Eliana Willis

Johnny Depp, not content with playing a gangster, chocolatier, and man with scissors for hands, has landed his greatest starring role yet: artist. Don’t believe it? The beloved actor and musician has now opened a massive exhibition of his art in New York to demonstrate his bona fides and illustrate how artistry just flows through his veins, man.
Titled “A Bunch of Stuff,” the show is billed as a “multi-layered immersive exhibition” bringing together various works that Depp has created over the years. “Some may call it art, some may not; I call it mine,” he wrote in introductory wall text. In effect, through his paintings and collages, we’re trailing the artist on his creative journey, which has closely mirrored his personal life. “His art,” as organizer Bau Art touts it, “is emotion made flesh.”
Installation view of “A Bunch of Stuff.” Photo: Min Chen.
The expansive exhibition venue in Chelsea makes that journey literal. One enters the show through a winding path draped with lush red curtains, before being released into an area dubbed the White Box, featuring dozens of thematic works. Another room called the Black Box plays an animated film, while outside of it are pieces of furniture from the artist’s studio and a wall where visitors can leave messages for the star. You exit through a gift shop stocked with merchandise and silkscreen prints.
Installation view of “A Bunch of Stuff.” Photo: Min Chen.
It’s as much a showcase of art as it is a trip into Depp’s mind and an unironic exercise in self-mythologizing, fitting for a man who’s come up in show business. (Of note, the exhibition opens as Modi, the Depp-directed Amadeo Modigliani biopic—that modern-day form of hagiography—is making the film festival rounds.) So, what kind of artist is Depp? What’s he been cooking up in the studio? What is his emotion made flesh? Here’s a bunch of stuff in the show.

His word paintings
Johnny Depp, Buy the Ticket, Take the Ride (2021) on view at “A Bunch of Stuff.” Photo: Min Chen.
These pieces feature hand-lettering by Depp that spells out various slogans, such as “Question Everything” and “The Joke Is on Us, But Aren’t Jokes Meant to be Funny.” The show’s accompanying leaflet informs us that they “recall” the work of Ralph Steadman—the artist best known for his illustrations for Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, a non-fiction touchstone by Hunter S. Thompson, who Depp depicted in a 1998 film—though that’s putting things delicately. Fear and Loathing has evidently shaped the actor enough that the show opens with a piece bluntly scrawled with “Buy the Ticket, Take the Ride,” a turn of phrase lifted from Thompson’s famed tome.
Installation view of “A Bunch of Stuff,” featuring Johnny Depp’s “Hedy Lamarr” series. Photo: Min Chen.
More interesting is his “Hedy Lamarr” series, a sequence of “graffiti-style paintings” with words taken from the Depp and Jeff Beck track about the Hollywood star and inventor. While still obviously aping Steadman’s style, they evince more care in composition, pops of color, and ink blots that echo the lyrics’ sentiment. The most vividly visual piece contains the song’s opening line: “Erased by the same world that made her a star.”

An actual… bunch of stuff
Installation view of “A Bunch of Stuff.” Photo: Min Chen.
In a blue-curtained area is an installation featuring cables hanging from the ceiling and threaded with diverse artifacts. There are feathers, sketches, small collages, cigarette papers, postcards, bookmarks, and cryptic musings on hotel stationery. These are presumably relics pulled from the actor’s archive (or pockets?) and offer the promised peek into his creative thinking—the art of his life, as he might even put it.

The other paintings
Installation view of “A Bunch of Stuff.” Photo: Min Chen.
As we know from his 2023 sale of prints that reportedly netted him millions, Depp enjoys capturing his friends and compatriots on canvas. In “A Bunch of Stuff,” he’s included studies of Marlon Brando, Jack Kerouac, and Keith Richards, as well as tender portraits of his son Jack and his darling dog Moohman. There are paintings of mysterious characters that Depp has imagined as well, among them “Everyman” and “The Bunnyman,” the exhibition text tells me.
These works vary in style; some have been painted on canvases composed of cigarette papers, which lend the works unique textures.
Johnny Depp, Moohman (2008) on view at “A Bunch of Stuff.” Photo: Min Chen.
It seems the actor also has a thing for skulls (maybe because he once played a pirate). A whole series depicts skeletons and skulls as forms of memento mori. A pointillist work frames a skeleton with the stenciled phrase “Death by Confetti,” which Depp explains in an accompanying film thusly: “The business celebrates you… they build you up to this great height, but you’re choking on that. I think the skeletons understand that.”
Johnny Depp, Death by Confetti – Celebration (2019–24) (detail) on view at “A Bunch of Stuff.” Photo: Min Chen.
Between this skull and the Hedy Lamarr tribute, one can’t help but sense Depp’s frustration about the damage to his public standing following his 2022 legal battle with ex-wife Amber Heard—his “cancellation,” per the parlance of our times. Or perhaps, in his own words, he’s just “cursed with a dark sense of humor.”

This desk
Installation view of “A Bunch of Stuff.” Photo: Min Chen.
The space called the White Box is installed with pieces of furniture in what appear to be recreations of Depp’s private spaces. One looks like a studio, staged with an easel and a cabinet of paint supplies; another a living room, complete with an electric guitar in a corner and a cluttered coffee table. At the entrance to the exhibition, there’s an impressive antique writing desk stacked with a typewriter and all manner of knickknacks—a bell, a magnifying glass, a skull of course, and a cymbal case stickered with old backstage passes, among others. Is this Depp’s actual desk, a stage for his artsy inclinations, or both? No idea, but the desk is very nice.

An animated “visual experience”
Inside the Black Box at “A Bunch of Stuff.” Photo: Min Chen.
A 13-minute film or “visual experience,” per the exhibition text, plays on loop in the Black Box, animating Depp’s artworks and featuring his narration. In it, he recounts episodes from his life—his nomadic upbringing, his friendship with Brando—and shares how he’s been guided by a creative impulse since he was a child drawing on the walls.
Created by the experiential team TAIT, the film is quite compelling, lending movement and meaning to Depp’s artistic oeuvre, while being unwittingly revealing. “I’ve been more people than most people have been,” he intones in his voiceover. “The question becomes, is there anything that I can offer? Is there anything uniquely me that I can add?” They’re good questions to ask.
“A Bunch of Stuff” is on view at the Starrett-Lehigh Building, 600 W 27th St, New York. More

A new exhibition at the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna offers viewers the rare chance to see the work of the Dutch master Rembrandt van Rijn in conversation with his student Samuel van Hoogstraten.
“Rembrandt – Hoogstraten: Color and Illusion,” which the museum is billing as the largest showing of Rembrandt’s major works ever to come to Austria, features over 60 paintings and drawings by the artists side by side. It not only considers the teacher-pupil relationship but also looks at these two painters’ work in a 21st-century context. The exhibition features loans from museums from across the globe, including the National Gallery in London, Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum, the Louvre in Paris, and New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, among others. 
The show illuminates Rembrandt’s legendary technique, which captures dramatic scenes through sumptuous use of light and darkness. Similar qualities also became a part of the work of Van Hoogstraten, who also experimented with perspective and is known as a painter of architecture.
Samuel van Hoogstraten, Perspective View with a Young Man Reading in a Renaissance Palace (1662/67). © Dordrechts Museum. Photo: Bob Strik, Reprorek.
Van Hoogstraten’s 1632 painting Young Man Reading in a Renaissance Palace contains many of the hallmarks of his work. Within a trompe-l’oeil architectural frame, we see an impressive colonnade leading to a palatial home in the distance, as a young man studies a book in the middle ground, a faithful dog resting on the tiled floor nearby.
Rembrandt’s famous work Juno, painted between 1662-1665 and finished just four years before the artist’s death, is part of a series of female subjects the artist painted later in life. Here, the wife of Jupiter is depicted in an ornate dress with a crown and fur-trimmed cape. The use of shadows and darker colors helps to highlight the subject’s face and illuminate various details, including her jeweled brooch and scepter. 
Rembrandt van Rijn, Juno (1662/65). © Hammer Museum, Los Angeles.
Another Van Hoogstraten standout is The Slippers (1650). Here, perspective is used again to give viewers an intimate look into a domestic space. A checkered floor gives way to a threshold on which rests a pair of slippers; in the room beyond, cleverly, a Dutch painting of an interior hangs, artwork-within-artwork. 
Samuel van Hoogstraten, The Slippers (1650/75). Photo © RMN-Grand Palais (musée du Louvre) / Michel Urtado.
Rembrandt’s 1665 painting Self-Portrait with Two Circles is one of the Baroque artist’s most moving and mysterious late works; he is renowned for his revealing works in this genre, which number about 40. The artist can be seen holding brushes and a palate in a shallow space; the work almost appears to be left unfinished. 
Another factor setting Van Hoogstraten apart from his teacher and explored in this show is his use of perspective boxes. These small wood enclosures, produced in Amsterdam in the second half of the 17th century, allowed viewers to look through a peephole into a shallow painted interior that created an illusion of three-dimensionality. London’s National Gallery owns one by Van Hoogstraten; a replica was created for this show. 
Samuel van Hoogstraten, Old Man at a Window (1653). © KHM-Museumsverband.
The exhibition also studies the two artists’ efforts at illusionism, including, for example, Rembrandt’s Girl in a Picture Frame and the younger artist’s Old Man at the Window and Feigned Letter-Rack Painting, which attempt to fool the eye and confuse the boundary between actual and painted space. In a 21st-century nod to these illusionistic moves, the show features interactive spaces and projections, too.
Samuel van Hoogstraten, Feigned Letter-Rack Painting. © Creative Commons, Staatliche Kunsthalle Karlsruhe.
“Rembrandt – Hoogstraten: Color and Illusion” will remain on view at the Kunsthistorisches Museum Vienna, Maria-Theresien Platz, through January 25th, 2025. More

In Jane Austen’s 1814 coming-of-age novel Mansfield Park, Fanny Price, a young woman who learns to navigate high society when she moves into the estate of her aunt and uncle, receives an amber cross from her brother William, a navy officer who just returned from Sicily.
This detail, like many others in Austen’s work, is directly inspired by the author’s own life. Her brother Charles was a sailor, too, and would often bring back trinkets from his travels. Some of these trinkets—including a pair of topaz crosses gave to Austen and her sister Cassandra—are now on display at Jane Austen’s House, her onetime residence in Chawton, the U.K.
The museum’s newest exhibition, “Jane Austen and the Art of Writing,” opened on October 9. Included with general admission to the House, it explores the relationship between Austen’s writing—which aside from Mansfield Park includes such timeless novels as Emma, Pride and Prejudice, and Sense and Sensibility—and the domestic setting in which she wrote.
Jane Austen’s House in Chawton. Photo: Jane Austen’s House.
Aside from those aforementioned crosses, the exhibition features rarely seen first-edition copies of Austen’s novels, two of which belonged to her brothers Frank and Edward. Also featured are several of Austen’s letters, which, while not as famous as her full-fledged novels, display her skill as a writer and offer insight into her private life.
Being Jane Austen’s former residence, the museum also houses some of her favorite pieces of furniture, including a custom-made, 12-sided display case and a 12-sided writing table, the latter of which is now located in the building’s dining room. (According to the memoirs of Austen’s nephew James Edward Austen-Leigh, her desk used to be located in the sitting room, because its creaking door warned the author of approaching footsteps.)
Jane Austen’s historic kitchen. Photo: Jane Austen’s House.
Items from the John Murray Archive at the National Library of Scotland shed light on Austen’s relationship with her publishers, John Murray and Thomas Egerton. A check made out to “Miss Jane Austin” [sic], taken from Murray’s account book, show that Austen, unlike female authors from previous centuries, did not write under a male or gender-neutral pen name.
“This exhibition is a deep dive into Jane Austen’s creative process,” Sophie Reynolds, the House’s head of collections, interpretations and events, said in a press release. “We hope that it will unlock a new way for our visitors to understand Jane Austen as a dedicated, driven and professional writer, and to explore how her life and living arrangements affected her writing in the very house in which she lived and wrote.”
Jane Austen’s writing table. Photo: Luke Shears / Jane Austen’s House.
The show will lead the museum into the 250th anniversary of the legendary author’s birth. Throughout the incoming year, Jane Austen’s House will organize a variety of exhibitions, events, and festivals, starting with the annual Pride and Prejudice Day on January 28, which will include a public reading of the novel, and ending with musical performances, readings, and tours on December 16.
“Jane Austen and the Art of Writing” is on view at Jane Austen’s House, Winchester Rd, Chawton, Alton, U.K. More

The Middle Ages were not the ‘dark’ and somber antithesis to the Enlightenment that clichés may have us believe. It was also a time of fantasy and certainly playful humor. Now, a comedic character ubiquitous to medieval culture—the fool—is taking center stage as the subject of a Louvre exhibit in Paris titled, “Figures of the Fool,” from October 16 to February 3, 2025.
From witty jesters to lascivious buffoons, men gone mad and subversive artists who live on the margins of society, the show takes a fresh look at how this figure was regularly depicted from the 13th to the 16th century, and then again during the Romantic era. In the imaginations of those who painted, carved, and wove these figures of folly on everything from tableaux to, literally, bells and whistles, these subjects served as a canvas for exploring a world turned on its head. A mirror to the absurdity and contradictions of life that were hard to face, but important to express and attempt to understand. In the form of the fool, this was most often voiced through humor—possibly the ultimate, and only real salve to the weight of life’s troubles.
After Hyeronimus Bosch, Concert in the Egg Former Netherlands, mid XVIth century.© RMN-Grand Palais (Palais des Beaux-Arts, Lille). Stéphane Maréchalle
If this all sounds like it could as easily apply to contemporary life, it’s no coincidence. The jester —inspiration for the playing card, the Joker, more on that below—has continued to capture our imaginations for many of the same reasons. The Louvre exhibit, featuring over 300 artworks from Northern Europe, sheds new light on why that may be.
Who or what exactly is the fool, as it originated in the Middle Ages? A common depiction comes from the characters described in Sebastian Brant’s Ship of Fools (1494), a hugely popular and influential, German satirical allegory. There, the fool, “plays a key role, because he is an outlet during a time of crisis in the church, and amid the mutations of a society in full upheaval, notably with the emergence of capitalism,” said Elisabeth Antoine-König, senior curator in the Department of Decorative Arts in an e-mail written in French. “The fool allows for a figurative representation of questions troubling society,” she added. Later, during the Romantic period, the fool—usually a male figure—is identified with the artist, and their struggle with inner thoughts and emotions.
The fool is “one thing and its opposite, he is the rejected marginalized figure, and the one who unites us, and bears the ridicule and anger of others,” added Antoine-König, who compares these ambivalent traits with the supervillain Joker, of DC Comics.
Marx Reichlich, A Jester. Tyrol (ca. 1519-1520). © Yale University Art Gallery.
By coincidence, Todd Philipps’s new film, Joker: Folie a Deux has come out at about the same time as the Louvre’s exhibit, though the latter was apparently in the making for over ten years. Far be it from the world’s largest museum to pass up a golden opportunity. The Louvre partnered with Warner Bros Pictures on a short clip promoting both endeavors. Lady Gaga, who stars in the Joker film, can be seen in the clip wandering through the Louvre halls at night, and painting a red lipstick smile over the glass protecting the Mona Lisa. From the right angle, it transforms La Joconde’s modest, soft smile, into a wide, cartoonish grin. Plus, La Joconde, as she is called in French, sounds a lot like Joker, points out the museum in a statement. Touché.
Aquamanile : Aristotle and Phyllis. South Netherlandish, (ca. 1380). © The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Yet as captivating and troublesome a figure as the fool still is, Antoine-König wonders whether there is still much we can learn from the fool of yesteryear, when it played a much more prominent role in social life. “I feel that the figure of the fool, as it existed in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance is lacking today, in helping us face the crises we are experiencing… During that period [13th to 16th centuries], most subjects could be interpreted in a variety of ways. Today, we reflect little on the exercise of seeing things from different angles.”
Jan Matejko, Stanczyk during a ball at the court of Queen Bona in the face of the loss of Smolensk. Krakow, (1862). © Varsovie, Muzeum Narodowe w Warszawie / Piotr Ligier
Antoine-König, who co-curated the Louvre exhibit with Pierre-Yves Le Pogam, also compares our current, fraught experience with digital technology and social media to the radical transformations brought by the invention of the printer. “But who is helping us manage this turning point?” She asks. “In the artworks we are exhibiting, the artists, and through them, the people of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, allowed themselves to laugh about a lot of particularly difficult things.” More

Amid a bustling week in Paris, as the art market continues to clamor for bits of real estate and attention in the city of lights, the French capital’s institutions continue to shine with major art exhibitions. Here are five shows that you must not miss on your next visit.

“Barbara Chase-Riboud: Everytime A Knot is Undone, A God is Released”
Several Locations
September 17, 2024—January 13, 2025
Barbara Chase-Riboud, Mao’s Organ (2007). 2024 Musée Guimet © Barbara Chase-Riboud.
In a never-before-seen synchronized collaboration, eight major museums in Paris—including the Musée d’Orsay, Louvre Museum, Centre Pompidou, and the Palais de Tokyo—are concurrently showing work by a living artist. “Everytime A Knot is Undone, A God is Released” is named after Barbara Chase-Riboud’s poetry collection released in 2014, and celebrates the artist’s seven-decade career. Sculptures by Chase-Riboud, made from a variety of materials from bronze to wool, act like markers of Chase-Riboud’s life in the city where she has lived since 1961, spread across the city over the course of four months. “Everytime A Knot is Undone, A God is Released” is the first multi-museum exhibition of a solo artist ever in the French capital, let alone the first to unite eight of the country’s most important galleries and museums.

“Arte Povera”
The Pinault Collection
October 9, 2024–January 20, 2025
Michelangelo Pistoletto, Venus of Rags (1967). © Pinault Collection, 2024.
The Arte Povera movement, born in Northern Italy in the 1960s, was not so much “Povera” as in “poor,” but as in “humble.” Artists created artwork from non-traditional materials and brought their unusual sculptures into the formal gallery space. Curated by Arte Povera specialist Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, the major show at the Pinault Collection includes historically significant works from the collection as well as new commissions and loans from international collections.
Including Michelangelo Pistoletto’s Venus of Rags (1967), Alighiero Boetti’s Castasta (1967), and one of Mario Merz’ igloos among over 250 artworks made by or in response to the Arte Povera group, the show at Paris’ Pinault Collection is sure to be a comprehensive guide through one of Italy’s most influential conceptual art movements.

“Jackson Pollock: The Early Years (1934 – 1947)”
Musée Picasso
October 15, 2024–January 19, 2025
Jackson Pollock, The Key (1946). © Pollock-Krasner Foundation / ADAGP, Paris 2024.
His first exhibition in France for over 15 years, “Jackson Pollock: The Early Years (1934–1947)” is a comprehensive showcase of the Abstract Expressionist icon’s early career. Evidencing Pollock’s interest in Native American art, contemporary avant-garde artwork from Europe, and the work of the Mexican Muralists, in The Early Years we see how Pollock moved towards the development of his signature “drip” action paintings begun in 1947.  These earlier works, which include figurative Expressionist-inspired paintings, drawings—some of which the artist may have brought with him to Jungian therapy sessions he undertook in the 1930s to address his alcohol issues—as well as sculptures, have not often been exhibited in their own right.

“Elmgreen & Dragset: L’Addition”
Musée d’Orsay
October 15, 2024–February 2, 2025
Elmgreen et Dragset © Musée d’Orsay Sophie Crépy
Nestling a new series of figurative artworks into the museum’s sculpture nave in a site-specific curation that straddles sculpture and performance, L’Addition is a never-before-seen architectural installation at the Musée d’Orsay. Such innovation comes as no surprise to fans of Elmgreen & Dragset, the Scandinavian duo who have built their reputation on subversive artworks and humorous installations. Exploring notions of masculinity in dialogue with works in the permanent collection of the Musée d’Orsay, “L’Addition” is guaranteed to highlight both subtler themes in and surprising similarities between both collections.

“Martine Syms: Total”
Lafayette Anticipations, Fondation Galeries Lafayette
October 16, 2024–February 9, 2025
Martine Syms, This Is A Studio / Aunty (35) (2022-23). © Martine Syms. Courtesy of the artist, Sprüth Magers.
Syms’ first retrospective in France, “Total” is the American artist’s attempt to entirely envelop the Lafayette in a total work of art. Including pieces from all stages of Syms’ career from 2007 onwards, this show tackles and breaks down the boundaries between public exhibition space, private artist studio, and gift shop by asking conceptual questions about the intersections between images and identities.
These intersections are referred to in the show’s promotional materials as the “theatre of the everyday.” A selection of works and motifs from the show have been produced in editions for purchase, continuing the show’s dialogue about consumption and ownership. Offering visitors a colorful, multi-media experience, “Total” delves into what it means to live life in public spaces in a surveillance-heavy era.

“Pop Forever, Tom Wesselmann &…”
The Fondation Louis Vuitton
October 17, 2024–February 24, 2025
Tom Wesselmann, Mouth #14 (Marilyn) (1967). © Adagp, Paris, 2024, Jeffrey Sturges.
Taking over all floors of the Fondation Louis Vuitton, “Pop Forever, Tom Wesselmann &” is putting over 200 works by Pop Art legends on display in Paris. Alongside 150 works by Wesselmann are pieces by Ai Weiwei, Andy Warhol, Marisol, Claes Oldenburg, Yayoi Kusama, Jeff Koons, and Roy Lichtenstein. This exhibition is a celebration of all-things Pop Art, in all of its manifestations from the Surrealist and Dada-inspired beginnings to artists today influenced by Pop’s pioneers of the 1950s and 1960s. Key works on display will include Wesselmann’s early collages made in the 1950s as well as his later landscapes made shortly before his death in 2004, as well as Warhol’s Shot Sage Blue Marilyn (1964), and Jeff Koons’ Three Ball 50/50 Tank (1985). More

In April 1874, 150 years ago, the Impressionists held their first exhibition together in the studio of Felix Nadar on the Boulevard des Capucines in Paris. It was a less-than-complimentary review by the critic Louis Leroy of this show that would give the burgeoning art group their name: Leroy describing how Monet’s Impression, Sunrise was less finished that “wallpaper in its embryonic state” and “Impressionism” being reclaimed.
Now, Amsterdam’s Van Gogh Museum is the site of the new exhibition “Vive l’impressionnisme! Masterpieces from Dutch Collections,” marking the revolutionary art movement’s 150th anniversary.
Paintings, sculptures, drawings, prints, and decorative plates by major Impressionists are being brought together for the exhibition, including work by Claude Monet, Edgar Degas, Berthe Morisot, Mary Cassatt, Auguste Rodin, Camille Pissarro, and Pierre-August Renoir. Artworks on display have been loaned from collections across the country, including from some of the Netherland’s most significant arts institutions including the Rijksmuseum, Stedelijk Museum, Kröller-Müller Museum, and the Kunstmuseum the Hague as well as numerous Dutch private collections. 150 Years of Impressionism – The Netherlands Sees the Light, an accompanying publication to the exhibition, includes texts by 13 Impressionist curators and scholars.
Claude Monet, Poppy Field (Champs de coquelicots) (1881) © Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen.
The exhibition homes in on how Impressionism was received in the Netherlands, and looks at the role that key Dutch collectors like Theo van Gogh played in the movement’s spread outside of France. The catalogue accompanying “Vive l’impressionnisme!” explores the questions the exhibition attempts to tackle, including “when did interest in Impressionist art arise in the Netherlands; who exhibited these works; who purchased them for their own collections; and which works were not appreciated or acquired in time?”
The art dealer Theo van Gogh is best-known for financially supporting his brother, Vincent van Gogh, acting as his dealer, financier, and confidant throughout his life. After Vincent’s death in 1890 and Theo’s in 1891, Theo’s widow Johanna van Gogh-Bonger collated and published a collection of some of the hundreds of letters that the brothers had sent back and forth to each other over many years. This published collection helped to cement Vincent’s legacy after being famously under-appreciated during his lifetime.
Pierre-Auguste Renoir, In the Café (Au café) (c. 1877) © Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo.
The Van Gogh Museum opened in Amsterdam’s Museum Square in June 1973, 83 years after the artist’s death, displaying—among other major artworks—previously unsold work by van Gogh. These unsold works had passed from Johanna to her son, also named Vincent, and were subsequently loaned to the Stedelijk Museum for many years before the Dutch government commissioned a permanent museum dedicated to the artist in 1963.
While the Van Gogh brothers did have their own collection which included several Impressionist works, the Van Gogh Museum has been on a mission since the 1990s to expand their collection of Impressionist art. Recently the Museum has been focused on acquiring work by female Impressionists, most recently collecting pieces by Marie Bracquemond, Berthe Morisot, and Mary Cassatt: Impressionism’s “Trois Grandes Dames”. Part of the exhibition, a virtual installation called the Gallery of Lost Opportunities will highlight masterpieces which were once held in Dutch collections but were sold to collections abroad.
Berthe Morisot, Walk in the Woods (Au bois) (1876) © Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam.
Other 150th anniversary celebrations have been held around the world, including an auction at Christie’s New York, an exhibition at the Musee d’Orsay, Paris, and a festival in Normandy.
Fleur Roos Rosa de Carvalho, the curator of the show, told Artnet News: “I am thrilled to finally share this exhibition with the world. It presents a broad picture of the Impressionist movement, celebrating artists who refused to stick to a singular medium—they moved fluidly between different art forms, ignoring all of the age-old hierarchies that ranked painting at the top. Here colorful watercolors and pastels are shown with experimental sculptures and prints, which we hope will challenge the prevailing image of the Impressionists as mere painters of light and color.”
Mary Cassatt, Woman Bathing (1890–91) © Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam.
“I’m also really honored to bring these Dutch collections together under one roof for the first time. It’s my hope that the show will inspire other museums and private collectors to continue to work together on an ambitious collecting policy for Impressionist art that transcends national boundaries.”
“Vive l’impressionnisme! Masterpieces from Dutch Collections” will be on display at the Van Gogh Museum from October 11 2024 to 26 January 2025. More

“Dalí Alive,” a multimedia exhibition at the Lume at Indianapolis’s Newfields, has redirected attention to a mysterious case of a missing watercolor by the famed Surrealist whose designs the show is devoted to.
The exhibition, spread across 30,000 square feet, sees Salvador Dalí artworks enlarged and projected onto the walls and floors, promising an immersive experience. “Dalí Alive” follows on from the Lume’s first two immersive shows devoted to reliable crowd-pleasers, one each to Impressionism and to Vincent van Gogh.
The display includes four Dalí watercolors (remember that number!) from the collection of the Indianapolis Museum of Art, part of the Newfields complex.
Salvador Dalí, Tragedy and Comedy (1961). © 2023 Salvador Dalí, Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí, Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY.
The Spaniard created the watercolors as part of his commission to design sets and costumes for the 1961–62 production of Baroque composer Alessandro Scarlatti’s 1714 opera The Spanish Lady and the Roman Cavalier, produced by Lorenzo Alvary. A Hungarian-American operatic bass, Alvary created his own company in order to put on the opera, in which he played the male lead.
Dalí was in some ways a sensible choice: he had already some experience as a designer for theatrical productions, including several ballets throughout the 1940s.
The opera follows a love story between a Roman centurion and a Catalan woman following the fall of the Roman Empire. The production traveled to Venice, Brussels, and Paris, a tour apparently so physically grueling that a principal ballerina (who had been performing without an understudy for seven months) collapsed on stage during a Paris performance.
Salvador Dalí, The Elephants (1961). © 2023 Salvador Dalí, Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí, Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY.
Decca Records released a 1962 record of the opera that featured an interview with Dalí. The album cover features one of the watercolors, Apotheosis (1961), emblazoned with a large signature; other Dalí works are included on the reverse and inside of the record sleeve, including Tragedy and Comedy.
In addition to Apotheosis, which features Dalí’s trademark melting clocks among other Surrealist details, and Tragedy and Comedy, Lume is also displaying Musicians and The Elephants, which which Dalí created for the opera and which stars long-legged pachyderms that are also seen in Dalí’s 1948 The Elephants.
Dalí had extravagant plans for The Spanish Lady. Actors blew bubbles filled with Guerlain perfume (though they failed to achieve the square bubbles that Dalí wanted). A Time magazine review of the show gives a long list of things that went awry during a performance at Venice’s La Fenice theatre. These oddities included Dalí himself throwing paint onto a canvas (and onto some audience members) while dressed as a Venetian gondolier, and several “visual distractions” like a walking violin, a blind man seated in front of a TV, some uncomfortably erotic dancing, and liquid carbon dioxide “milk” flowing onto the stage from underneath the rafters.
Salvador Dalí, Musicians (1961). © 2023 Salvador Dalí, Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí, Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY.
The collaboration between artist and producer was not a peaceful one. Dalí took Alvary to court when he claimed that he was not staying true to his creative vision. (The case was dismissed.) Plans to take the show to London and New York were duly scrapped.
“Dalí Alive” is the first time the watercolor set designs from The Spanish Lady have been on public display for over 45 years. Alvary and his wife Hallie, who owned the paintings, donated them to the Indianapolis Museum of Art in 1973; their agreement with Dalí stipulated that they would not be allowed to sell them.
But here’s the mystery: there were five watercolors, not just the four on view in Indianapolis. The location of the final watercolor is unknown, and it was not donated to the IMA.
Also missing are the costume designs. Their whereabouts are entirely unknown.
“Dalí Alive” is on view at the Lume Indianapolis at Newfields, 4000 N Michigan Rd, Indianapolis, through December 29.  More

As Art Basel returns to Paris at the Grand Palais, the city’s vibrant scene of art dealers are presenting new exhibitions timed with the influx of collectors and global attention.
From renowned international contemporary figures like Dana Schutz to art history stalwarts like Sturtevant, here are eight must-see shows.

“Maison Ancart”
Gagosian
October 13—December 20, 2024
Le Grand Parc (2024) © Harold Ancart. Photo: JSP Art Photography. Courtesy the artist and Gagosian
From twinkling nightscapes of groves, to kissing trees with bright red crowns painted like plump lips, New York-based Belgian artist Harold Ancart opens a window into nature with his upcoming solo exhibit “Maison Ancart” at Gagosian. Trees are the central figures of this show’s paintings, which were “conceived in conversation with the spirit of radical freedom,” according to a statement from the gallery. Fields, mountains, and trees are recurring motifs throughout the artist’s body of work. His art has previously been featured at other behemoth galleries like David Zwirner, and on the concrete walls of handball courts in New York City. Ancart’s imagined landscapes, created using oil sticks, are a delight that you won’t want to miss.

Sylvia Snowden
White CubeOctober 15—November 16, 2024
Sylvia Snowden Sandra Billups (1982) © the artist. Photo © White Cube (Frankie Tyska)
France’s first solo exhibition of works by acclaimed American painter Sylvia Snowden (b. 1942) will be presented by White Cube. The show will feature the artist’s powerful “M Street” series. Created between 1978 and 1997, the collection of emotionally charged paintings captures the lives of the residents of M Street in Washington, DC, where Snowden has lived and worked for more than 45 years. Snowden’s practice digs deep into the African American experience, with a palpable intensity on every canvas built through her raw, impasto brushstrokes and kaleidoscopic whorls of limbs. This Paris exhibition coincides with her first European museum show at the Hepworth Wakefield in the UK and marks her full-circle return to the city, where she first studied at the prestigious Académie de la Grande Chaumièr in 1962. The exhibition is part of the gallery’s “Inside the White Cube” series, a curated exhibition series featuring accomplished, non-represented artists from around the world.

Rashid Johnson’s “Anima”
Hauser & Wirth
October 14—December 21, 2024
Rashid Johnson Untitled Standing Soul (2024). Photo: Walla Walla Foundry © Rashid Johnson. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth
Animism is the belief that all things, even inanimate objects, have souls. It’s why Marie Kondo suggests you thank your timeworn shoes for your time together before donating them to your local thrift store. American artist Rashid Johnson compels you to contemplate body and soul as he explores animism in his new exhibition “Anima,” opening at Hauser & Wirth Paris this month.
“Interiority has always been essential in my project … There’s a sense of soul searching, a sense of intimacy that is necessary for me to explore,” the artist explained in a statement from the gallery. The exhibition will showcase “Soul Paintings” and “God Paintings,” two series of works Johnson has been developing over the past several years. Several bronze sculptures by the artist will also be on display. Their wispy metal twists to form skeletal masks that could have been summoned into 3D from one of his paintings.
Jean-Marie Appriou’s “Exonaut Horizon”
Perrotin
October 12—November 16, 2024
Jean-Marie Appriou. ©Jean-Marie Appriou / ADAGP Paris, 2024. Courtesy of the artist and Perrotin.
French artist Jean-Marie Appriou is an elementalist, wielding marble, glass, bronze, and even lava, to create his mythological sculptures. His work has been displayed across France from the Louvre to the Fondation Louis Vuitton; now, Perrotin gallery promises to transform its space into an immersive stage where visitors can explore the inner workings of Appriou’s cosmic universe.
The show will feature sheer silk robes like kimonos, engraved to depict floating bronze jellyfish or stout little penguins. One of Appriou’s particularly captivating artifacts is a molten glass orb with plaster fractal faces embedded within it, like a comet that has fallen to the earth carrying evidence of humanoid alien life.
Kader Attia’s “Pluvialité”
Mor Charpentier
October 5th – November 16th, 2024
Untitled, Kader Attia, 2024. Photo by Laurent Lecat. Courtesy of Galerie Mor Charpentier
In celebration of the opening of its new Parisian location at 18 rue des Quatre-Fils, Galerie Mor Charpentier has announced “Pluvialité,” an exhibition featuring Algerian-French artist Kader Attia’s work. The gallery is known for its support of artists from the global south whose work tackles socio-political issues. Attia’s practice explores themes of identity, memory, and the concept of repair through different mediums. The exhibition, Attia’s first show in Paris in a decade, will feature works on canvas, repaired objects, and a dynamic installation. The installation is a study of time and nature, comprised of a battery of rain sticks supported by unipods, arranged like wind turbines, spinning at different tempos.
.
“Zip Zap!”
Thaddaeus Ropac
October 12—December 21, 2024
A member of Sotheby’s staff poses with artwork entitled ‘Warhol’s Marilyn Monroe’ 1967, by US artist Elaine Sturtevant. Photo by BEN STANSALL / AFP)
Thaddaeus Ropac Gallery is celebrating the 100 -year anniversary of the birth of groundbreaking American conceptual artist Sturtevant, promising a “sexy funky show that goes through time and thought.” Sturtevant is best known for her pioneering work in appropriation art in the 1960s, where she created near-exact replicas of works by other famous artists. She began her practice long before the concept of “appropriation” was widely understood in the art world. Sturtevant most famously replicated Andy Warhol’s silkscreen works, including his famous Flowers series and portraits of Marilyn Monroe. Warhol himself once remarked, “I don’t know why people are so upset. I only do what Sturtevant does.” He was highlighting the blurred lines between original and copy that Sturtevant sought to explore.

Dana Schutz’s “The Sea and All Its Subjects”
David Zwirner
October 14—November 16, 2024
Dana Schutz, Mountain Group, (2018). © Dana Schutz. Photo: Jeff McLane.
Dana Schutz’s surreal paintings are as comical as they are revolting. A number of the paintings in her upcoming show at Zwirner’s Paris location, called “The Sea and All its Subjects,” are of figures trapped in sisyphean tasks. One of the paintings, The Optometrists (2024), depicts an anthropomorphic cyclops in a knitted sweater crawling through a pit of loose eyeballs and other spherical objects, seemingly picking out his favorite. The New York-based artist is known for her visual storytelling, constructing complex narratives of subjects involved in their own realities. “The Sea and All its Subjects” will be Schutz’s second solo show with the gallery, following her major institution presentation “Dana Schutz: Le monde visible” (The Visible World) at the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris that ended earlier this year.

Bracha Ettinger’s “Trust After the End of Trust”
High Art Paris
October 14—December 1, 2024
Bracha L. Ettinger Untitled (2013-2023). Courtesy the artist and High Art
For artist, writer, and psychoanalyst Bracha L. Ettinger, painting is a medium for tending to historical wounds with compassion. Her feminist psychoanalytic background might explain the rorschach quality of the inky, spectral figures in her abstract artwork. Her paintings are deeply emotional, sometimes haunted by regret, other times imbued with gentle wonder. A statement from High Art Paris describes her work as “a monumental architecture of female sign language.” For Ettinger, who lives between Tel Aviv and Paris, “Trust after the End of Trust” is an artistic and theoretical concept that extends her broader exploration of trauma and subjectivity.  More