Eliana Willis

This year’s wide-ranging Surrealism celebrations have explored aspects from feminism to the African diaspora. Few, though, have highlighted how the advent of modern photography helped shape the movement.
Now, the Dalí Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida has opened “The Subversive Eye: Surrealist and Experimental Photography from the David Raymond Collection,” a sprawling display of rare Surrealist photographs from the noted connoisseur’s collection.
Man Ray, Self Portrait, Distortion (1928 or 30). Photo: Collection of David Raymond, © Man Ray 2015 Trust / Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY / ADAGP, Paris 2024.
“The Subversive Eye” offers over 100 works made by more than 50 artists hailing from Surrealism’s European core and beyond, such as Japanese photographer Osamu Shiihara, between the 1920s and 1940s.
Gygöry Kepes, Woman with Guitar (1939). Photo: Collection of David Raymond, © Estate of György Kepes (Imre Kepes and Juliet Kepes Stone).
The exhibition catalogue includes an essay by British art historian Dawn Ades, who also contributed to the catalogue for the Corcoran Gallery of Art’s groundbreaking 1986 Surrealist photography show “L’Amour Fou.” Inside, David Raymond himself recounts his decades-long engagement with the subject. Raymond famously donated his entire Surrealist photography collection to the Cleveland Museum of Art in 2007, only to start amassing another soon after.
Jaroslav Rössler, Multiple Exposure of a Woman (early 1930s). Photo: Collection of David Raymond & Kim Manocherian,© 2024 Jaroslav Rössler—heirs.
One might expect that Surrealism and photography should be opposites. One captures reality, it could be argued, while the other distorts it.
Jaroslav Rössler, Self-Portrait (1929). Photo: Collection of David Raymond,© 2024 Jaroslav Rössler—heirs.
But, as “The Subversive Eye” posits, handheld cameras and easier printing processes didn’t just provide Surrealist artists with new tools to alter their images through techniques like collage, solarization, and multiple exposures. In fact, photography itself captures a kind of parallel reality.
Georges Hugnet, Statue and Crawling Woman (1936). Photo: Collection of David Raymond, © 2024 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
“The Subversive Eye” explores this thesis through six thematic sections. “Transformations” demonstrates how Surrealists materially altered their photos. “Enigma of the Ordinary” then shows how they pictured mundane objects without amendments in order to highlight life’s absurdity.
Brassaï, Young Couple Wearing a Two-in-One Suit at the Bal de la Montagne Sainte-Geneviève (c. 1931). Photo: Collection of David Raymond,© Estate Brassaï –RMN-Grand Palais.
Next, “The Visible Woman” highlights how photography advanced the Surrealist aim to liberate desire. A range of female nudes appear here—some tender, some shocking, like Hungarian-French photographer Brassaï’s phosphorescent pants-down portrait Ass (1932). A cache of images by French artist Dora Maar (also Picasso’s lover and muse) temper such examples. Several of Maar’s works feature Nusch Éluard, the late wife of French poet Paul Éluard. The floral pattern from his mournful book Time Overflows covers an entire wall, lending this section a poignantly pretty atmosphere.
Manuel Alvarez Bravo, Parabola Optica (1931/38-39). Photo: Collection of David Raymond, © Archivo Manuel Álvarez Bravo, S.C..
“Poetic Objects” illustrates how Surrealist photographers imbued everyday objects with symbolic power through zooming or strategic cropping. “Automatic Sculpture” shows how photography allowed for an otherwise impossible form of sculpture through its ability to immortalize the momentary coalescence of objects, like a pile of metal fragments that Mexican photographer Manuel Alvarez Bravo shot at an industrial site.
Dora Maar, Leaf Abstraction (1930s). Photo: Collection of David Raymond, © 2024 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris.
Finally, “Urban Mysteries” offers imagery captured through the Surrealist exercise of Parisian night strolls.
“The Subversive Eye” also allows guests to test these techniques for themselves. A photo studio features wooden mannequins, geometric metal boxes, coiled metal springs, and moveable light sources so attendees can stage shoots using their smartphones.
Umbo (Otto Umbehr), Mannequins (1929). Photo: Collection of David Raymond, © 2024 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
In this way, “The Subversive Eye” ensures that the tradition of Surrealist photography outlives this year’s celebrations.
“The Subversive Eye: Surrealist and Experimental Photography from the David Raymond Collection” is on view through May 4, 2025 at The Dalí Museum, 1 Dali Blvd, St. Petersburg, Florida. More

It whirs, it clangs, it sighs and scrapes. Of course it does! This is “Jean Tinguely” at Pirelli HangarBicocca in Milan, showcasing 40 works by the Swiss artist who transformed mechanical parts, toys, skulls, and other detritus into monumental kinetic sculptures that influenced generations of artists. It marks his first major exhibition in decades (the last was at Palazzo Grassi in 1987) and arrives just ahead of his centenary next year.
Tinguely’s spectre looms large. It’s hard to look at Theo the dog—a wooden articulated toy, activated by a metal skewer stuck into its behind—without thinking of Paul McCarthy; or the clusters of glowing lamps and steel bars without Jason Rhoades coming to mind. Michael Landy’s debt was revealed in the credit card-crunching machine he created for Frieze London in 2011. (The British artist later staged his own show at the Tinguely Museum in Basel in 2016, as an ultimate homage).
“Jean Tinguely” runs through February 2, 2025. Here at the HangarBicocca, the curators have taken Tinguely at his word, and used the 5,000 square meters of its vast Navate gallery, to evoke the “anti-museum” of which the artist spoke frequently before his death in 1991, aged just 66. He described art as “a form of revolt, total and complete”, and that included its display.  In 1988, he had taken over a huge abandoned glass factory between Fribourg and Lausanne, Switzerland, and intended to turn it into the invitation-only Torpedo Institut, filled with his animated machines and explosive performances.
Jean Tinguely, Méta-Maxi (1986) Installation view, Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan, 2024 On loan from the Mercedes-Benz Art Collection Courtesy Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan Jean Tinguely: © SIAE, 2024 Photo: Agostino Osio
Machines in Motion
Alas, that never came to pass, but homage is paid here in in Milan, where there is nothing on show but the work itself. (Interpretation is provided by a map and a booklet that visitors can read or not.) In the dark industrial space, most works sit on the concrete floor, and those that can, still whir and clang, suddenly springing to life every 20 minutes or so.
“It’s more like a ballet between the pieces,” says Lucia Pesapane, one of the curators, who had already spent years working on a Tinguely exhibition for the Grand Palais, which ended up never happening. “Once Vicente Todoli [the artistic director of HangarBicocca] agreed to bring it here, it changed completely,” she says. “In Milan, we could use the quality of the space to evoke the spirit of Tinguely. It’s not a proper retrospective.”
Jean Tinguely, Requiem pour une feuille morte, 1967 (detail), Installation view, Palazzo Grassi, Venice, 1987 Collection Fonds Renault pour l’art et la culture, France Courtesy Magnum Photos, Jean Tinguely © SIAE, 2024 Photo: René Burri
The fruits of her extensive labors are very clear, though. These are 40 exceptional works and include loans from several private collectors including Larry Warsh in New York and Esther Grether in Switzerland.
The scene is set with two key works—Cercle et carré-éclatés (1981) and Meta-Maxi (1986). Both are multi-colored assembly lines of wheels, spokes, work benches, pistons and random parts that create their own musique concrete as they grind into motion. The critic Pierre Restany and artist Yves Klein had established the Nouveau Realiste movement in Paris in 1960, advocating “a poetic recycling of urban, industrial and advertising reality”. Tinguely was one of its finest exponents, as he aimed to rearrange the micro parts of the industrial world into machines that developed their own self-expression, beyond human control.
He also believed in taking art out of the gallery: a film running on a black and white TV screen shows Tinguely and friends pushing one of his contraptions, Gismo, through the streets of Paris in 1960. It is as much carnival as performance art. The players in the accompanying brass band are dressed in carefully curated stripey tops and bowler hats, and cute blonde girls in big white dresses are leading the way. Tinguely, for all his political critique of the postwar, machine-led, sociologically fragile world, simply can’t supress his showman tendencies.
Exhibition view, Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan, 2024 Foreground: Sculpture méta-mécanique automobile (1954) Collection Centre Pompidou, Paris, Musée national d’art moderne-Centre de création industrielle Background: Méta-Matic No. 10 (1959). Replica (2024) Museum Tinguely, Basel. Courtesy Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan Jean Tinguely: © SIAE, 2024 Photo: Agostino Osio
Meanwhile, a drawing machine (Meta-Matic no. 10, 1959) fully develops the Duchampian idea of the audience completing the artwork and the concept of chance.
At the behest of the visitor, the machine is set in motion and colored pens, held in metal grips, begin to make lines on a sheet of white paper. A white wall behind it is designated for display of the final “artworks”, though on the day of my visit, most participants had opted to take theirs home.
Not all work sits comfortably in the present day. A suspended ensemble, called Le Ballet des Pauvres,appears to represent womanhood as a distressed and chaotic state, as dishevelled clothing and domestic objects dance chaotically from the ceiling. Its debt is, of course, to Dada, another anti-art movement that railed against aesthetics, logic, and the bourgeoisie and that Tinguley discovered while at art school in Basel. The onomatopoeic nonsense names of works like Rotozaza (one here, no.2 from 1967, is a hectic assemblage of bicycle chains, plexiglass and rubber belts that grinds up green glass bottles) reflects that heritage too.
Jean Tinguely, Swiss sculptor and painter. (Photo by Monique JACOT/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images)
Perhaps with the passing of time it is hard to see the freshness that would have emanated from the work in its day. Now the idea of the machine—dancing or not—is one of increasing obsolescence, rather than something at odds with human intellect. It is the digital world that threatens us more. And a certain machismo hangs in the air – what is it with all the priapic, outsized drill bits? It really is hard to see Tinguely as a feminist, even if La Vittoria—the 1970 performance work in Milan, where a 10m high phallus spurted out fireworks from its tip for half an hour—is proclaimed as “a feminist public statement” in a catalogue essay.
Tinguely loved Formula 1and drove a Ferrari. A particularly unsettling work is Pit-Stop (1984) —an exploded Renault RE40 driven by Eddie Cheever and Alain Prost that looks to me like a veneration of the fatal nature of motor sports. The work was actually sponsored by Renault itself. Times have changed.
Jean Tinguely, L’Odalisque (1989). Installation view, Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan, 2024 Bischofberger Collection, Männedorf-Zurich, Switzerland. Courtesy Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan Jean Tinguely: © SIAE, 2024 Photo: Agostino Osio
Let There Be Light
Still, the artist wasn’t impervious to the mortal coil. With his health in poor shape by the mid-1980s, his world—and this exhibition—darkens. Movement is replaced by glowing lights; great philosophers are conjured up in a baroque series of portraits, made of salvaged metal, feathers and fur.
The exhibition finishes with a literally dazzling work created by Tinguely and his sometime partner in life, and eternal partner in art, his wife Niki de Saint Phalle.
Jean Tinguely and Niki de Saint Phalle in their studio at La Commanderie des Templiers a Dannemois, France,1964 RMN-Grand Palais / Fonds Shunk et Kender / RMN-GP / Dist. Photo SCALA, Firenze
Niki de Saint Phalle and Jean Tinguely were married from 1971 until Tinguely’s passing in 1991. Their enduring and unconventional relationship blended personal and professional bonds, marked by mutual respect and numerous collaborations. It was de Saint Phalle who delivered the Tinguely Museum in Basel after his death. He bequested her his entire estate.
In a massive mushroom sculpture, the couple are seen intertwined, her fecund and him aroused, covered with mirrored mosaic in which the viewer becomes equally absorbed. It’s a testament to creativity and collaboration. It’s a good way to end. More

Art about art is catnip for aesthetes. Art about art magazines is sure to be a magnet for people like me—I spent a decade in the trenches at Art in America. So over the years, I’ve always loved seeing California artist Marlon Mullen’s painted interpretations of covers and advertisements from publications like Artforum, Art in America, and Frieze. Seeing the covers is like seeing old friends, and witnessing his visual commentary on them, the way he transforms them with graphic riffs in vivid colors, well, it’s like seeing an old friend who is trying out a dashing new style that really suits them.
So when New York’s Museum of Modern Art announced in the fall that it would organize a Mullen solo show in its Projects gallery, which is open to the public free of charge, it was great news. The show itself is even greater news. With a daring installation based on input from the artist himself and some judicious choices in terms of didactic material, the whole show, organized by chief curator of painting and sculpture Ann Temkin with support from curatorial assistant Alexandra Morrison, is a triumph. 
Installation view of “Projects: Marlon Mullen” at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Photo courtesy of MoMA.
The show is a joyous occasion partly because he’s not the kind of artist you might expect to see in a solo show at one of the world’s greatest museums. Born in 1963 in Richmond, California, Mullen has long been based at his hometown’s NIAD Art Center (“Nurturing Independence through Artistic Development”), which hosts and supports Bay Area artists with developmental disabilities; in fact, this is the first MoMA showcase for an artist with such disabilities. As it happens, the museum has a long history of showing folk art, Outsider artists, and untrained practitioners—favored terminology has changed over time—so while this is a special high water mark, it doesn’t come completely out of the blue.
Marlon Mullen, Untitled? (2024). Courtesy of the artist, NIAD Art Center, and Adams and Ollman. Photo: Chris Grunder.
The paintings are a delight. Mullen’s rendition of an advertisement for a show of early Warhol paintings at New York gallery Blum Helman, for example, plays havoc with the unmistakable face of Marilyn Monroe: her sexy, slight smile and heavy-lidded gaze turn into a look of shock, mouth seemingly agape, painted brows hovering far above her eyes. And “Warhol” appears not above her face, as in the ad, but rather superimposed on her hair, as if the shadows between her blonde locks formed the Pop artist’s name.
Marlon Mullen, Untitled (2017). © 2024 Marlon Mullen.
Mullen takes even greater liberties with a February 2004 Art in America cover featuring a detail of James Rosenquist’s painting House of Fire (1981), in which multiple tubes of lipstick seem to bear down like rockets on a bucket that floats in front of a window. None of those motifs survive Mullen’s treatment, which imposes a square shape on the magazine’s rectangular layout and preserves only the deep reds and various shades of blue in what has, apart from the magazine’s title, become an abstract composition.
Installation view of “Projects: Marlon Mullen” at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Photo courtesy of MoMA.
In a thoughtful addition, the museum has included a display case with a handful of the very copies of the magazines Mullen himself works from, so his innovations are plain to see. It’s illuminating to look at the May 1997 Artforum cover in which a gawky teenager stares out at us from Rineke Dijkstra’s 1992 photo Kolobrzeg, Poland, and then turn around and see Mullen’s interpretation, where the magazine’s logo and even the girl herself have shrunk, while a brushy version of the sky dominates—even as a UPC barcode encroaches from the corner.
Marlon Mullen, Untitled (2024). © 2024 Marlon Mullen. Photo: Silvia Ros.
But I’m able to make those comparisons I made earlier because the museum has also provided a website where each painting is lined up next to its source. It is not just illuminating but also hilarious to regard the September 2015 Artforum cover where a beatifically glowing infant gazes out from Torbjørn Rødland’s photo Baby (2007), and then look, high up on the wall, to see Mullen’s untitled 2015 interpretation, in which the baby has fattened up into something resembling an infant Jabba the Hutt, and is seemingly covered in pimples. 
Marlon Mullen. Courtesy the artist and NIAD Art Center.
It’s also great fun to know, if you can’t figure it out from the paintings themselves, just how many artists’ work—not to mention the art designers’ treatments of the images and the cover texts—come in for Mullen’s revamps: Jean-Michel Basquiat, Bernd & Hilla Becher, René Magritte, Kerry James Marshall, Claes Oldenburg, Jenny Saville, and Sarah Sze are among them.
Besides the joy of the paintings and the edification of the side-by-side comparisons, the show is notable for being so successful even in a challenging space. Its ceiling is over 26 feet high, but the paintings, even at modest scale, command the eye. In a quirky idea that came straight from the artist, three paintings hang very high on the wall just to your right as you enter, and the far wall has an effective salon-style hang.
Installation view, “Projects: Marlon Mullen,” at the Museum of Modern Art, New York.
MoMA also went the extra mile to make the space welcoming. Museum environments can be unforgiving, especially in sonic terms, with all their hard surfaces making for an unpleasant experience for anyone—not to mention neurodivergent people who might be especially sensitive to sound. The museum accounted for those visitors in spades, with a not-unappealing gray carpet that goes a long way to deaden sound, and downright attractive “acoustic sofas” from Snowsound that absorb noise and that you can even carry to your preferred spot for viewing the show. They really ought to carry them in the MoMA Design Store across the street.
“Projects: Marlon Mullen” is on view at the Museum of Modern Art, 11 West 53rd Street, New York, through April 20, 2025. More

Five years ago, almost no living people had ever laid eyes on the storied Torlonia Marbles—the most important collection of ancient Roman sculpture in private hands. Now, a selection from the 620-piece trove is preparing for its first-ever traveling show. “Myth and Marble: Ancient Roman Sculpture from the Torlonia Collection” will touch down at the Art Institute of Chicago in May, then open at Fort Worth’s Kimbell Art Museum in September. Its sojourn will conclude at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts in July 2026.
The exhibition will mark the first time that many of these relics have left Rome, let alone set out for America. It will also mark the first showcase of ancient Roman sculpture at the Kimbell in the museum’s 52-year history, and the first time the Art Institute of Chicago will show such work in its modern wing.
Statue of a Goddess, known as the Hestia Giustiniani (ca. 470 B.C.E.). Photo: Lorenzo De Masi, © Torlonia Foundation.
The sprawling collection takes its name from the Torlonia family, who got rich handling the Vatican’s finances during the 18th and 19th centuries and bought many of its specimens from other Italian aristocrats who were facing financial hardships. In 1876, Prince Alessandro Torlonia created a museum to house the collection, which hosted small groups until the start of World War II, when the works went into storage. They didn’t re-emerge until 2020, when they went on show in Rome. Since then, one of the family’s Venuses joined the Basquiat exhibition at Gagosian’s Los Angeles gallery earlier this year, and a wider selection of Torlonia marbles is currently on view at the Louvre.
Lisa Ayla Çakmak, the Art Institute of Chicago’s Chair and Curator of Arts Greece, Rome, and Byzantium, and Katharine A. Raff, a curator in the same department, have planned an entirely new spectacle using the Torlonia collection. They’ve chosen 58 sculptures spanning nine centuries for “Myth and Marble,” 24 of which have been newly restored through the collection’s ongoing partnership with Bvlgari.
Portrait of a Young Woman (ca. 60 B.C.E.). Photo: Lorenzo De Masi, © Torlonia Foundation.
Their take will play out over six thematic sections, starting with some of the collection’s most famous holdings. “The primary thesis of the exhibition is about how both in antiquity and today we live in a world surrounded by images and those images communicate messages about identity, status, power, etc.,” Çakmak told me over email.
Portrait of Hadrian (ca. 130 C.E.). Photo: Lorenzo De Masi, © Torlonia Foundation.
“Where we really focused our efforts was in the areas of portraiture and gods and goddesses,” she continued. “We wanted to highlight the emperors of the 2nd century C.E. because there is significant name recognition here, such as Marcus Aurelius.”
“The Torlonia Collection also has a good number of female portraits from the same time period,” Çakmak added, “so it gave us the opportunity to highlight the role of imperial women in the dynastic structures of the period.” Most Roman women of this era were relegated to the roles of wives and mothers, but exceptions abound—like Livia Drusilla, Rome’s first empress, and Julia Domna, who mediated the co-emperorship of her two sons 200 years later.
Statue of Artemis Ephesia (ca. 2nd century C.E.). Photo: Lorenzo De Masi, © Torlonia Foundation.
In terms of ancient deities, Çakmak feels especially fond of a newly restored statue of Athena holding an owl in her outstretched hand. (Works restored previously, like an imperial-era goat that Gian Lorenzo Bernini attended to during the 17th century, will also appear.) Raff, meanwhile, is partial to the Statue of Artemis Ephesia, since it’s “stylistically quite different from most Roman depictions of the goddess of the hunt.”
Funerary relics like the collection’s oldest piece, Attic Votive Relief (ca. 5th century B.C.E.) prove a strong point of the collection. Most ancient Roman graves were dug on the outskirts of the city for health reasons—in areas the Torlonias bought up en masse throughout the 19th century, alongside their land in Porto, Italy. These mesmerizing adornments promise to help bring this ancient era to life for an entirely new audience.
Statue of a resting goat (ca. 1st century C.E.). Photo: Lorenzo de Masi, ©Fondazione Torlonia.
“Myth and Marble” will be on view March 15–June 29, 2025 at the Art Institute of Chicago, 111 S Michigan Ave.; from September 14–January 25, 2026 at the Kimbell Art Museum, 3333 Camp Bowie Blvd., Fort Worth, Texas; then March 14–July 19, 2026 at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, 1380 Sherbrooke St W, Montreal, Quebec. More

For his latest project, actor James Franco is returning to the role of artist.
This month, Franco opens “Hollywood is Hell” at Galerie Gmurzynska in Zurich. The exhibition will debut a never-before-seen series of 28 wall-hanging assemblages and “objets d’art,” as a press release calls them, all created over the past two years. The opening date arrives just weeks after the debut of Hey Joe, the first U.S. release that Franco has starred in since allegations of misconduct forced his career into a hiatus in 2018.
Franco has made numerous artistic efforts over the years. His paintings of the late aughts and early 2010s easily evoke Jean-Michel Basquiat. In 2014, he re-staged Cindy Sherman’s “Untitled Film Stills” for a widely panned show at Pace. He painted $10 portraits for charity in 2016, collaborated by painting clay sewer pipes with his brother in 2017, and staged a multidisciplinary solo exhibition titled “The Dangerous Book Four Boys” at New York’s Clocktower Gallery in 2019, which New York Times critic Roberta Smith called “a confusing mix of the clueless and the halfway promising.”
Now, in “Hollywood is Hell,” Franco appears to channel Robert Rauschenberg—particularly the artist’s noted combines. It’s not Franco’s first exercise in amalgamation, however. His 2011 performance Collage, for instance, layered live acting with video projections. Franco’s career itself is a patchwork of different mediums and businesses—including his new punk-inspired streetwear label, Paly Hollywood.
James Franco, 2 Houses, 1 Castle (2022). Photo: Galerie Gmurzynska.
His artworks slated for Zurich consist of singular, collaged objects that contemplate life in Los Angeles, particularly through the lens of the pandemic. “The streets were empty, the posters damaged on the walls,” Franco recounted in a statement. “I lived at that time near the Hollywood cemetery, where so many stars are buried, and I was walking there. Dreamland had became for me a waste land.”
L.A. icons like helicopters and Disney characters pop up. In He Smelled So Bad (2022), Franco’s scrawl states the work’s titular phrase atop a photograph of a cop car perched ambiguously behind a civilian vehicle. No matter who “he” is to Franco, the piece conjures one of L.A.’s most heart-wrenching calling cards, its immense population of unhoused people.
James Franco, He Smelled So Bad (2022). Photo: Galerie Gmurzynska.
Franco’s recent years have proven bumpy. In 2019, he settled two lawsuits alleging he’d taken advantage of female pupils at his  Studio 4 acting school. “Hollywood is Hell,” however, marks Franco’s first art show since he finally admitted to wrongdoing on SiriusXM’s Jess Cagle Show in 2021. In a recent conversation with Variety, the actor discussed how cancellation shaped him. “Being told you’re bad is painful,” he said. “But ultimately that’s kind of what I needed to just stop going the way I was going.”
The collages in “Hollywood is Hell” seem to synthesize Franco’s many disparate components. The bit of Gucci paraphernalia in He Smelled So Bad, for instance, highlights his friendship with the Italian fashion house. Bright colors and gestural accents retain bits of his Basquiat knockoffs. Comic book heroes and readymade lockers evoke the fixation with male youth that defined “The Dangerous Book Four Boys.” The show’s press release noted that “Masculinity is devastated” in this series, “as one of the pillars of a decadent mass entertainment culture.” Perhaps through these constructions of decay, the artist has worked at understanding how, exactly, he became a man who had to change.
James Franco, This is what the World’s Greatest Navy Mom Looks Like (2022). Photo: Galerie Gmurzynska.
Franco even returned to touch up artworks he’d made at age 20 for this show. “Half of the series are therefore like double works: two works in one each time,” the release stated.
“It is really my young actor self being sort of repurposed and put in to the collages,” Franco added.
Gmurzynska has not responded to a request for comment regarding whether Franco’s tumultuous recent past provoked any pause ahead of his show. Additional questions remain. For example, has Franco’s soul searching helped him find his voice? And, will the art world grant him the acclaim he’s long pined after?
“James Franco: Hollywood is Hell” will be at Galerie Gmurzynska, Paradeplatz 2, Zurich, February 17, 2025. More

On December 2, 1804, the great and good of Paris gathered in Notre-Dame Cathedral to witness the coronation of Napoleon Bonaparte and the birth of the French Empire. It’s a moment immortalized (and cunningly manipulated) in Jacques-Louis David’s monumental painting—and one that was top of mind at the launch of a virtual reality production centered on the life of the Little Corporal.
Two hundred and twenty years on from snatching the crown from Pope Pius VII and crowning himself (as well as his beloved Josephine), many aspects of Napoleon’s world linger in roads, sewer systems, legal codes, and higher education. Despite this legacy, military history seems the focus of “Napoleon, the Immersive Saga,” the V.R. experience that debuted at Paris’s Bank of France, an institution Napoleon himself established in 1800, one he would eventually grant a monopoly to print the French Franc.
Visitors can chat with Napoleon. Photo: courtesy Sandora.
It’s the first project from Sandora, a Paris-based company founded in 2024 that aims to create immersive experiences with a cultural emphasis. Here, it has worked with a committee of historians to make sure its product is accurate. In the nearly half hour-long experience, a computer-generated Napoleon guides visitors through some of the main events of his life—and of the early 19th century. Alongside the experience is a feature called “Bonjour Napoleon,” from Jumbo Mana, a French tech startup, which allows the visitor to converse with the Emperor courtesy of a customized A.I. generator.
“We aimed to reveal to the public how Napoleon himself crafted his own legend,” said Pierre Branda, a historian who has published widely on Napoleon. “Every element of the narrative was carefully studied and validated by the committee.”
Visitors can stand aboard an accurate model of a 19th-century ship. Photo: courtesy Sandora.
The visitor meets Napoleon at the low ebb of his long and turbulent career. The setting is a rainy afternoon on St. Helena, the speck of land in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean to which Britain banished Napoleon after defeating him at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815 (he would die on the island in 1821). Perhaps understandably given the isolation, Napoleon is happy for the company and to reminisce.
Designed to accommodate up to 10 people in a roughly 200-square-foot space, “Napoleon, the Immersive Saga” is free form, allowing visitors to wander and engage with the experience as they wish. Highlights include traveling to St. Helena by boat, standing amid the fog at the Battle of Austerlitz, and soaring above the Vendôme Column, which Napoleon had built as his very own Trajan Column to commemorate the 1805 battle.
Visitors can experience 1805’s Battle of Austerlitz. Photo: courtesy Sandora.
“We have taken on the triple challenge of achieving technical, artistic, and historical excellence to create the first immersive experience on Napoleon,” said Sandora founder Marin de Saint Chamas. “The intensity of the recreated events and the close connection with a universally known figure make this production both captivating and educational.”
The V.R. experience is due to travel to Brussels, Belgium, and Lille, France, in 2025, before returning to Paris. More