Eliana Willis

Earlier this year, as the Thom Yorke-led trio The Smile was recording its sophomore album, the newly announced Wall of Eyes, a separate, yet related, act of creation was taking place close by.  
In a room at London’s Abbey Road Studios where the band was working on the record, Yorke’s long-time collaborator Stanley Donwood had set up an art studio stocked with easels and canvases. There, over two weeks, the pair would turn out a run of paintings—of fragmented topographies, alien forms—as a live audio feed from the neighboring control room was piped into the space. 
It was a project of “simultaneous composition,” Donwood said over email. “I find it very useful to listen to the music that will be associated with the artwork while the music is being made, while the artwork is being made.” 
“The music and the visual work both matter very much to me,” Yorke added. “One liberates the other a lot of the time.” 
Fittingly, a painting from the session will grace the cover of Wall of Eyes, while all 10 works will form the second part of Yorke and Donwood’s The Crow Flies series, going on view at Tin Man Art gallery from December 6. The new showcase, titled “The Crow Flies: Part Two,” follows the successful debut of the duo’s works at the London gallery in September, which saw Maastricht’s Bonnefanten Museum acquiring one of the abstract landscapes. 
Thom Yorke and Stanley Donwood, Aggag (2022). Courtesy of Tin Man Art.
While the works in part one of the series were created in an Oxford studio in the wake of 2020, Donwood said, “things were much freer, in every way, for the second phase.” He admitted to starting the project with a clear mindset, while the Abbey Road building provided inspiration “in a very vague and non-specific way” (that is, “aside from the ghostly Beatles wandering about”), allowing the duo to work intuitively—or at least attempt to. 
“Intuition is hard to quantify and I think when it genuinely happens, that’s very rare. It’s an excellent feeling when something just goes right; but it’s really, really infrequent,” the artist explained.  
Still, looking at these latest paintings, it’s easy to imagine them emerging from a shared subconscious. Some, like The Lakes, Aggag, and Goom, depict eerie vistas with abstract shards juxtaposed against organic contours. Others, such as Frozen Raw and One of Many, bring the viewer up close to otherworldly silhouettes. Might they be snapshots of exterior as much as interior landscapes? 
Thom Yorke and Stanley Donwood, Frozen Raw (2022). Courtesy of Tin Man Art.
Kind of, Donwood said. He brought up the pirate maps and topographic charts that inspired the first The Crow Flies paintings, which in turn represented arcane, complex navigational aids. These new works, he said, “are pictures of the places you might see if you follow the maps.” 
The paintings were created with egg tempera, with the layers blended to evoke the weathering of centuries-old art or frescoes. The choice of linen as canvas was intended to recall vellum or parchment. In Donwood’s telling, the idea was to recreate the effect of Medieval murals that had been “repaired by considerably less skilled people” (see: the infamous botched Jesus restoration).
Thom Yorke and Stanley Donwood, River Spikes (2023). Courtesy of Tin Man Art.
While the textures of the works in The Crow Flies depart from Yorke and Donwood’s previous outings, the narratives and motifs that fuel them—haunting abstraction, reimagined artifacts, esoteric terrains—are the same that have informed their decades-long partnership.  
Since the early ’90s, Donwood has created the bulk of cover art for Yorke’s musical projects, from Radiohead to Atoms for Peace to his solo work, some of which featured contributions from the singer-songwriter himself. In 2006, the duo’s joint paintings for Radiohead’s 2003 record Hail to the Thief were first exhibited at Iguapop Gallery in Barcelona (with Yorke using the moniker Dr. Tchock). More recently, they curated a showcase of Donwood’s artwork for 2001’s Kid A to accompany a Christie’s auction in 2021.  
In working together, Donwood and Yorke have established a shared visual language, one that is perhaps now tough to tease out from their individual aesthetic. But maybe that’s the point. 
“There isn’t a lot of navigating to be done,” Yorke said about balancing their individual and collaborative creativity. “The effort to understand where someone else is coming from—that’s the point. So then when you look back at what you’ve done, it speaks to you in a way you didn’t expect.” 
Thom Yorke and Stanley Donwood, The Lakes (2023). Courtesy of Tin Man Art.
In fact, according to the pair, their collaboration seems to thrive on necessary friction. “Essential interference” is how Donwood characterized it, while Yorke called it “Midi/USB,” referring to the opposite heads of a connecting cable commonly used with musical equipment. 
Yorke’s is an apt analogy. If music is the root and throughline of his and Donwood’s shared visual art practice, it has arguably also served as the glue. 
“It was partly because we both found ourselves making record covers… and then got carried away,” Yorke explained. “And because of what has developed between the two of us. I never expected that to happen honestly.” 
“The Crow Flies: Part Two” is on view at Tin Man Art, 4 Cromwell Place, London, December 6–10. 

More Trending Stories:  
Art Critic Jerry Saltz Gets Into an Online Skirmish With A.I. Superstar Refik Anadol 
The Old Masters of Comedy: See the Hidden Jokes in 5 Dutch Artworks 
A Royal Portrait by Diego Velázquez Heads to Auction for the First Time in Half a Century 
How Do You Make $191,000 From a $4 Painting? You Don’t 
In Her L.A. Debut, South Korean Artist Guimi You Taps Into the Sublimity of Everyday Life 
Two Rare Paintings by Sienese Master Pietro Lorenzetti Come to Light After a Century in Obscurity 
Follow Artnet News on Facebook: Want to stay ahead of the art world? Subscribe to our newsletter to get the breaking news, eye-opening interviews, and incisive critical takes that drive the conversation forward. More

Grammy-winning singer Alicia Keys and her husband Kasseem Dean, the rapper and producer known by his stage name Swizz Beatz, will exhibit their landmark collection of works by Black artists at the Brooklyn Museum. The show, Giants: Art from the Dean Collection of Swizz Beatz and Alicia Keys, will run from February 10 to July 7, 2024.
“Swizz Beatz and Alicia Keys have been among the most vocal advocates for Black creatives to support Black artists through their collecting, advocacy, and partnerships. In the process, they have created one of the most important collections of contemporary art,” museum director Anne Pasternak said.
The exhibition will bring together works by around 40 artists in the couple’s collection. Known as the Dean Collection, the trove boasts artworks by the likes of Arthur Jafa, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Amy Sherald, Lorna Simpson, Kehinde Wiley, and Esther Mahlangu, as well as the largest number of works by Gordon Parks in private hands.
The show will open with an introduction to the creative lives of the Deans, with sections on different aspects of their collection, such as “On the Shoulders of Giants,” highlighting artists who “have left an indelible mark on the world.” Another section, “Giant Conversations,” will explore Black social issues, while “Giant Presence” will show monumental artworks such as Abney’s Catfish (2017).
Kwame Brathwaite, Untitled (Model who embraced natural hairstyles at AJASS photoshoot) (c. 1970, printed 2018). Photo courtesy of the Dean Collection, Swizz Beatz and Alicia Keys.
The Fallin’ crooner and her husband, both born and raised in New York, have long been vocal about their support of African American creatives, not least with their art collection.
Speaking to Artnet News in 2019, Dean characterized growing his collection of African American artworks as “building a family I didn’t even have in music, where there’s a little bit of a disconnect sometimes because of competition and wanting to be the best. I felt something different with the artists.”
Dean was on the board of the Brooklyn Museum from at least 2019 until just last month. In an email, the museum confirmed that the couple is “not funding the exhibition,” clarifying that the show is “being produced by the Brooklyn Museum.” The exhibition is organized by the museum’s curator of modern and contemporary art Kimberli Gant and curatorial assistant Indira A. Abiskaroon.
“You have to understand that this is a different game than buying a piece of jewelry or buying a car,” Dean said in 2019 about his collecting strategy. “This is actually adding to the conversation.”
See more works in the exhibition below.
Derrick Adams, Man in Grayscale (Swizz) (2017). Photo courtesy of The Dean Collection, Swizz Beatz and Alicia Keys.
Deana Lawson, Soweto Queen (2017). Photo courtesy of the Dean Collection, Swizz Beatz and Alicia Keys.
Ebony G. Patterson, . . they were just hanging out . . . you know . . . talking about . . . ( . . . when they grow up . . .) (2016). Photo courtesy of the Dean Collection, Swizz Beatz and Alicia Keys.
Tschabalala Self, Father (2019). Photo courtesy of The Dean Collection, Swizz Beatz and Alicia Keys.

More Trending Stories:  
Top French Art Expert Heads to Trial for Allegedly Selling Fake Antique Furniture to the Palace of Versailles 
Two Contemporary Female Painters Triumphed at Sotheby’s. Who Came Out on Top Depends on How You Do the Math 
How an Exclusive NYC Cult Influenced the 1970’s Art Scene 
A Rare Soulages Lithograph Possibly Worth $30,000 Sells For $130 in Facebook Marketplace Mishap 
Masterpiece or Hot Mess? Here Are 7 Bad Paintings by Famous Artists 
Is There a Hat Better Than Napoleon’s? We Rank Art History’s 5 Most Iconic Chapeaux 
Follow Artnet News on Facebook: Want to stay ahead of the art world? Subscribe to our newsletter to get the breaking news, eye-opening interviews, and incisive critical takes that drive the conversation forward. More

2023 has been the year of Mark Rothko. He is currently the subject of a landmark exhibition in Paris, which includes an impressive 115 paintings that redefines the celebrated Abstract Expressionist’s oeuvre. For anyone stateside who is experiencing FOMO, however, the smaller “Mark Rothko: Paintings on Paper” has opened at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. It’s also a revelatory show, albeit less grandiose than the Paris survey.
Though Rothko is most often associated with majestic canvases, these more intimate paintings, which the artist regarded as finished works in their own right rather than preliminary sketches, reveal a new side to his practice. Alongside his archetypal, hazy fields of color from the 1950s and 1960s, visitors can see figurative works from the 1930s and semi-surreal experimental constructions from the 1940s. In some of these early paintings, soft swathes and unfurling pools of watercolor pigment sit flat on the surface of the construction paper, foreshadowing Rothko’s later anti-illusionistic style.
The exhibition runs through March 31, 2024 and will travel to the National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design in Norway next year. Adam Greenhalgh, the associate curator at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, spoke with us about six paintings on paper that evince Rothko’s journey towards abstraction, never losing sight of painting’s richly expressive potential.
Untitled (seated woman in striped blouse) (1933–34)
Mark Rothko, Untitled (seated woman in striped blouse) (1933-34). Photo: © 2023 Kate Rothko Prizel and Christopher Rothko.
Adam Greenhalgh: “To supplement his meager income during the 1930s, Rothko taught children’s art classes at the Center Academy of the Brooklyn Jewish Center. He took the job seriously, encouraging students to prioritize self-expression over technical skill. He also practiced what he preached, painting quickly and intuitively, delighting in the fluidity and translucence of water-based paints. In this portrait, pools of paint are offset by untouched construction paper, a material also used by Rothko’s young students. Watercolor billows in currents around the woman’s head, beneath her chin, and at the base of her neck, conveying a forceful personality.
This work illustrates how Rothko took advantage of the often-unpredictable results produced by such a liquid paint. And demonstrates his admiration for portraiture of the past, which he praised for its ‘eternal interest in the human figure, character, and emotions—in short, in the human drama.’ It also hints at the facile technique and expressive content of his mature works to come.”
Untitled (seated figure in interior) (ca. 1938)
Mark Rothko, Untitled (seated figure in interior) (c. 1938). Photo: © 2023 Kate Rothko Prizel and Christopher Rothko.
Adam Greenhalgh: “Rothko was always concerned with the relationship between an artwork and its viewer. In this watercolor, a figure sits before an easel painting of a blue-skinned, pink-haired alter ego. The latter beckons invitingly with a curved blue hook of an arm. Bubblegum pink reflects onto the viewer’s face, tinting it. The pair stare at each other intensely, locked in silent communion.
Throughout his entire career, Rothko sought to foster engaging and potentially transformative encounters between viewers and paintings. This watercolor encapsulates the kind of viewing experience Rothko hoped to cultivate with an attentive and committed viewer.”
Omen (1946)
Mark Rothko, Omen (1946). Photo: © 2023 Kate Rothko Prizel and Christopher Rothko.
Adam Greenhalgh: “In the 1940s, Rothko looked to the past for a symbolic language that could address what he saw as the tragic nature of human experience. He found subjects in mythology, ancient art, archaeology, religion, and natural history, and stylistic inspiration in the work of European surrealists like Joan Miró and Yves Tanguy, who aimed to visualize the unconscious mind. Omen, with its cruciform composition, echoes 17th-century paintings that show Jesus Christ being taken down from the cross after his death. The suggestion of a figure at right, with upstretched arms and dangling legs, evokes a lifeless body.
Rothko felt that tragic biblical subjects of intense communal grief were emotionally relevant to his own time, as the world grappled with the brutality and terror of events like World War II and the Holocaust. Omen, with its pale, near monochrome palette, soft hazy appearance, and emotionally resonant subject, conveys in a powerfully moving manner, what Rothko saw as the essentially tragic nature of human experience.”
Untitled (ca. 1948)
Mark Rothko, Untitled (c. 1948). Photo: © 2023 Kate Rothko Prizel and Christopher Rothko.
Adam Greenhalgh: “In 1947 Rothko declared that the “familiar identity of things has to be pulverized.” His mid-1940s symbolic motifs and linear compositions dissolved into hazy shapes and swirling backgrounds. This watercolor exemplifies a transitional period where Rothko is on the brink of developing his classic format. Squiggles and glyphs hint at a half-length figure—torso, shoulders, and head—emerging from a colorful soup, like a final echo of earlier figurative work.
Out of quasi-abstractions like this emerged the rectangular blocks and horizontal bands that came to characterize his art from 1949 onward. Rothko adapted the thin washes and dilute glazes of watercolor paintings like this one to the canvases that would dominate his output for the final years of the decade.”
Untitled (1969)
Mark Rothko, Untitled (1969). Photo: © 2023 Kate Rothko Prizel and Christopher Rothko.
Adam Greenhalgh: “Despite being, by all accounts, unwell and depressed following a near fatal aortic aneurysm in 1968, Rothko, somewhat surprisingly, made hundreds of paintings on paper in the final two years of his life. They vary greatly in composition, palette, and effect, from fiery and explosive to placid and caliginous. Many, like this one, display a startling vigor and vitality, erupting with volcanic energies and compositional tension.
Rothko once said: “You think my paintings are calm, like windows in some cathedral? You should look again. I’m the most violent of all the American painters. Behind those colors there hides the final cataclysm.”
In late paintings on paper, amplification is the name of the game—in scale, in the energy and force of paint handling, and in the immediacy, intensity, and potency of the colors. This large orange and crimson painting is exemplary. He worked energetically with a large brush, streaking and smearing the paint across the paper. His powerful gestures are recorded in the quick-drying acrylic paint. Rothko began this work with a thin base layer of pink ink, which makes the orange background almost blindingly phosphorescent.”
Untitled (1969)
Mark Rothko, Untitled (1969). Photo: © 2023 Kate Rothko Prizel and Christopher Rothko.
Adam Greenhalgh: “Rothko’s late paintings on canvas trend dark—blacks, purples, maroons. After he died by suicide on February 25, 1970, the dark palette of these works became associated with his death—a link that persisted.
But, in the final months of his life, he produced a lesser-known suite of ethereal paintings on paper with soft, cloudlike edges surrounded by margins of pale paper. These late works, including this radiant pink painting, undermines any simple association between dark palette and mental or physical health. It is intriguing to speculate where Rothko might have taken his work after this startling painting.”
Follow Artnet News on Facebook: Want to stay ahead of the art world? Subscribe to our newsletter to get the breaking news, eye-opening interviews, and incisive critical takes that drive the conversation forward. More