Eliana Willis

Upcoming at the Louvre in Paris, a major exhibition is set to showcase the works of Jan van Eyck (1390-1441), the Flemish master of the Northern Renaissance, from March 20 to June 17, 2024. Titled “Meeting with a Masterpiece: The Virgin by Chancellor Rolin” the exhibition promises to present the largest collection of Van Eyck’s works ever seen in France.
The artist’s influence on European art cannot be overstated. His mastery of oil painting techniques changed the course of western art history, bringing a newfound realism and luminosity to his works. Through his method of glazing, which involved applying multiple translucent layers of oil paint, Van Eyck achieved depth, richness of colour, and intricate light and shadow effects. His meticulous attention to detail breathed life into his compositions, from the textures of fabrics to the landscapes in the background.
Van Eyck received commissions to paint significant portraits, including Isabella of Portugal. One of his most famed works, The Arnolfini Portrait, painted in 1434, depicts Giovanni di Nicolao Arnolfini and his wife in their home. The work has various interpretations and mysteries, including a cryptic figure within the convex mirror’s reflection.
Jan Van Eyck, The Virgin of Chancellor Rolin (ca. 1435) before restoration. Musée du Louvre, dist RMT – Grand Palais, Angèle Dequier.
At the heart of the exhibition in Paris lies the restored version of The Virgin of Chancellor Rolin, completed around 1435. After undergoing historic restoration, the painting had centuries-old oxidised varnish removed to reveal the painted layers that lie beneath. Alongside this piece, the exhibition will feature six other masterpieces by Van Eyck, including The Lucca Madonna (ca. 1437) from the Städel Museum. This rare exhibition offers visitors an opportunity to explore Van Eyck’s evolution as an artist and his interactions with contemporaries like Rogier van der Weyden and Robert Campin.
A program of events will accompany the exhibition, with a series of lectures on the restoration process, musical performances inspired by Van Eyck’s works, and opportunities to engage with art experts. If Alastair Sooke’s review of the “Van Eyck: An Optical Revolution” exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts Ghent in 2020 is anything to go by, we are eagerly anticipating the upcoming show in Paris.
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It is reasonable to expect that we may not remember the noughties with absolute clarity. We stumbled towards that historical horizon with a fin-de-siècle perversity made all the more dire by the rising superstitions of millennial dread. And then, with an offbeat chronological clockwork that belied the frenzy of Y2K, we hit the new century with a traumatic bang 20 months later, on September 11, 2001. 
It all comes back to us when we listen to decade-defining greatest hits compilations heavy on Eminen, Coldplay, Pink, Linkin Park, Black Eyed Peas, and Britney Spears. Lets not forget the memes that remind us of the advent of social media. Isn’t the very nature of cultural memory defined by the fact that first-hand experience is never so comprehensible as when it is relived through nostalgia? When I was growing up, the joke was that if you could remember the sixties you weren’t there, but this seems to be a rule of thumb for every era. Actually living it is incidental and anecdotal to the fictions of recollection.
The promise of a new century is something between an extreme diet and a healthy amnesia. We can finally shed all those named decades and the burden of their associations to start anew with a clean slate. The expectation should be that it is shiny, young, and fresh, rather than dusty, old, and dull. We want novelty and, above all else, youth, so that’s what we’re celebrating here, the exhibitions from 2000 to 2010, which put youth culture and its unruly vernaculars above mid-career surveys and historical retrospectives.
Also, please note that to avoid the gratuitous hierarchy of listicles, this is an index of certain shows as they occurred chronologically rather than by degree of importance.
“Sensation” at the Brooklyn Museum, NY (2000) 
Visitors to the Brooklyn Museum of Art look at artist Damien Hirst’s The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, part of the “Sensation” exhibition (1999). Photo: Doug Kanter/AFP via Getty Images
The best way to dive into the arbitrary framework of divvying up history according to the numbers of a Gregorian calendar is to cheat, so we’re starting with a show that was really a late ’90s exhibition in London because, well, it did run in New York through January 2000.
Like a grand debutante ball for a generation of YBAs (Young British Artists), this was a coming out like few others, the zeitgeist as organized and packaged by an English ad man. Of course it mattered that so many of its artists (including the Chapman Brothers, Tracey Emin, Damien Hirst, Sarah Lucas, Jenny Saville, Sam Taylor-Johnson and Rachel Whiteread) were brilliant, but it sure helped that they were as ambitious and crafty as the exhibition’s capitalist maestro, Charles Saatchi.
Somehow pulling off all the experimental, radical, and subversive genius of late 20th-century American art with impeccable English style, it felt like Brian Epstein and Malcolm McLaren had gotten together to launch another British Invasion, something we might have resented if it hadn’t been so damn smart and sexy.
Scandal and outrage—with a healthy dash of culture wars rhetoric—were a big part of the heady brew, as England got all Fleet Street over Marcus Harvey’s monumental portrait of serial killer Myra Hindley, and New York mayor Rudy Giuliani got his knickers in knots over Chris Ofili’s use of elephant dung in his representation of the Virgin Mary. He decried that “the city shouldn’t have to pay for this sick stuff,” before trying to pull the Brooklyn Museum’s funding and evict them from their century-old home. Funny how the media now frames Giuliani’s despicable behavior, pathological lies, and psychotic furies like some amazing fall from grace. Most New Yorkers have known he’s a deranged asshole for a long time.

“Beautiful Losers” at Contemporary Art Center, Cincinnati (2004) 
Installation view, “Beautiful Losers: Contemporary Art, Skateboarding and Street Culture” at Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati. Photo: Tony Walsh (2004). Image courtesy of the Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati, OH.
The first and still unmatched exhibition to chart the visual artists deeply associated with the subcultures of skateboarding, graffiti, punk, and hip hop, “Beautiful Losers” succeeded like none before, because it understood these are not opposing camps but realms of mutual influence and dynamic cross-pollination.
Taking its name from a 1966 novel by Leonard Cohen, and grounded with a pantheon of forbearers including Jean-Michel Basquiat, Larry Clark, Robert Crumb, Futura, Keith Haring, Raymond Pettibon, Pushead, C.R. Stecyk III, and Andy Warhol, “Beautiful Losers” helped launch and conceptualize a generation of artists who had fans long before they had collectors. Among them were Mark Gonzales, Kaws, Margaret Kilgallen, Barry McGee, Ryan McGinley, and so many others that are now simply legendary.
Born of alternate media sensibilities like zines, album covers, skateboard graphics, sketchbooks, and music videos, the cumulative effect was D.I.Y. multimedia, a tribal narrative of underground sensibilities so compelling one of the curators, Aaron Rose, made the show into a movie, and four of the artists—Harmony Korine, Mike Mills, Cheryl Dunn and Spike Jonze—would become far more celebrated as filmmakers.

“Ecstasy: In and About Altered States” at MOCA, Los Angeles (2005) 
Installation view of Ecstasy: In and About Altered States, October 9, 2005 – February 20, 2006 at The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA. Courtesy of The Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA). Photo by Brian Forrest.
When it comes to understanding culture, there is the question of how much contemporary creativity is about the fine art of intoxication. Does art look the way it does, or music sound a particular way, because artists get high? And do we seek out these expressions because we like feeling that way too?
A sensory gift from curator Paul Schimmel back when he had his MOCA mojo, “Ecstasy” was a universe of out of this world. This was eye-candy with selfie-magnets for communal ego deaths, like Carsten Holler’s “Upside Down Mushroom Room”, and a cast of blue chip art stars tripping the light fantastic. It was like the coolest chill out room in the most aesthetic rave, a full blast of mind-melting mayhem at a visionary velocity that would make Bernini dance in his grave. 

“Little Boy: The Arts of Japan’s Exploding Subculture” at Japan Society, NYC (2005) 
Installation shot, “Little Boy: The Arts of Japan’s Exploding Subculture”. Yuji Sakai, godzilla figures, various scales and dates.Photo: Sheldan Collins. Courtesy the Japan Society.
The brilliant finale to Takeshi Murakami’s trilogy of shows on Japanese popular culture that began with “Superflat” in 2000, “Little Boy”—named after the type of atomic bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima—explored the gleeful infantilism of post-war Japanese art from the dark perspective of national trauma. Dizzying, delirious, and entertaining in ways that most fine art would never dare to be, “Little Boy” spun an alternative storyline, as conceptually acute as it was visually compelling. It spanned the legacy of Manga comics and Anime cartoons, the fetish of Godzilla toy figures, the rise of Otaku fan culture, the post-modern perversity of Kawaii’s super-cute, and the explosion of a hyperactive pop culture, as the frantic expressions of the psychic rupture wrought by the atomic age.
A stunning example of just how wildly inventive language gets when lost in translation, Japan’s embrace of western entertainment’s spectacle would indeed forever change our own amusements and obsessions. By looking back Murakami was prescient beyond measure, delivering an art house prequel to Barbenheimer with subversive subtitles.  

“Spank the Monkey” at the Baltic Art Centre, Gateshead, UK (2006) 
Installation view of work by Barry Mcgee in “Spank the Monkey” exhibition at Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, (2006-7). Photo Colin Davison © the artist. Courtesy Baltic.
Probably the most important show no one has heard of, “Spank the Monkey” saw curator Pedro Alonzo catch the big wave of urban art long before it crested into an international phenomenon. He brought a wide range of practices into an unlikely but lively dialog, including those of Banksy, Dr Lakra, FAILE, Shepard Fairey, Invader, Barry McGee, Ryan McGinness, Os Gemeos, David Shrigley, Swoon and Ed Templeton. Sadly the museum—mistaking youth culture with juvenile humor—chose to name the show after the act of masturbation, so instead of heading these artists’ bios, it was dropped by all to spare cringe embarrassment.  

“The Generational Triennial: Younger than Jesus” at the New Museum, NYC (2009) 
Installation view of “The Generational Triennial: Younger Than Jesus,” New Museum, New York (2009). Photo: Allison Brady
Billed as “The Generational” triennial, “Younger than Jesus” seemed so bold out the gate, limiting itself to artists under 33 years old, and making too evident how the art world’s vampire thirst for new blood lays in some shady ground between Peter Pan and pedophilia.
With a trio of sharp curators, Lauren Cornell, Massimiliano Gioni, and Laura Hoptman, which was somehow abetted by an open source network of 150 arts professionals the world over, this gathering of Gen Y Millennials (the kids of Baby Boomers, for those keeping track) was about as tepid as one might expect of consensus opinion, showcasing the process of collective ratification and ambitious professionalism more than the slippery moves of delinquent kids who ultimately do more to change the world than their disappointed parents will ever know.
Though the energy flagged as it inevitably does when adult squares try to dress up like cool kids, the endeavor was too savvy to fail, with some killer work by Cory Arcangel, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Josh Smith, Ryan Trecartin, and Adam Pendleton, back when they were fresh.

Wynwood Walls in Miami (2009) 
Wynwood Walls with Peter Tunney at Wynwood Walls on December 10, 2017 in Miami, featuring mural by Kenny Scharf. Photo: Patrick McMullan via Getty Images
For all the elite, rich power players in the art world, really visionary patrons like Tony Goldman don’t come along all that often. Starting out in the 1960s with his brother, renovating apartments on the Upper West Side, Tony fell in love with a neglected no-man’s land downtown called Soho, working as much as an historian preserving the flat-iron architecture as a developer, and learning that neighborhoods ultimately depend on culture and community far more than the wealthy cats who take them over.
He did the same for the art deco district of Miami Beach, and for his final act brought us to the nightmarish gentrification party zone we now know as the Wynwood district. For all his kindness in life, capitalist success will always leave a mixed legacy, and the once generous and freewheeling outdoor museum Goldman created is now a tourist clip joint with all the curatorial adventure of a marketing company, seeing which artists have the most likes on social media. But if you were lucky enough to be there when Tony opened it at the end of the decade with major murals by Futura, Os Gemeos, Kenny Scharf, Barry McGee, and Shepard Fairey, you will never forget the magic that can happen when the city dreams for all to see. 

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Sir Frederic Leighton’s iconic painting Flaming June (1895) back at the Royal Academy, on loan from the Museo de Arte de Ponce, Puerto Rico. First exhibited at the RA almost 128 years ago at the height of Leighton’s popularity, the painting enjoyed great success with Victorian audiences and critics, and is today considered one of the artist’s best-known and most reproduced works.
Flaming June portrays a sleeping woman, curled up beneath an awning and draped in a translucent orange Grecian dress, the circular shape taken by her body thought to symbolize the sun. In the background, the setting sun lights up the still surface of the sea, while a blooming Oleander flower suggests the scene is set in the early summer. The relative lack of iconographic detail or narrative, and the artist’s focus on color and form has led critics to associate the painting with Aestheticism. Painted a year before the artist’s death, Flaming June was well-received by its contemporaries, but the painting’s fortunes would soon change.
Shortly after the painting was made, it disappeared for decades, until it was by chance rediscovered in the 1960s, found boxed in over a chimney in a home in Battersea, England. In all that time, Victorian art had fallen out of fashion, and no one seemed to want to buy it.
The canvas was eventually bought for Museo de Arte de Ponce by its founder, Puerto Rican politician, industrialist, and patron of the arts Luis A. Ferré in 1963. Ferré bought the painting against the opinion of his advisors, and for a mere £2,000. The meager price demonstrated the changing feeling towards academic figurative painting at a time when Impressionism, post-Impressionism and abstraction reigned supreme in the museums and the art market. As tastes changed and interest in art of the Victorian era returned, Flaming June regained its status as one of the best-loved works of this period in British art. In recent years, Flaming June has been loaned to a number of museums while Museo de Arte de Ponce reconstructs its exhibition spaces damaged in the catastrophic 2020 earthquakes in Puerto Rico.
Flaming June will be on view at the Royal Academy from February 17th 2024 until January 12th 2025, having previously been loaned to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
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Now open in Chicago, Imagine Exhibitions’s “Titanic: The Exhibition” is promising to take its visitors on quite the voyage. The show unfolds a journey through the design, creation, launch, and ill-fated sinking of the luxury cruise ship—then the largest in the world. The dramatic narrative will be told through more than 300 artifacts and interactive elements.
The show stretches between 10,000 and 20,000 square feet and has had sold-out runs in Macau, Moscow, Riga, Perth, Sydney, and L.A. It follows Imagine Exhibition’s other offerings such as “Harry Potter: The Exhibition,” “Angry Birds Universe,” and “Downton Abbey: The Exhibition.”
The R.M.S. Titanic, made by the Belfast-based shipbuilders Harland and Wolff, set off on its maiden voyage from Southampton on April 10, 1912, and famously sank around 400 nautical miles away from its final destination of New York in the early hours of April 15. Of the ship’s 2,200 passengers and crew members, 1,517 died in the maritime accident. The last survivor of the Titanic, Eliza Gladys Dean, died in 2009; she was the youngest passenger aboard in 1912, aged just two months.
Installation view of “Titanic: The Exhibition.” Photo courtesy of Imagine Exhibitions.
In 1997, James Cameron directed the movie Titanic, starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet as fictional lovers aboard the doomed vessel. The film was the first-ever to reach an initial worldwide gross of over $1 billion. Imagine Exhibitions’s show includes several items from the blockbuster’s set.
As part of its interactive experience, visitors entering the show will first receive a boarding pass corresponding with a passenger on the ship. The organizers say this system will “allow the visitors to relate to the individual story of their passenger.” Other immersive elements include music from the era, the use of V.R. headsets, and the opportunity to view historically accurate recreations of the ship’s interiors and promenade deck. Artifacts included in the exhibition are said to “tell the latest details of her sinking and discovery” and include personal effects of those aboard the ship.
Installation view of “Titanic: The Exhibition.” Photo courtesy of Imagine Exhibitions.
The show’s Discovery Gallery features a raised glass floor, mimicking the bottom of the ocean as part of a recreation of the Titanic’s wreck site, which lies at 12,500 feet below sea level. This is accompanied by a film narrated by Cameron who has visited the Titanic wreckage on more than 30 occasions.
Tom Zaller, the president and CEO of Imagine Exhibitions, also went on a dive mission to the wreck site in the late 1990s. “Since that firsthand experience, I’ve presented hundreds of exhibitions about the ship, her people and her stories,” he said.
Zaller explained that the continued public fascination with the Titanic is because “it’s every man’s story—the story of hopes and dreams,” and that this exhibition is “designed to immerse the visitor in the history of the Titanic in a new way, with incredible media experiences and recreated environments that bring the story to life”.
“Titanic: The Exhibition” is on view at Westfield Old Orchard, Skokie, from February 16.
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The viral nature of the term “Roman Empire” makes it easy to forget the trend started because ancient Rome had one of the most unforgettable armies in history. A new show at the British Museum is turning the spotlight on the soldiers that helped build and safeguard Roman rule.
“Legion: Life in the Roman Army” transports visitors to the million square miles that was once the Roman Empire to explore its unparalleled military might through the eyes of the people who lived it. The museum already has a dedicated gallery space covering the rise of Rome from a small town to an imperial capital, covering a period of about 1,000 years. But the latest show humanizes that collective power through more than 200 exhibits ranging from soldierly objects to everyday items that capture the lives of citizens living under military rule.
Copper alloy Roman legionary helmet. © The Trustees of the British Museum. Photo courtesy of the British Museum.
“Few men are born brave,” wrote Vegetius in the later Roman Empire. “Many become so from care and force of discipline.” From the 6th century B.C.E., soldiering was a career choice and joining the army came with substantial perks (if you lived), including a substantial pension. Foreigners entering the auxiliary troops could also attain citizenship for themselves and their families.
The show traces the journey of a notable Roman soldier, Claudis Terentianus, following him from his enlistment to his participation in campaigns to his retirement. Along the way, visitors can view the armor and weapons soldiers wielded in battle, from a gilded bronze scabbard to a copper alloy helmet to the world’s only intact legionary shield. Domestic objects such as children’s shoes illustrate the family life of military men; coins and tombstones allude to the cost of the empire’s wars.
Installation view of “Legion: Life in the Roman Army” at the British Museum. Photo: Peter Nicholls/Getty Images.
Also included in the show is an ancient Roman arm guard, found in fragments in 1906 and recently reconstructed by the National Museums Scotland—the first time the artifact can be viewed in its entirety in millennia.

“Sword and sandals, helmet and shield are all on parade here as would be expected, but told through often ordinary individuals,” Richard Abdy, the museum’s curator of Roman and Iron Age coins, said in a statement. “Every soldier has a story: it’s incredible that these tales are nearly 2,000 years old.”

See more images from the show below.
A helmet depicting the face of a Trojan, on view at “Legion: Life in the Roman Army” at the British Museum. Photo: Peter Nicholls/Getty Images.
Sword of Tiberius – Iron sword with gilded bronze scabbard. Photo courtesy of the British Museum.
Tombstone of an imaginifer’s daughter, 100-300 C.E. © The Trustees of the British Museum. Photo courtesy of the British Museum.
Installation view of “Legion: Life in the Roman Army” at the British Museum. Photo: Peter Nicholls/Getty Images.
Roman scutum (shield). Yale University Art Gallery, Yale-French Excavations at Dura-Europos. Photo courtesy of the British Museum.
Gold coin featuring an oath-taking scene between two soldiers. © The Trustees of the British Museum. Photo courtesy of the British Museum.
A 2,000-year-old Roman cavalry helmet, on view at “Legion: Life in the Roman Army” at the British Museum. Photo by Lewis Whyld/PA Images via Getty Images.
“Legion: Life in the Roman Army” is on view at the British Museum, Great Russell Street, London, through June 23.
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The painter Tesfaye Urgessa will represent Ethiopia for the country’s first-ever national pavilion at this year’s 60th Venice Biennale, which runs from April 20 until November 24, 2024. His exhibition “Prejudice and Belonging” will take place at Palazzo Bolani and is curated by the writer Lemn Sissay. It was commissioned by Ethiopia’s Ministry of Tourism.
Urgessa’s work stands out for its focus on classicized human figures, often distorted or entwined with each other in domestic settings. The viewer is invited to contemplate the subjects’ ambiguous psychological states.
Born in Addis Ababa in 1983, Urgessa began his studies under the celebrated painter Tadesse Mesfin at the Ale School of Art and Design at Addis Ababa University. He later moved to Stuttgart in Germany to study at the Staatlichen Akademie and remained in the country for 13 years. During this period, Urgessa developed a style that used Ethiopian iconography as well as influences from the German Neo-Expressionists and School of London painters like Freud, Auerbach, and Bacon.
Urgessa’s work is several renowned collections, including Stuttgart’s Kunstmuseum and Staatsgalerie, the Uffizi in Florence, the Rubell Museum in Miami, the Museum of African Contemporary Art in Marrakech, and the Zabludowicz Collection in London. He is represented by Saatchi Yates gallery in London, which will host a coinciding exhibition in April.
“This is not only a personal milestone, but also a proud moment for Ethiopian art and culture,” said Urgessa in a press statement. “I hope that my exhibition at the Palazzo Bolani will inspire and empower other Ethiopian artists to pursue their creative aspirations and to share their stories with the world. I believe that this is the start of a new era for Ethiopian art, and I am excited to be part of it.”
Check out Artnet News’s list of the national pavilions that have so far been announced here. Other nation’s presenting their first pavilions at Venice this year include Benin and Morocco.
The theme for the main exhibition this year will be “Foreigners Everywhere – Stranieri Ovunque,” curated by Adriano Pedrosa. A full list of participating artists can be found here.
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