taken when Kahlo returned to Mexico by train from New York following her mother’s death in 1932.  
The poignancy of these photographs is often rooted in Kahlo’s intimate connections to the photographers themselves. Several brilliantly colorful photographs of Kahlo taken by her lover Nickolas Muray appear in the exhibition, including the iconic image Frida Kahlo with Magenta Rebozo “Classic”. In several of these portraits, Kahlo adopts classical stances seemingly plucked out of Rennaissance paintings—an artful positioning Throckmorton says reflects their relationship.
Lucienne Bloch, Frida, and Diego, with Colleagues, Viewing a Solar Eclipse on the DIA roof (1932). Courtesy of Throckmorton Fine Art.
“Nickolas Muray came along and taught her classical poses. She was a natural because she was studying art history. A lot of the poses he took of Frida were based on Renaissance and 17th- and 18th-century paintings,” Throckmorton explained.  
Other photographs by the artist Lucienne Bloch are delightfully informal. “Lucienne was a friend of hers so Frida lets her hair down. One photographer shows Frida with a doily on her head—another one with a bottle of wine. There’s the one of her with a lampshade on her head!”
Nickolas Muray, Frida with Olmeca Figurine, Coyoacán (20/30) (1939). Courtesy of Throckmorton Fine Art.
Other images highlight Kahlo’s considered and passionate engagement with fashion and the ways dress and jewelry became her embodied mode of celebrating indigenous culture and Aztec heritage. “In 1929, Frida started to wear Mexican indigenous clothing from the Indians of the coast of Mexico and Tijuana with long skirts. She loved jewelry and a lot of her jewelry was made by William Spratling, an American. It was a very specific way of presenting herself,” he explained.  
Edward Weston, Frida Kahlo Side Pose / Abstract drawing by Frida on verso (1931). Courtesy of Throckmorton Fine Art.
In other ways, the photographs influenced Kahlo’s painting practice directly. One portrait in the show by Leon DeVos shows Kahlo with a downward gaze—it is an image Kahlo would later base a self-portrait. “She used the photograph as a model to paint her Self-Portrait with Jade Necklace, 1933. It’s almost identical to the pose of the photograph,” said Throckmorton, “I talked to Solomon Greenberg [the leading expert on Kahlo] and he says a lot of the photographs relate to her paintings.”  
Other highlights in the show include three photographs from 1931 taken in San Francisco by Edward Weston each of which Kahlo doodled on the back of. Another gem: a print of Kahlo and Rivera on the roof of the Detroit Institute of Art, watching the solar eclipse with a crowd—it’s the only vintage print none to exist.  
For painting devotees, the exhibition also includes the Kahlo painting La Risa, which features a Mexican folk mask used in indigenous dances in festivals, as well as two drawings, which Frida made after she came back from Paris in 1939, made in purple crayon.
The exhibition, Throckmorton says is a chance to glimpse, “just how fabulous and intelligent Frida really was.”

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In an unprecedented collaboration, the Stedelijk Museum and Van Gogh Museum are teaming up to host a sprawling exhibition on Anselm Kiefer. Opening in 2025, the show will be presented as a diptych across both Amsterdam institutions, with each part tracing key aspects of the German artist’s oeuvre and creative influences through his past and new works. 
The show, “Anselm Kiefer: Sag mir wo die Blumen sind,” is headlined by a new spatial work that the artist is unveiling at the Stedelijk. Still being completed by Kiefer, the 24-meter-long installation is set to occupy the space around the venue’s historic staircase. Its title, also the exhibition’s, is borrowed from Pete Seeger’s seminal 1955 folk song “Where Have All the Flowers Gone,” later made famous by Marlene Dietrich, and points to the flowers—specifically, Van Gogh’s Sunflowers—that inspired the artist’s most recent landscapes. 
At the Stedelijk exhibition, Sag mir wo die Blumen sind, as well as another new installation, will join Kiefer’s earlier works that are emerging from the museum’s collection. The Stedelijk boasts a long relationship with the artist, marked by its hosting of his 1986 solo show and acquisition of his paintings including Innenraum (1981) and Märkischer Sand (1982). This latest exhibition will display all the Kiefer pieces the museum holds, offering a rare survey of the artist’s decades-spanning career.
Anselm Kiefer, Innenraum (1981). Photo courtesy of Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam.
“It will be truly remarkable to see these [new] installations shortly amid several of his iconic works from the 1980s,” Rein Wolfs, the Stedelijk’s director, said in a statement. “In this way, Kiefer looks back at the past and towards the future.’ 
Born in Donaueschingen in 1945, Kiefer is best known for his unflinching works that confront the myth-making, grief, and silence of a postwar Germany. “Ruins, for me, are the beginning,” he once said. His materials have ranged from lead and concrete to shellac and impasto; his tools acid baths and blowtorches. Somber and totemic, his paintings and sculptures are held in museum collections around the world and have earned him a prime spot in Europe’s Contemporary canon.
Vincent van Gogh, Wheatfield with Crows (1890). Van Gogh Museum collection (Vincent van Gogh Foundation). Photo courtesy of the Van Gogh Museum.
Throughout Kiefer’s long career, poet Paul Celan and German Romanticism have been guiding lights, as has Vincent Van Gogh. In his early years, the artist traced the Dutch painter’s journey from the Netherlands to Arles, France, where the 17-year-old Kiefer spent three weeks on a farm creating a body of drawings. Speaking to an audience at the Tate Britain in 2019, he explained he was not drawn to the emotional content of Van Gogh’s work, but rather his “workmanlike clarity.” 
“What impressed me even then was the rational structure, the confident construction of his pictures—in a life that was increasingly slipping out of his control,” he said.
Anselm Kiefer, The Starry Night (2019) © Anselm Kiefer. Photo: Georges Poncet.
The exhibition at the Van Gogh Museum unpacks the Impressionist’s deep influence on Kiefer. It will bring the Dutchman’s key masterpieces together with the German artist’s new paintings, with the most notable pairings highlighting how sunflowers have served as motifs in both Van Gogh’s and Kiefer’s bodies of work—as in the former’s La Berceuse (1889) and the latter’s Tournesols (1996).
“Anselm Kiefer has been engaged with Van Gogh’s work from his early years. His recent work—displayed here for the first time—shows how Van Gogh continues to make his mark on Kiefer’s work today,” said Emilie Gordenker, director of the Van Gogh Museum. 
The Stedelijk showcase is overseen by curator Leontine Coelewij and the Van Gogh Museum exhibition by curator Edwin Becker. Visitors need only purchase one ticket to access both shows at the museums. 
“Anselm Kiefer: Sag mir wo die Blumen sind” will be on view at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Museumplein 10, Amsterdam, Netherlands, and the Van Gogh Museum, Museumplein 6, Amsterdam, Netherlands, March 7–June 9, 2025. 
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Duke Riley has long been captivated by the sea. When I reached the Brooklyn-based artist over the phone, he was sailing off Rhode Island on his boat, on which he lives for months out of the year. He attempted to boil his feelings for seafaring and maritime history down into a neat one-liner—and failed. “It’s the kind of thing that I could write a thesis on,” he told me. 
Not long ago, while reading up on Theodore Roosevelt’s Great White Fleet, a group of 16 battleships the U.S. president sent on a 1907–09 world tour to showcase the nation’s military might, he stumbled on a curious fact. In the early 1900s, the USS Vermont was once home to a goat named Skellig Mór, which lived on the battleship as a sort of mascot. Just as intriguing was the creature’s back story and its fate, now long forgotten.
The legend of Skellig Mór has since sent Riley on a quest to locate the animal’s remains. Over the past month, he has plastered missing posters on the street, placed an ad in the Boston Globe, and set up a hotline to receive tips about its whereabouts. He told me the search has not yet yielded any good leads, but he’s been in touch with folks from Boston College who are volunteering their help. 
Duke Riley’s missing poster for Skellig Mór in the Boston Globe. Photo: @dukerileystudio on Instagram.
And what might Riley want with the remains of Skellig Mór? The point is to return the goat to its home in Ireland, but more deeply, the hunt itself—which headlines his new solo show, “The Repatriation of King Skellig Mór,” at Praise Shadows Art Gallery in Brookline, Massachusetts—enacts a form of remembrance.
“Just the very fact that this goat had significance in one place and now, nobody even seems to know where it is,” he said, “is a pretty good argument for why certain things should be repatriated.”
Skellig Mór made its first public appearance at the 1905 Puck Fair, an annual street festival, in Killorglin in County Kerry, where it was exhibited and crowned king. The following year, the Knights of St. Brendan society, deciding Boston should have its own Puck Fair, bought and imported the goat to the U.S. for such a purpose. But an internal fight split the organization, and, in a highly publicized dispute, its various factions spent years quarreling over the rightful ownership of Skellig Mór.
Ultimately, it took the courts to decide that the goat should be donated to the U.S. Navy. Skellig Mór was brought aboard the Vermont, where it briefly served as a sort of mascot until it died in 1909. Its body was then reportedly stuffed and displayed in the Boston Museum of Natural History, now known as the Museum of Science. The institution, however, no longer holds those remains. 
Duke Riley, No. 418 of the Poly S. Tyrene Memorial Maritime Museum (2024), on view at Praise Shadows Art Gallery. Photo: Dan Watkins.
At the heart of Riley’s latest exhibition is a scrimshaw, titled No. 418 of the Poly S. Tyrene Memorial Maritime Museum (2024), commemorating Skellig Mór. But unlike traditional scrimshaw, which sailors etched into bone or ivory, the artist’s work is drawn on a detergent bottle he recovered from the waters of the U.S. eastern seaboard. The container has been treated to mimic the grain of whale bone, while its face depicts a naval officer weeping by the goat’s tombstone. 
The work is Riley’s way of not just memorializing the goat, but recognizing its service to the U.S. Navy. “It didn’t willingly enlist,” he noted. “But then again, most humans don’t willingly enlist in the military either. So, there’s some questions about how we separate ourselves from the natural world.”
A group of Duke Riley’s scrimshaw cassettes. Photo: Robert Bredvad.
For some two decades now, Riley’s practice has sought to unpack how individual and institutional forces have left indelible marks on our natural landscapes and waterfronts. Notably, he’s done so in his celebrated scrimshaw and mosaics crafted out of scavenged materials, recently showcased at his 2022 solo exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum. 
“These objects were designed to be appealing to us so that we’ll keep buying them,” he explained of his salvaged hoard. “There’s no reason why you can’t make beautiful objects out of something that was already designed to be beautiful.” 
Duke Riley, Five Boston Battleships and Their Accompanying Mascots (2024) (detail). Photo: Robert Bredvad.
At Praise Shadows, Riley is also showing a clutch of “ruby glass” bottles, which reimagine the Victorian souvenir in single-use plastic, as well as more scrimshaw, lovingly hand-drawn as befits a tattoo artist, made of canisters and cassette tapes. His brand of humor and mischief is on display, too: on one scrimshaw tape is rendered a bemused-looking fish with the caption “All That You Have Is Your Sole.” 
The exhibition is dominated by his latest sailor’s valentine (a shellcraft memento sailors used to gift their sweethearts), an eight-by-eight-foot assemblage made of shells and plastic detritus including disposable lighters, tampon applicators, and syringes. Riley is betting it’s the world’s largest sailor’s valentine: “I don’t think anybody is stupid enough to do something that big.” 
Installation view of “The Repatriation of King Skellig Mór” at Praise Shadows Art Gallery. Photo: Dan Watkins.
Besides Skellig Mór, another animal is getting its due at Riley’s show. One scrimshaw bottle, No. 424 of the Poly S. Tyrene Memorial Maritime Museum (2024), is dedicated to Hoover, a harbor seal housed at Boston’s New England Aquarium in the 1980s. Hoover was beloved for its apparent ability to mimic human speech—and in a Boston accent, no less. But like Skellig Mór, Hoover’s story has been lost to history, save for Riley’s posthumous tribute. 
“We have a very short concept of time in our own self-obsessiveness,” he said. “It’s a reflection of our culture that something that was once deemed important has been completely forgotten.” 
With that, Riley informed me he had urgent boat business to tend to, namely fishing out some shaving equipment he had accidentally dropped down a toilet. “I have some exciting nautical stuff ahead of me,” he joked. I let him return to the sea. 
“The Repatriation of King Skellig Mór” is on view at Praise Shadows Art Gallery, 313A Harvard Street, Brookline, Massachusetts, through June 30.
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Artists’ books offer a solitary, intimate experience of a creator’s work, one that unfolds across the time it takes the reader to turn the pages, and one that typically comes a lot cheaper than works that hang on the wall. So said two longtime New York dealers, John Post Lee of BravinLee Programs and Adam Boxer of Ubu Gallery, in a video chat on Wednesday that also provided a preview of a show of dozens of these precious objects, now on view at BravinLee.
The books range as far back as 1931, with European practitioners like Hans Bellmer, Unica Zürn, and the duo of Paul Éluard and Man Ray, along with contemporary artists, some who focus on the medium, like New York’s Scott Teplin, and some less known for their engagement with it, like Alexis Rockman (whose first publication, in 1991, was printed by John Post Lee Gallery).
The name of the show, “Artists’ Book Month II The World is a Scandal,” is based on an oft-quoted line from Bellmer: “If the origin of my work is scandalous, it is because, for me, the world is a scandal.”
Hans Ballmer, La Poupée (1934). Courtesy Ubu Gallery.
The German artist contributes two of the highlights of the show. He started forming mannequin parts into unsettling sculptures, which he called “an artificial girl with multiple anatomical possibilities,” in Berlin in 1933. His book The Doll (printed in German as Die Puppe in 1934, and in French as La Poupée in 1936) contains photos of his dolls in various stages of assembly. The show includes a German printing from an extremely small, unknown edition size, priced at $250,000, as well as a French example from an edition of 100 for $100,000.
It was Bellmer who brought the two dealers together, in fact, when, 15 or so years ago, Lee had a copy of the Bellmer book he was trying to sell, and asked for help from Boxer, who invited him over and generously shared his knowledge of the artist and the book market. The show combines historical material from Ubu, which shows 20th-century avant-garde art with an emphasis on Dada, Surrealism, and Constructivism, with BravinLee’s contemporary program. 
George Cochrane, Inferno: Geryon Edition (2018–20). Courtesy BravinLee Programs.
While the historical and aesthetic merits of these works are easy to see, Boxer said, even when museums are eager to add examples to their collections, they run up against a problem. They may not be able to get support to acquire the works because of one simple question: How will we display it? While vitrines can provide a good showcase, they deprive the viewer of the experience of the book as it’s meant to be. 
The most ambitious project from BravinLee’s side of the aisle is George Cochrane’s lushly hand-colored copy of Dante’s Inferno, published by Thornwillow Press to mark the 700th anniversary of the poet’s death. It’s illuminated using pigments dating from the author’s day and sourced from Italy, and, for the right buyer, could go for $50,000.
Martin Wilner, Journal of Evidence Weekly Vol. 172 (2016). Courtesy BravinLee Programs.
Martin Wilner’s Journal of Evidence Weekly Vol. 172 (2016), meantime, is priced at $20,000. The artist, who has been showing since 1997, appears in museum collections from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art to New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art.
But many of the contemporary artists come at much more modest prices, and offer aesthetic delights aplenty. 
Iranian-American artist Anahita Bagheri contribtues a gorgeous acrylic and crayon on papier-mâché book which also made an appearance in a 2020 video installation, and lists at $2,500.
Andrea Burgay, Science Fiction Stories (2024). Courtesy BravinLee Programs.
Andrea Burgay’s altered found books, such as Science Fiction Stories (2024), exploit the graphic covers and the pathos of the objects’ past lives. They are tagged at just $800. 
For those on an even tighter budget, there’s Cochrane’s graphic novel Long Time Gone: Chapter One, “Bird Gets the Worm,” created with his young daughter Fiamma, that’s just $20. 
“It’s an honor to be able to show these young artists alongside these masterpieces of the book arts, in a head space that is more rarified,” Lee said.
Of the partnership between the two gallerists, he added, “Dealers often aren’t given credit for how nicely they can play together.”
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