Eliana Willis

More than 20 years ago, Hugh Nini and his partner Neal Treadwell were browsing in an antique shop in Dallas, Texas, when they came across a 1920s photo of a young male couple in which they were sure they saw clandestine love. Struck by the risk the pictured couple had taken by showing themselves intertwined physically, in everyday clothing in an American suburb, Nini and Treadwell saw themselves. 
Their collection of images of men in love now encompasses more than 4,000 photographs from about 1850 to 1950, spanning events like the Civil War, two World Wars, and the Great Depression, and coming from all across the world. A selection was published in a book, Loving: A Photographic History of Men in Love, 1850s-1950s, in 2020. Reviewing it in Rolling Stone, Jerry Portwood said it was “gorgeous” and called it “a promise we keep to these forgotten men, acknowledging their devotion, who loved despite all the odds.”
Portwood also hoped the book would become a museum show, and at Geneva’s Rath Museum (the temporary exhibition space of the Musée d’Art et d’Histoire), he now has his wish with the exhibition, “Loving: the Hugh Nini and Neal Treadwell Collection.” Zurich-based artist Walter Pfeiffer helped to curate the show from a selection offered by Nini and Treadwell. The show came as a result of museum director Marc-Olivier Wahler meeting the book’s publishers in 2019.
Photograph, undated, with a note: “Edward and his chum.” Courtesy of the Nini-Treadwell collection © Loving by 5 Continents Editions
The photos and the subjects are anonymous, and the men pose as straight couples might: in bed, on board a ship, in a photo booth, or even simulating a wedding. They include workers, businessmen, students, and servicemen. 
And they’ve mostly stayed anonymous despite the exposure in the book, which was published in various languages around the world simultaneously.
“Surprisingly, we have had no one reach out to say that they are related to anyone in our book,” said the collectors in an interview with the museum. “However, people who have our book have sent us photos of their relatives that they believe could be a part of our next book.”
There is one couple which has been identified, according to the collectors. 
“A professor from Vienna, and others, have reached out to us saying that the couple on pages 210/211 are in fact Rupert Brook, a famous poet, and Duncan Grant, a famous artist, both from the U.K.,” they said. “If you look at photos of these two men from the early 1900s, they are more than similar. They are a match.”
“One enduring philosophical question is: ‘If a tree falls in a forest, and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound?’” the collectors asked in their book. “The correct answer is yes—or no. If these couples loved each other and memorialized their love with a photo, but no one else saw it, did their love exist or matter? This book is filled with fallen trees whose sound, though delayed, is now being heard for the first time.”
See more photos from the show below.
Photograph, 1951, with a note: “1951”, “Davis & J.C.” Courtesy of the Nini-Treadwell collection © Loving by 5 Continents Editions
Photograph, United States, undated. Courtesy of the Nini-Treadwell collection © Loving by 5 Continents Editions.
Photograph (n.d.). Courtesy of the Nini-Treadwell collection. © Loving Continents Editions.
Photograph, United States, undated. Courtesy of the Nini-Treadwell collection © Loving by 5 Continents Editions.
“Loving: the Hugh Nini and Neal Treadwell Collection” is on view at the Rath Museum, Rue Charles-Galland 2, 1206 Geneva, through September 24.
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When the Museum of the City of New York decided to mark its centennial with a massive show exploring what the city has meant to artists, let’s just say it did not lack for exhibits.  
More than 400 objects have been assembled for “This Is New York: 100 Years of the City in Art and Pop Culture,” all capturing how the city has served as muse, setting, and subject for visual artists, filmmakers, writers, fashion designers, and musicians over the past century. The stories they have told in and about New York City have been as abundant as they are diverse. 
“Nobody feels neutral about New York,” Sarah M. Henry, the museum’s chief curator and interim director, told Artnet News. “The warts-and-all quality to this observation and the ways in which artists have drawn attention to the flaws of New York is as much part of the story as the odes to the things that we love about the city.”
Installation view of “This Is New York: 100 Years of the City in Art and Pop Culture” at the Museum of the City of New York. Photo: Brad Farwell for Museum of the City of New York.
The show is divided into distinct segments.

Tempo of the City surveys visual representations of the city streets evoking both joy (as in Sex and the City) and stress (Taxi Driver); Destination NYC spotlights New York’s most iconic spaces, from its beaches to its rooftops; At Home in New York explores how artists have depicted the comforts and challenges of living in the city.  

Interactive exhibits dot the show, including a sound installation loaded with 100 songs inspired by the city’s five boroughs and a digital bookshelf, masterminded by design studio Dome Collective, where visitors can listen to books read by the likes of Matthew Broderick, Ronnie Chieng, and Tessa Thompson.  
A highlight, though, is You Are Here, an installation that immerses viewers in more than 400 film scenes shot of and about New York. Do the Right Thing and Ghostbusters are represented, as are clips from Working Girl to Breakfast at Tiffany’s to Midnight Cowboy, all cleverly and thematically stitched together by production company RadicalMedia.  
Installation view of “This Is New York: 100 Years of the City in Art and Pop Culture” at the Museum of the City of New York. Photo: Brad Farwell for Museum of the City of New York.
A vast project, MCNY planned and pulled the exhibition together over five years, a period that overlapped with 2020’s lockdowns. According to Henry, it was a moment that surfaced for the museum team how New York’s distinct qualities could also make it most vulnerable to a pandemic. That discrepant view, as the show points out, is just the tip of the complexity of inhabiting—let’s face it—the greatest city in the world. 
“We’re not the visitor center and New York doesn’t need it either,” said Henry. “What the exhibition is about is these conflicting perspectives, experiences, and emotions that a place as complicated and challenging as New York City can evoke.” 
Here are eight unmissable highlights from the exhibition.

Edward Hopper, New York Movie (1939) 
Edward Hopper, New York Movie (1939) at “This Is New York: 100 Years of the City in Art and Pop Culture.” Photo: Min Chen.
One of Hopper’s lesser-seen works, on loan from MoMA, this painting depicts an usher, pensive against the backdrop of an opulent movie theater. The painter’s signatures are in full bloom here—from the visual sumptuousness of the New York setting to the haunted atmosphere of urban alienation. 

The robe and gloves Robert De Niro wore in Raging Bull (1980) 
Robe, trunks, and boxing gloves from Raging Bull at “This Is New York: 100 Years of the City in Art and Pop Culture.” Photo: Min Chen.
One of the most striking costume choices in Martin Scorsese’s Oscar-sweeping film, this ensemble, designed by John Boxer and Richard Bruno, was most prominently seen in scenes recreating boxer Jake LaMotta’s bouts at Madison Square Garden. It will only be on view for three months. 

Alice Neel, 108th and Madison (1945) 
“I love you Harlem,” artist Alice Neel wrote in her journal in the early 1940s, “for the rich deep vein of human feeling buried under your fire engines.” That affection for her neighborhood, Neel would also paint into her street scenes that immortalized El Barrio, she wrote, for “your poverty and your loves.” This particular oil depicts the city’s sanitation workers going about their job not far from the MCNY itself. 

Elinor Carucci, Emma in Her Room, Shelter-in-Place Time, Corona Days (2020) 
Elinor Carucci, Emma in Her Room, Shelter-in-Place Time, Corona Days (2020). Courtesy Edwynn Houk Gallery.
Over lockdown, photographer Elinor Carucci turned her camera onto her own family in isolation, capturing her husband and teenage twins, Eden and Emma (seen here), sheltering in place in their 950-square-foot apartment. Her series would illustrate not just an individual, but a shared reality—further mirrored in Kadir Nelson’s Homecoming (2021), a painting, included in the show, that depicts the bliss of a post-vax reunion.  

The pendant from Uncut Gems (2019) 
Pendant from Uncut Gems, with the Carrie Bradshaw tutu ensemble from Sex and the City. Photo: Brad Farwell for Museum of the City of New York.
You know that highly meme-ed scene from Uncut Gems where Adam Sandler, playing a jeweler, holds up this diamond-encrusted Furby pendant and declares, “I started this shit”? Well, that object is here, the work of designer Catherine Miller who oversaw the molding, casting, and setting by hand of the 14-carat gems on the instantly iconic medallion.  

Jimi Hendrix’s handwritten lyrics for “My Friend” (1968) 
Jimi Hendrix’s handwritten lyrics. Photo: Min Chen.
Hendrix lived in New York City for four years starting in 1966, during which he left his mark on studios like Electric Lady and apartments in Greenwich Village and the Upper East Side. The city, too, left its mark on the musician, who, in his song “My Friend” transformed Harlem into a fantastical setting for an encounter with “a stagecoach full of feathers and footprints.” 

The T-shirt Chloë Sevigny wore in Kids (1995) 
T-shirt from Kids. Photo: Brad Farwell for Museum of the City of New York.
Straight from Sevigny’s own collection, this T-shirt saw her character Jennie through one life-changing day of hard partying, drug use, sex, and skateboarding in Larry Clark’s seminal film Kids. Sevigny calls the item one of her “most treasured possessions.” 

Faith Ringgold, Tar Beach (1988) 
Faith Ringgold, Tar Beach (1988) at “This Is New York: 100 Years of the City in Art and Pop Culture.” Photo: Min Chen.
Ringgold’s story quilt, which narrates the creative reveries of the artist’s eight-year-old heroine Cassie Louise Lightfoot, is included here for its framing of a Harlem rooftop as a site for socializing, dreaming—and flight. “My women are actually flying,” Ringgold said of her “Women on a Bridge” series, of which this quilt forms a part. “They are just free, totally.” 
“This Is New York: 100 Years of the City in Art and Pop Culture” is on view at the Museum of the City of New York, 1220 5th Ave, New York, through June 21, 2024. 
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In Gwen John’s hazily beautiful La Chambre sur la Cour (1907-8) we see a solitary, contemplative woman seated in a small room, a cat curled on a wicker chair opposite her. Interior scenes were all the vogue at the time, with French artists like Édouard Vuillard and Pierre Bonnard among the leading practitioners. But John did something wholly unique with the genre, making it about a woman’s experience and needs rather than a depiction of the domesticity in which contemporary society would like to see her confined.
John was a woman who consistently refused to conform to the norms expected of her. Brave and bohemian, she moved between London and Paris where she immersed herself in the art and thinking of her time.  Yet because of her sex and later conversion to Catholicism, her subject matter has been used to define her as a timid, insular woman, too pious or afraid to engage with the world around her.
“It’s quite a seductive image, the archetypal artist in a garret,” says art historian Alicia Foster, author of a new biography of John and curator of an accompanying exhibition at the Pallant House Gallery in Chichester, England, which both aim to challenge the myths that have built up around her.  However, as Foster laughingly points out, “if you want to be a recluse, there are better places to go than London in the 1890s or Paris in 1904.”
Gwen John, La Chambre Sur la Cour (c.1907–08), oil on canvas. Photo: © Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.
Spending most of her early life in Pembrokeshire, Wales, John followed her celebrated brother Augustus to London to study at the Slade School of Art in 1895. A lack of funds meant that she had to eke out her existence in a series of cheaply rented rooms, but she relished her newfound independence, embracing life as one of the “New Women” who were then challenging societal norms. She excelled at the Slade, winning two prizes, and in 1898 she made her first sojourn to Paris. While there, she studied under American painter James Abbott Whistler, and reveled in the heady sense of freedom the city gave her.
In the years immediately afterwards, John painted her first great works, both self-portraits (neither unfortunately could be lent for the Pallant House show). In the first, painted around 1899, John stands with her hand on her hip, haughtily meeting the viewer’s gaze, an uncompromising take on the Grand Manner style. The second, painted around 1902, sees her portraying herself with the intensity of an Ibsen heroine. “The fact that she was so assured and playing with these ideas of who she was so early on is fascinating,” Foster says. “I think they’re statements of presence, and intent.”
That intent was always to be a great artist, and to that end John knew she had to move to Paris, settling there in 1904. It was here that she began to focus on the interiors with which she would become so closely associated. While her male peers painted rooms as part of the domestic sphere, for John they were always “a woman’s space for work and thought,” Foster says.
Gwen John, A Corner of the Artist’s Room in Paris (c.1907–09), oil on canvas. Photo: © Sheffield Museums Trust.
Money was as always short, and to make ends meet John worked as an artist’s model, a career choice which would have been unthinkable in London, and one which—even in Paris—took significant courage. Yet John ended up working for the most famous sculptor of the era, Rodin, becoming not only a favored model, but also his lover.
The massive power differential has often seen John cast as a victim when the affair ended, but Foster doesn’t think she ever yearned for a conventional domestic set up. “A relationship with someone magnificent at one remove was what she wanted,” she says. “And it’s no coincidence I think that when the relationship with Rodin ended, there was God.”
John converted to Catholicism in 1913, but rather than signaling an end to her career, it was the spur for another creative leap. In France, there was a move to establish a Modern art movement that was also religious, one in which the techniques and methods were as important as the subject matter. Taking her cue from Cézanne, “she extends her painterly practice in a quite risky manner. She pares down her palette and paints in blocks, leaving brushes of paint that are visible,” Foster explains. The results can be seen in the cool serenity of a work such as The Nun (c. 1915–21).
Gwen John, Autoportrait à la Lettre, (Self-portrait with a letter) (c.1907–09), pencil and watercolour. Photo: © Musée Rodin
The patronage of the wealthy American John Quinn had already resulted in John’s work being shown in the 1913 Armory Show in New York, and following World War I, her simple yet radiant style was perfectly in tune with the times. Works such as the “Convalescent” series, which Foster believes alludes to the post-war recovery of France, led to significant success in the Paris salons.
Yet in 1925 she abruptly stopped exhibiting. For someone so sure of their talent it seems an inexplicable decision, but it was perhaps a fit of pique at having been nominated as a Salon Associate only to be disqualified later when it was discovered that she wasn’t French.
Despite that disappointment, the following year John had a solo show at the New Chenil Galleries in London. It was a great success, yet it was here that the myths around her began. The art historian and curator Mary Chamot described her as an “elusive personality” who has to be “besought for years before she will consent to show anything.” It was a somewhat mystifying comment given her success in America and France, yet the idea persisted. When her work appeared in a 1952 Tate exhibition, a catalog entry described her as “by nature a recluse, devoid of ambition.”
Gwen John, Young Woman Holding a Black Cat (c.1920–25), oil on canvas. Photo: © Tate: Purchased 1946.
Whether playing into misogynistic myths, or a canny attempt to manipulate the art market, the idea of John as reclusive and unambitious simply doesn’t hold water. “For a woman to have built such a sustained career at that time is very rare, it’s an enormous achievement,” Foster says. John herself was always aware of the value of her work.  In 1910, she wrote to her friend Ursula Tyrwhitt: “I cannot imagine why my work will have some value in the world – and yet I know it will.”
Visitors to the Pallant House show are likely to concur. “The work has a radiance to it that is quite shocking when you see it face to face, it can’t be reproduced,” Foster says. And how should we now think of John herself? “Intensely brave, self-assured to the point of ruthless, driven, and profoundly gifted,” she concludes.
 
“Gwen John: Art and Life in London and Paris,” Pallant House Gallery, 8-9 North Pallant, Chichester, U.K., through October 8, 2023.
Gwen John: Art and Life in London and Paris by Alicia Foster is published by Thames & Hudson. It will be released in the U.S. on July 25.
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The major shifts that took shape in the 1960s—from the civil rights movement and rock and roll to the rise of mass consumerism and the sexual revolution—still echo in contemporary society and throughout the art world. A new show at France’s Pinault Collection explores not just the era’s creative upheaval, but what it represents to us today.
“Forever Sixties: The Spirit of the Sixties in the Pinault Collection,” which marks the third edition of the annual arts and culture Exporama in Rennes, explores the decade’s resounding shifts in art history and beyond through 80 emblematic artworks—many of which have never been on public display. “What did the 1960s represent?” their release reads, citing “tension between conservatism and democratization, dominant culture and alternative countercultures, commercial conformism and dreams of escape.”
The 13-room show spans paintings, photos, and sculptures by names including Barbara Kruger, Martial Raysse, Richard Prince, Sturtevant, and Richard Avedon. Some artists, like Michelangelo Pistoletto, are still actively at work today.
An entire room has been dedicated to an Edward Kienholz installation, while another has been filled with a series of culturally significant album covers, accompanied by a soundtrack of 100 songs selected by French singer Etienne Daho.
The exhibition further coincides with another show at the Pinault Collection on the London-based, Turner Prize-winning contemporary artist Jeremy Deller. His three-venue presentation demonstrates parallel fascinations with contemporary politics, attitudes, and pop culture—against which “Forever Sixties” offers particular historic context.
See more images from the show below.
Duane Hanson, Housepainter I (1984–88). Collection Pinault © Adagp, Paris, 2023.
Richard Prince, Untitled (Fashion) (1982–84). Collection Pinault. © Richard Prince.
Niki de Saint Phalle, Nana noire (1965). Collection Pinault © Niki Charitable Art Foundation / Adagp, Paris, 2023.
Kiki Kogelnik, Outer Space (1964). Collection Pinault. © Kiki Kogelnik.
Martial Raysse, Bien sûr le petit bateau (1963). Collection Pinault. © Adagp, Paris, 2023
Martial Raysse, Belle des nuages (1965). Collection Pinault. © Adagp, Paris, 2023.
Tim Noble and Sue Webster, Forever (2001). Collection Pinault. © Adagp, Paris, 2023
“Forever Sixties: The Spirit of the Sixties in the Pinault Collection” is on view at the Pinault Collection, 2 Rue de Viarmes, 75001 Paris, France, through September 10.
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“Me saying hi to you is me welcoming you into the space and saying I see you, I see you,” said Mark Bradford to those gathered at the opening of his new exhibition “You Don’t Have to Tell Me Twice” at Hauser & Wirth’s 22nd Street gallery (on view through July 28). Bradford’s warmth hearkens back to his early days as a hairstylist, when he’d wave to every new customer to walk through the door. 
Expressive and down to earth, the 61-year-old Bradford is known for such genuine moments of connection, even as his work has become canonical. In 2017, he represented the United States at the Venice Biennale, and in 2018, his painting Helter Skelter set a world record for the highest purchase price ever paid for a single work by a living African American artist, when it sold at auction for $12 million with fees. Now, the new “landscapes” unveiled at Hauser & Wirth underscore Bradford’s ongoing sense of experimentation, often offering a sense of revelation.
Installation view, “Mark Bradford. You Don’t Have to Tell Me Twice”; Hauser & Wirth New York 22nd Street, 13 April – 28 July 2023 © Mark Bradford; Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth; Photo: Thomas Barratt
The exhibition at Hauser and Wirth is Bradford’s first solo exhibition in New York since 2015 and brings together works spanning from Bradford’s youth to his most recent creations and marks an important touchstone in his career.  With that in mind, we’ve chosen what we consider to be 4 essential artworks in the exhibition that unlock insights into his larger practice, whether you’re familiar with Bradford’s work or you’re new to his practice. Read on to find out more.
Johnny the Jaguar (2023)
Mark Bradford, Johnny the Jaguar (2023). Courtesy of the artist and Hauser and Wirth. Photograph by Joshua White.
Just the Facts: The first floor of “You Don’t Have to Tell Me Twice” features a series of works that, according to Hauser & Wirth, are “informed by the history of European tapestry and their socio-political significance, as symbols of the greatest opulence of European aristocracy, and, by extension, their relationship to power.” Originally premiered at the Fundação de Serralves in Porto in late 2021, these works accompany more recent tapestry-like “landscapes” depicting flora and fauna indigenous to Blackdom–“an early-20th Century African American homesteader settlement in New Mexico.” Central to these tableaux is a “symbol of historical predation,” a large cat figure Bradford has fondly nicknamed, Johnny the Jaguar.Insights: Bradford’s Johnny is very clearly a depiction of a Panthera Onca, the jaguar species indigenous to the Chihuahuan Desert of northern Mexico and the southern-western U.S., and as such is apt for its multiplicity of shifting significances: it might not only serve as a symbol for historical predation–recalling structures of power and race in America and Western colonialism more broadly–but as a symbol of the Aztec Empire’s elite jaguar warriors. And yet, even more intriguing, Panthera Onca is also today, in point of fact, an endangered species, perhaps pointing to a vision of oppression’s diminishment, if not end. 
Fire Fire (2021) 
Mark Bradford, Fire Fire (2021). Photograph by Sarah Muehlbauer. Courtesy of the artist and Hauser and Wirth.
Just the Facts: The works featured at Hauser & Wirth New York mark a shift in Bradford’s work from his bird’s-eye views of cityscapes to eye-level allegories of “survival, violence, and desire.” The figure, according to Hauser & Wirth, was “the starting point of [Bradford’s] abstraction.” Reflecting on these works, the artist himself points out: “I really wanted to create these kinds of playful landscapes. … Maybe because there was so much pressure happening throughout Covid and through questioning who we are culturally and racially that I had to create sights within my own imagination to give myself permission to play and to move things around. I always have to create a sight to give myself permission to kinda f— things up.”
Insights: An immense work Fire Fire (2021) presents us with a drab and scabbed upper layer seemingly peeled away to reveal vibrant, colorful figures and shapes beneath., “I’m always thinking about how I can layer meaning, how I can create a visual metaphor, how I can be provocative in some way,” the artist said. In this case, it seems like the thrust of this layering is to reveal the new life hidden beneath the scars of catastrophe. “I’m interested in the kind of beauty that comes out of difficulty,” he explained “…I want my work to be a catalyst for conversations about social justice and equality.”
Several vibrantly colorful figures emerge from what seems the charred and blackened ashes of a vast and impersonally abstract conflagration: alongside deep teal, salmon, and cobalt blooms emerges the stylized depiction of a human arm gripping an upside-down jaguar by its tail. In the context of other works in the exhibition such as Jungle Jungle and Johnny the Jaguar, Fire Fire seems to betoken the hopefulness of deliverance from life’s spirited chaos and our resulting fears. And yet, it also brings with it terrors of its own, for it is a pale arm that grips the jaguar’s tale, implying that there may be more to fear than natural predation.
 
Death Drop 1973
Mark Bradford, Death Drop 1973. Courtesy of the artist and Hauser and Wirth. Photograph by Sarah Muehlbauer.
Just the Facts: Central to the second floor of the show is a projector screen looping a Super 8 film Bradford directed at age 12. In it, Bradford’s adolescent self falls backward into a chain-link fence as he pretends to be struck by a bullet.
Insights: Bradford’s reflection on the film today is both inspiring and timely: “What’s important for me is that the kid wiggles back up. The falling is one side of it, but the fact he wiggled back up–that’s the journey.”

Death Drop 2023
Mark Bradford, Death Drop 2023. Courtesy of the artist and Hauser and Wirth. Photograph by Sarah Muehlbauer.
Just the Facts: “For me, art is about creating connections and building bridges between people,” Bradford has said. He also insinuates a connection between his younger self and his present person. A sculptural installation on the fifth floor titled, Death Drop 2023 in many ways references his childhood film Death Drop, 1973, in terms of considerations of violence and mortality.
Insights: The artist also connects his art and the exhibit to a wider context through the sculpture’s pose and title, a “death drop” being a popular pose in gay ballroom culture. Thus, pointing to the intersection of persecution and performance, the installation becomes both personal self-reflection and social commentary. This is to be expected from Bradford.”My work is always a response to what’s happening in the world. It’s always about the here and now,” he said.
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