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    There’s More to Alma Thomas Than Colorful Abstractions, an Eclectic Show of the Artist’s Marionettes, Still Lifes, and Other Work Proves

    A long overdue retrospective for the late artist Alma Thomas has touched down at the Chrysler Museum of Art in Norfolk, Virginia.
    The exhibition, titled “Everything Is Beautiful,” showcases little known aspects of the artist’s life and career, such as her interests in gardening and fashion, and her early student works. It was co-organized with the Columbus Museum in the artist’s hometown of Columbus, Georgia.
    “One of the goals of the show has been to have a Columbus-originated story,” Jonathan Frederick Walz, the Columbus Museum’s curator of American art, told Artnet News. “There seems to be this received wisdom that Thomas only became an artist after she stopped teaching in the classroom in 1960, but the material that we had at the museum made us realize that, in fact, she had been making art all along.”
    “Her late abstractions kind of end up standing for her entire career,” Walz added. “Our project with this show is to show that Thomas was multifaceted.”
    Alma Thomas with students at Howard University Art Gallery (1928 or after). Photo courtesy of the Columbus Museum, Columbus, Georgia.
    Born in 1891, Thomas spent the first nearly 16 years of her life in Columbus before her family moved to Washington, D.C., in 1907. After spending several years teaching in Delaware out of high school, she enrolled in Howard University in 1921 and became the first graduate of its art department.
    The earliest painting in the show dates to her college years, likely from 1924. By comparing works from throughout her life, “you can really see how she’s exploring different styles and techniques before she arrives at what she focuses on as her signature style,” said Seth Femen, curator of photography at the Chrysler Museum and co-curator the exhibition.
    Thomas hit upon that style—the colorful dabs of paint arranged in strips and rows—in the mid-1960s.
    Alma Thomas, Blast Off (1970). Courtesy of the National Air and Space Museum, Washington, D.C.
    “This is a moment where the New York art world is being highly contested by African Americans and other BIPOC folks and women about the lack of representation in New York museums,” Walz said.
    In response, the Whitney began a series of solo shows in a one-room, ground-floor gallery, and Thomas was one of the artists invited to participate.
    It was a watershed moment in her career. “It was so important, since Thomas was the first Black woman to be given a solo show at the Whitney and it’s really where her career skyrockets from that point onward,” Walz said.
    But like so many women artists, Thomas returned to relative obscurity after her death.
    “She and her work just kind of lost currency for quite a long time,” Walz said. “It really wasn’t until 2009, when the Obamas hung the painting Skylight in their private residence apartments in the White House, that suddenly she became a thing again.”
    Despite growing interest in Thomas in the last decade, large swaths of her career have received little attention. In the 1930s, she became deeply interested in marionettes, sculpting figures that she brought in as teaching guides to her classroom at D.C.’s Shaw Jr. High School, where she taught from 1925 to 1960.
    Alma Thomas, Clown Marionette (ca. 1935). Photo courtesy of the Alma Thomas, Wind Dancing with Spring Flowers (1969). Courtesy of the Columbus Museum.
    “Marionettes were a teaching tool that she could use to communicate teaching concepts, but also as the framework of a year-long project where her students learned all different kinds of things—language arts, music, electrical engineering, color theory, history of theater, design,” Walz said. “At the end of the year, the class would produce a version of Alice in Wonderland.”
    The only time a Thomas marionette has been exhibited was at the artist’s posthumous 1981 show at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. The Columbus Museum owns five of them, and is also displaying a large architectural drawing for a collapsible marionette stage.
    Alma Thomas, Sketch for Giant marionette (1935/1938). Courtesy of the Columbus Museum, Columbus, Georgia.
    “It is an engineering feat,” Femen said, noting that Thomas had studied draftsmanship at the technical high school she attended. “She’s figuring out how the components will all work together.”
    “That engineering and architectural interest really comes through in the late paintings,” Walz added. “They are very considered. They’re somewhat architectonic. Even though they are nature based, there’s a very significant structure behind them.”
    Of the more than 150 objects on view in the current presentation, about two dozen have never (or only rarely) been in the public eye.
    Alma Thomas, Untitled (1922/1924). Courtesy of the Kinsey Collection, Pacific Palisades, California.
    “You can’t do good scholarship on an artist unless you know the range of material,” Walz said. “The same range was being reproduced over and over and people were saying the same things. By broadening the selection, we are hoping to add texture to how people can understand her and her work.”
    As Thomas neared the end of her teaching career, she began redoubling her efforts in the studio, and took art classes at American University from 1952 to 1957.
    “That’s why, in 1960, she was able to hit the ground running—she didn’t come out of the blue. She was paying her dues all along,” Walz said.
    Alma Thomas, Grassy Melodic Chant (1976). Courtesy of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.
    Thomas remained dedicated to her craft until her death, in 1978.
    “There are works from 1977 that really show her grappling with physical impairments and adapting to them—you can see it in the work,” Femen said. “She reportedly brought materials with her to the hospital when she went in for the surgery that ultimately was the end of her life.”
    See more works from the show below.
    Alma Thomas, Untitled (1968). Courtesy Steve and Lesley Testan/Emily Friedman Fine Art.
    Alma Thomas, Red Azaleas Singing and Dancing Rock and Roll Music (1976). Courtesy of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.
    Alma Thomas, Horizon (1974). Courtesy of Henry H. and Carol Brown Goldberg, Bethesda, Maryland.
    Jan van RaayAmerican, Faith Ringgold and Michele Wallace at Black Emergency Cultural Coalition (BECC) protest at the Whitney Museum, New York, January 31, 1971. Photo courtesy of Jan van Raay, Portland, Oregon.
    Alma Thomas, Snoopy Sees a Sunrise (1970). Courtesy of the National Air and Space Museum, Washington, D.C.
    Unidentified youths in theatrical costumes at Howard University (ca. 1927). Photo courtesy of the Columbus Museum, Columbus, Georgia.
    Alma Thomas, Babbling Brook and Whistling Poplar Tree Symphony (1976). Courtesy of the Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, New York.
    “Alma Thomas: Everything Is Beautiful” will be on view at the Chrysler Museum of Art, One Memorial Place, Norfolk, Virginia, July 9–October 3, 2021. It will travel to the Phillips Collection, 1600 21st St NW,  Washington, D.C., October 30, 2021–January 23, 2022; the Frist Art Museum, 919 Broadway, Nashville, February 25–June 5, 2022; and the Columbus Museum, 1251 Wynnton Road, Columbus, Georgia, July 1, 2022–September 25, 2022. 
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    Sculptor Eva LeWitt’s Colorful Outdoor Installation in Massachusetts Celebrates the Power of Observing Art in Nature—See Images Here

    One of the best parts about summer art exhibitions is that many offer opportunities to spend time outdoors.
    One of the season’s most exciting shows for this kind of escape—to take in beautiful artwork in an even more beautiful setting—is the Clark Institute’s “Ground/work,” which welcomes visitors to the sprawling grounds of the Berkshires-based museum in Williamstown, Massachusetts.
    The show, the museum notes, highlights “a reverence for nature and a desire to further enliven the surrounding trails, pastures, and woods” of the property, and brings together bold, colorful installations from six contemporary female artists: Kelly Akashi, Nairy Baghramian, Jennie C. Jones, Analia Saban, Haegue Yang, and Eva LeWitt. All of the artists planned their works in response to sites they chose by hand, each of which are scattered about the Clark’s massive 140-acre campus. The works were also planned with the changing landscape—and visitors hoping to escape into the bucolic wilds of the Berkshires—in mind.
    “Ground/work,” according to the museum, “highlights the balance between fragility and resilience that both nature and the passage of time reveal, while offering fresh experiences with every visit.” The works were conceived in part as a way to help visitors re-enter the world again, following a long year of isolation, and gently encourages them to re-engage with themes like the comforts of nature and community.
    One of the most striking works in the show is perhaps Eva LeWitt’s Resin Towers (2020), which were assembled by the New York-based artist from tall pieces of colorful plastic in hues like fluorescent orange, yellow, and light aqua, and cast in layers of transparent resin. Together, the pieces create a pattern of expanding and contracting spheres as the viewer approaches the works or moves further away, depending on where they stand. The work was also planned to interact with particular elements of the landscape (including the sky, woods, grass, and light) and time of day, morphing as time passes, and seems to twirl more and more quickly as viewers approach it as if to “call them down the hill and beckon visitors to their site.”
    The works, which in many ways celebrate the “purity of hue against an ever-shifting landscape,” according to the museum, will be on view until October 17. See images of the show below.
    Eva LeWitt, “Resin Towers” (2020). Photo courtesy of the artist and VI, VII, Oslo. Photo: Thomas Clark.
    A closeup of one of LeWitt’s “Resin Towers” (2020. Photo courtesy of the artist and VI, VII, Oslo. Photo: Thomas Clark.
    LeWitt with her artwork. Photo courtesy Eva Lewitt.
    A closeup of one of LeWitt’s “Resin Towers” (2020. Photo courtesy of the artist and VI, VII, Oslo. Photo: Thomas Clark.
    One of LeWitt’s “Resin Towers” (2020. Photo courtesy of the artist and VI, VII, Oslo. Photo: Thomas Clark.
    Eva LeWitt, “Resin Towers” (2020). Photo courtesy of the artist and VI, VII, Oslo. Photo: Thomas Clark.
    Eva LeWitt, “Resin Towers” (2020). Photo courtesy of the artist and VI, VII, Oslo. Photo: Thomas Clark.
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    ‘Everything on This Planet Is Endangered’: Artist Tino Sehgal’s New Show in England Enacts the ‘Immaterial Magic’ of Impermanence

    Visitors milling around the Great Court at Blenheim Palace in Oxfordshire last Friday were caught off guard by the sound of a swelling chorus. A troupe of players who, moments before, had seemed like any other tourists there to discover the stately rooms and sprawling grounds of the Baroque countryside estate, broke out into a series of trance-like intonations: “wow, ooh, wow, ooh.”
    For the audience invited to see the work of Berlin-based visual artist Tino Sehgal, the troupe’s movements around the courtyard might have evoked the nonsensical dadaist performance art of the interwar years. But I could also relate to the bemused expressions of unsuspecting visitors to the palace, who might more readily have related it to the carefully choreographed flash mobs that were popular marketing ploys in the early 2000s. Either way, it was all a bit weird.
    Sehgal is revered in the art world for creating these kinds of scenes, which the 45-year-old artist calls “constructed situations,” designed to stir viewers out of passivity. His artistic practice eschews physical objects, relying on the human responses to these ephemeral live events. Once played out, there is no physical documentation of the work in the form of exhibition catalogues, video recordings, or photographs.
    “My basic premise is: Can you make an artwork without making an object? So why would I, on a secondary level, then make a photograph?” Sehgal asked me, as we sat in a shade overlooking one of Blenheim’s manicured gardens.
    Blenheim Park and Gardens. Landscaping by Capability Brown. Courtesy of Blenheim Art Foundation.
    Even without the wristbands identifying us, you could pretty easily tell the art audience from those who had just stumbled upon the work. Only the latter group (the larger one) reflexively whipped out their cell phones to take pictures. Sehgal has given up trying to control this particular impulse from the public. “I don’t mind it if it is for their private use,” Sehgal told me. “Society has changed. When my work first started, mobile phones literally didn’t even have a camera.”
    Sehgal, who is of German and Indian descent, has been exalted by many critics as among the greatest artists of his generation. In 2005, he was the youngest artist ever chosen to represent Germany at the Venice Biennale, for which he sent performers dressed as security guards pirouetting around visitors to the pavilion chanting, “Ooh, this is so contemporary, contemporary, contemporary!” He later won the Golden Lion for work included in the 2013 biennale.
    His current exhibition, on view through August 15, was staged by the Blenheim Art Foundation, and blends elements of some of his past works with new scenes designed specifically to respond to the environment of the palace grounds. Sehgal was introduced to Blenheim in the spring because he was looking for a maze to site a project, one of the first initiatives organized as part of veteran gallerist Marian Goodman’s nomadic exhibition program after closing her permanent London space, Marian Goodman Projects. As chance would have it, the art foundation did not have an exhibition scheduled for this summer, and Sehgal was suddenly invited to make a much larger project than he had initially envisioned, unfolding across the vast grounds of the estate.
    Tino Sehgal in the grounds at Blenheim. Photo by Edd Horder. Courtesy of Blenheim Art Foundation.
    Social Distancing and Intimacy
    “It was really spontaneous,” Sehgal told me. “But Michael [Frahm, director of Blenheim Art Foundation] was adamant that he wanted to do it now after corona, and it made sense for me after we have been deprived of human interaction for so long.” 
    Both Frahm and Sehgal’s main producer, Louise Höjer, were up for the “sports-like challenge” of pulling off the exhibition in just a few months.
    “After a long year distanced one from another, Tino’s work feels more relevant than ever: bringing bodies together in space and calling attention to the fleeting, immaterial magic of human connection,” Frahm wrote in his introductory statement.
    Höjer traveled to the U.K. ahead of Sehgal and scouted 52 amateur participants from the local area, ranging in age from 16 to 74, to take part. A few of Sehgal’s regular dancers, in-demand contemporary stars from Brussels and Berlin, also traveled to take part. 
    Then there was the matter of organizing an exhibition based on human interaction for the age of social distancing. Although it was mostly staged in an outdoor setting, they decided it would be best for the players approaching visitors to don masks and keep their distance, as a sign of respect and to help people feel safe.
    Tino Sehgal in the Rose Garden at Blenheim. Photo by Edd Horder. Courtesy of Blenheim Art Foundation.
    The roving troupe of dancers intermittently swarmed around the visitors to the art foundation, shepherding us throughout the grounds to where other works materialized. Outside, in the secret garden, a young girl serenaded passersby, an iteration of Sehgal’s 2006 work, This You. Inside the grandiose Great Hall, amid classical statuary including Venus and Bacchus, an intertwined couple writhed on the floor for Sehgal’s Kiss (2002), re-enacting kiss scenes from famous works of art throughout history, from Auguste Rodin’s embracing nudes to Jeff Koons and Iona Staller’s more provocative poses.
    A more recent work, This Joy, conceived last year for the Kunsthistorische Museum in Vienna, occurred next to a small fountain. Players sang out a bizarrely electric scat version of Beethoven’s Für Elise, which built to a crescendo that was theatrically synchronized with a burst of water springing from the fountain.
    The most affecting parts of the exhibition were the works specifically designed to respond to the palace grounds. Across the vast lawn in front of the palace, on the majestic water terraces, and nestled in the rose garden, players almost blended into the landscape. If you weren’t paying attention, your eye might have glossed over them as picnickers on the lawn or even perhaps more delicate shrubbery designed by Capability Brown. If you got close enough to one of the players, they might approach you and share details about their lives.
    This story-telling component of the new work, titled This Element, borrows from Sehgal’s These Associations, a work first shown at Tate Modern in 2012. The stories shared by the participants are answers to a number of prompts from the artist, such as: When have you felt a sense of arrival? What is something you are dissatisfied with in yourself? What are the personality traits of somebody you admire? But the artist does not control what intimacies they share beyond this.
    When I summoned up the courage to open myself up, and gave permission with my eyes for someone to approach me, it was a local bus driver, who told me about a regular passenger of his, an elderly gentleman who battles his own physical decline to ride the bus to go and visit his niece every Thursday. The story was not particularly emotional, but after a year and a half of being starved of interaction with friends, let alone strangers, I was in a very raw emotional state. I was embarrassed when tears welled up in my eyes.
    Blenheim Park and Gardens. Landscaping by Capability Brown. Courtesy of Blenheim Art Foundation.
    The Lesson of Beach Volleyball 
    Sehgal’s art tends to trigger this kind of reaction. And despite his forbearance of objects, he does actually sell his work—which he does through oral agreements with no paper trail. The rights to stage his situations have sold for six figure sums to museums including the Hirshhorn, MoMA, and the Guggenheim, as well as many private collections.
    “There is not a huge [market] but when people are interested, the fact that we do it with an oral contract is not really an issue,” he said. “If anything, it is maybe something that they find attractive.” If buyers want to show it, they need to give a six-months heads up, and trusted associates of the artist will be dispatched to set it up.
    I asked him what he thinks about the possible legacy of his work given that it is so ephemeral. What happens when he’s gone, and the chain of knowledge dilutes the work further and further from its original iteration? But Sehgal is not worried about obsolescence. He intentionally structures his situations like a game, with basic rules of play, and the interruption of chance encounters means that no two situations are exactly alike anyway. He could get deep into the theory behind this, but he offers a helpful sports analogy.
    “Nobody is worried that beach volleyball would cease to exist because you have got the rules,” he shrugged. “People can play it better or worse, but it is still beach volleyball.”
    Besides, material objects face obsolescence too. Paintings can burn up in a fire, or be eaten by pests, or deteriorate through age. “Somebody attacked a Barnett Newman at the Stedelijk Museum once—that can happen,” Sehgal pointed out. “I think everything on this planet is, in that sense, endangered and can deteriorate. And with art objects we make a big effort to ensure that they don’t… . So I think it is just a question of effort, finances, will, [and] planning decisions.”
    He recalled a particularly important exchange he had with a conservator during his early days in the art world, who pointed out that most of the objects that populate museums would not exist today without careful conservation and restoration efforts. “We don’t really conserve paintings, we produce them,” the conservator said. “When a painting has been restored three times, is it the same painting?”
    In that sense, Sehgal’s object-less work doesn’t seem any less ephemeral. He invited me to look further back into the past. “We have the tendency to think that objects are what remain or persist, but if you go back to antiquity, it is Plato,” he said, and “ideas that continue to exist.”
    Tino Sehgal is on view at Blenheim Art Foundation through August 15.
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    See 5 Riveting Manchester International Artworks, From a Celebration of Black Portraiture to a Reflection on Migration

    As the Manchester International Arts Festival continues into its final weeks, we decided to take a look at some of the best contemporary art interventions happening around the city.
    From an installation by Forensic Architecture on the occasion of the group’s 10th anniversary, to the transformation of a Jewish synagogue into a meditation on community and history, here are five must-see works.

    The most Instagrammable artwork on display is Big Ben Lying Down with Political Books, an installation by Argentine artist Marta Minujín. The work is a 140-foot replica of London’s famous clock, seemingly fallen to the grounds of Piccadilly Gardens. The work is another in a series of book-covered monuments the artist has installed at art events over the decades. This one contains 20,000 copies of “books that have shaped British politics” in an effort to spark conversations about the state today, as Britain reckons with new coronavirus strains and the repercussions of Brexit.

    Claire Govender adds the 20,000th book to “Ben Ben Lying Down with Political Books” by Marta Minujin, Photo: Fabio De Paola/PA Wire.

    Cephas Williams, Portrait of Black Britain (2021)
    Yandass Ndlovu, a participant of “Portrait of Black Britain” at the installation. Photo Fabio De Paola/PA Wire.
    “Portrait of Black Britain is me taking control of my narrative, asking other Black people to join me in the reintroduction of our presence and stories in the 21st century,” Cephas Williams wrote of his Manchester art installation.
    In this massive undertaking, Williams has embarked on a mission to create the largest photographic trove of Black British people ever created. For the project, Williams asked ordinary individuals to share their stories, successful or not, and then presented the 116 portraits he took.
    Cephas Williams’s installation “Portrait of Black Britain” part of Manchester International Arts Festival. Photo: Fabio De Paola/PA Wire.

    Laure Prouvost, The long waited, weighted, gathering (2021). Photo: Michael Pollard.
    Turner Prize-winner Laure Prouvost has transformed the Ladies Gallery in the newly renovated 1874 synagogue that houses the Manchester Jewish Museum into a time machine. The installation features textiles and a film that pays homage to the Jewish women who helped build Manchester into a modern city, and found comfort and safety within the walls of the Spanish and Portuguese synagogue. Prouvost worked with contemporary members of the Women’s Textile Group to create objects within the installation that reference themes of migration, community, femininity, and religion.
    Laure Prouvost, The long waited, weighted, gathering (2021). Photo: Michael Pollard.

    Forensic Architecture, Cloud Studies (2012–ongoing)
    Still from Forensic Architecture Cloud Studies (2012–ongoing), courtesy Forensic Architecture.
    Ten years ago, when the art and activist group Forensic Architecture was just forming, no one could predict the impact it would have on the art world. In an exhibition commemorating the group’s decade-long practice, a group of works from a variety of its past investigations come together in a wrenching exploration of how the air we breathe is co-opted to “suppress civilian protest, maintain and defend violent border regimes, and empower extractive industry.” The exhibition also features the first phase in Forensic Architecture’s new work exploring environmental racism in Louisiana, where an area deemed “Cancer Alley” has wreaked havoc on generations of Black residents.
    Forensic Architecture with Forensic Oceanography, The Seizure of the luventa (2017), courtesy Forensic Architecture.
    Forensic Architecture, Cloud Studies (2008-21). Photo: Michael Pollard.
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    After Years of Heated Debate, an Exhibition Dedicated to Jewish Art Dealer Max Stern Is Moving Forward—and His Heirs Are Not Happy

    An exhibition dedicated to the life and legacy of persecuted Jewish art dealer Max Stern will go forward this fall in Düsseldorf—despite opposition from scholars and the dealer’s own heirs.
    The show, called “Disenfranchised and Deprived: The Art Dealer Max Stern,” will open at the Stadtmuseum in Düsseldorf on September 1 (until January 30, 2022), three years after it was initially canceled amid a dispute between local authorities and Stern’s heirs over how the German city was handling the project. The heirs, a group of international universities, were concerned that German authorities were not being transparent enough about the works linked to Stern that remain scattered around Germany and have yet to be returned.
    Düsseldorf mayor Stephan Keller plans to present an updated concept for the show next week. The exhibition will focus on Stern’s personal and professional life as an important art historian and art dealer based in Düsseldorf.
    Stern was running a successful gallery in Düsseldorf until 1937, when the Nazis forced him to dissolve his company. He fled Germany and eventually landed in Montreal, Canada, where he ran another successful gallery.
    The large-scale exhibition was originally called off in 2017 by the mayor at the time, Thomas Geisel, after the Canada-based Max Stern Art Restitution Project, run by heirs to his estate in both Canada and Israel, withdrew their support over concerns that the show was not being transparent about the potentially looted art that remains in German museums. Works once owned by Stern still hang in public museums in Düsseldorf.
    While city authorities did not provide an official explanation for the cancellation at the time, they obliquely attributed it to “current demands for information and restitution in German museums in connection with the Galerie Max Stern,” according to The Art Newspaper. (To the Art Restitution Project, this statement suggested they were more interested in securing the return of artworks than assisting with the show.)
    Max Stern in 1925.
    A letter to the mayor by Georgetown University professor Ori Z. Soltes stated that the German museum failed to “heal wounds that remain open more than seven decades after they were inflicted,” and instead “unilaterally cancelled the project” to protect its holdings, according to a 2017 report in the Globe and Mail.
    Instead of the exhibition, in 2018, Germany held an international symposium on Stern’s legacy in an effort to quell the disputes, before resurrecting plans for the show. (Its original rescheduled date, fall 2020, was called off due to the pandemic.)
    While the show now has a new date, the Max Stern Art Restitution Project and the Canadian curatorial team are no longer involved—nor are they happy about the new direction.
    “After the politically-controlled decision that prompted the cancellation of the original exhibition, Canadian scholars refuse to be associated with an administration that once questioned their academic legitimacy,” a spokesperson for the project told Artnet News in a statement. “They have dedicated a significant part of their careers to the study of Max Stern’s life. We prefer to focus on our current research collaboration on Max Stern with Munich’s Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte. Without the expert contributions of these Canadian and German scholars, there is no reason for our project to be involved.”
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    The Medici Were History’s Greatest Patrons—and Also Tyrants. The Met’s New Show Tackles How Art Served Power

    Portrait paintings are sometimes described as windows into the soul. The Renaissance likenesses presented in the Metropolitan Museum’s “The Medici: Portraits and Politics, 1512–1570” have other purposes. Their cold, opulent beauty is more akin to the calculated image curation typical of modern day influencers than to the revelation of character that permeates the paintings of the Met’s nearby Alice Neel exhibition. And that, it seems, is the point of this fascinating exhibition.
    This is not the High Renaissance of the celebrated Lorenzo de Medici whose patronage brought us masterpieces by Michelangelo, Botticelli, and Leonardo da Vinci. The exhibition focuses on the later 16th century rule of Florence by Cosimo I de’ Medici and introduces the cast of Mannerist painters who helped him craft his image as the city-state’s benevolent dictator.
    Organized by the Met’s Keith Christiansen and Florentine professor Carlo Falciani, the exhibition is laid out in thematic sections that tell the rollicking tale of Cosimo’s rise to power and consolidation of authority through the artworks that helped make it possible.
    Installation view of “The Medici: Portraits and Politics, 1512–1570” at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Photo by Hyla Skopitz, Courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
    The Ruthless Medici
    The story begins with the machinations that brought the Medicis back to power in Florence after the reestablishment of Republican rule following their expulsion in 1494.
    For forty years, Florentine Republicans had mostly held off the onslaught of the Medician autocrats through periods of civil war, plague, and siege. A potent symbol of this struggle was Michelangelo’s David. Installed in 1504 outside the Palazzo Vecchio, the seat of Florence’s civic government, the figure’s stern resolve and youthful vitality provided inspiration for the city’s anti-Medici partisans.
    The second coming of the Medici was aided by a pair of Medici Popes: Leo X, a hedonistic pontiff who bankrupted the Vatican with dynastic wars and personal luxuries, and the inept Clement VII who brought on the Sack of Rome and lost half the Church to the Reformation. However otherwise disastrous their reigns, they secured the return of the Medicis to Florence.
    Jacopo da Pontormo, Portrait of a Halberdier (probably Francesco Guardi) (ca. 1528–30) with a display of arms in “The Medici” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Photo by Hyla Skopitz, Courtesy of The Met
    A series of skirmishes between Republicans and Medici supporters culminated in the 1529 siege of Florence which was led by Clement’s ally the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V. Following the city’s capitulation, Clement installed Alessandro de’ Medici as Duke. The licentious Alessandro, who may have been Clement’s illegitimate son, did not last long. He riled the city’s Republican families and was assassinated by a distant cousin in 1537 in what was celebrated as an act of tyrannicide.
    Thanks to wars, murders, and early deaths of designated heirs, Florence was now running out of direct descendants of the original Medici family. As a result, the Dukedom passed to seventeen-year-old Cosimo de Medici, a descendent of a lesser branch of the family. Expected to be a weak leader destined for exile, assassination, or domination by stronger factions, he ruled Florence for over thirty years, established a Medici dynasty that lasted for two centuries and transformed Florence with art patronage and massive public works into the city we know today.

    The Bronzino Touch
    Although “The Medici: Portraits and Politics” includes works by such luminaries as Jacopo Pontormo, Rosso Fiorentino, Benvenuto Cellini, Giorgio Vasari, and Francesco Salviati, the real stars of this exhibition are Cosimo and his favored artist Agnolo Bronzino.
    Bronzino was perfectly in tune with his patron. In numerous portraits he depicts Cosimo in a variety of guises: a young warrior in full armor whose hands caress his helmet; an older man of forty, now bearded and dressed in somber black as befitting the statesman he has become; and in an allegorical painting as Orpheus, naked from the back as he turns toward the viewer.
    Bronzino, Florence Cosimo I de’ Medici as Orpheus (1537–39). Philadelphia Museum of Art; Gift of Mrs. John Wintersteen, 1950. Image: Courtesy Philadelphia Museum of Art.
    In all these depictions, Cosimo offers the same gaze, mask-like in its impenetrability, presenting a picture of steadfast purpose and icy control. This essential message became part of Cosimo’s cultural diplomacy. The non-allegorical portrayals were repainted multiple times and distributed as gifts to friends and potential allies.
    Bronzino’s portraits offer a similar treatment of Cosimo’s family. His impressive wife Eleonora di Toledo was a granddaughter of Lorenzo de Medici and served as his frequent political advisor while bearing him eleven children. She is seen here as a gravely modest young wife and as an equally serene mother subtly pregnant as she pushes forward her equally composed young son Francesco.
    Bronzino, Eleonora di Toledo and Francesco de’ Medici (ca. 1550).Museo Nazionale di Palazzo Reale, Pisa. Image © Haltadefinizione® Image Bank by permission of the Ministry of Cultural Activities and Heritage—Polo Museale della Toscana.
    Francesco reappears elsewhere as a slightly older boy, holding a letter, and, in a 1570 painting by Bronzino’s protégé Alessandro Allori as a young man suited for battle. Francesco would succeed Cosimo as Duke of Florence in 1571, when his father went on to the more august position as the first Grand Duke of Tuscany.

    Art as PR Push
    None of Bronzino’s depictions of Cosimo or his family match the fierceness of Cellini’s bust of the Duke. Two versions, one in bronze and one in marble, introduce the exhibition. They present Cosimo as a supremely confident military man swathed in armor ornamented with classical motifs.
    Two portrait busts by Cellini in “The Medici: Portraits and Politics, 1512–1570” at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Photo by Hyla Skopitz, Courtesy of The Met
    This representation was meant to underscore the association of Florence’s 16th century ruler with Rome’s imperious Caesar Augustus. All these official portraits seem designed to smooth over the messy trajectory of Cosimo’s rise to power, his suppression of civil liberties, the political intrigues that marked his reign, and his brutal campaigns against other city-states.
    The exhibition includes portraits of other notable figures, both by Bronzino and by other artists. Among these are Francesco Salviati’s probing portrait of Bindo Altoviti, a leading banker and Republican sympathizer; Bronzino’s subtly sexualized depiction of naval commander Andrea Doria as a powerful, nearly naked Neptune; and his tribute to poet Laura Battiferri. The homosexual Bronzino carried on a long platonic relationship with this formidable woman and here depicts her in profile with features that deliberately echo those of a more allegorical painting of Dante he had created thirty years before.
    Francesco Salviati, Bindo Altoviti (ca. 1545). Private Collection.Photograph © Bruce M. White, 2020.
    There are as well portraits of some of the more dubious characters in this drama: The ill fated Alessandro de Medici appears in Pontormo’s portrait as a sober, cultured young man captured in the act of sketching the bust of a woman on a piece of paper. Pope Clement VII, painted by Sebastiano del Piombo just before the disastrous Sack of Rome, is a regal figure blissfully unaware of the debacle to come.
    The exhibition is dotted with various artifacts. These include rapiers, halberds, and ornamented axes of the sort used by both sides in the siege of Florence, original manuscripts, a red velvet dress that may have been worn by Eleonora di Toledo, and coins that celebrate Cosimo’s architectural projects. These public works were an equally important part of his cultural legacy, dedicated to cementing Florence’s place at the epicenter of Italian Renaissance.

    The Problem of Michelangelo
    So as to underscore the cool sobriety of Bronzino’s approach, the show ends with a face-off between him and painter Francesco Salviati, a fellow Florentine with more cosmopolitan tastes who had lived in Rome and traveled throughout Italy. Salviati’s portraits, many of them dotted with now obscure mythological motifs, exhibit a warmth and naturalistic approach that make a striking contrast to the chilly perfection of Bronzino’s figures.
    Installation view of the “Florence and Rome: Bronzino and Salviati” gallery in “The Medici: Portraits and Politics, 1512–1570” at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Photo by Hyla Skopitz, Courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
    But perhaps a more telling comparison would have been the works of Bronzino and Michelangelo, then and now Florence’s most famous artist. Michelangelo casts a long shadow over the exhibition even though he appears here only in a portrait by Daniele da Volterra. Even unfinished, the work captures its subject’s life force and craggy vitality in a way that seems a rebuke to the flattering elegance of Bronzino’s representations.
    Michelangelo posed a problem for Cosimo. Towering above other Florentine artists, he sided with the Republicans in Florence’s civil wars and fled the city forever when Cosimo came to power. Cosimo attempted unsuccessfully to lure him back and only succeeded after Michelangelo’s death, when the old master’s body was returned to Florence and given an extravagant state funeral. With this gesture, Cosimo hoped to tie himself to the revered artist and to obscure Michelangelo’s Republican sympathies. Cosimo had already brought artists of Florence under his patronage through the founding of Florence’s Accademia del Disegno. His embrace of the dead Michelangelo reveals his efforts to control the narrative of history as well.
    Benvenuto Cellini, Cosimo I de’ Medici (1545). Museo Nazionale del Bargello. By permission of Ministero della Cultura. Photo by Antonio Quattrone.
    But in the end, Michelangelo escaped Cosimo’s grasp. His David, now installed in Florence’s Galleria dell’Accademia, is one of the world’s most famous works of art. The generic blandness of Bronzino’s court portraits pale next to the giant slayer’s steely gaze and taut determination. David remains Michelangelo’s compelling monument to the resistance to tyranny.
    Is there a lesson here for our so-called Modern Medicis? The art world is currently engaged in an unprecedented inquiry into the political and economic entanglements of museum board members and the ethics of museum patronage. As history reveals, art often finds itself in service to power. But the saga of Cosimo de Medici also suggests there are limits to the control patrons have over the power of art.
    “The Medici: Portraits and Politics, 1512–1570” is on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, through October 11, 2021.
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    See How British Artist Bridget Riley’s Paintings ‘Caress and Soothe’ the Eye in Her New Show at David Zwirner London

    It’s hard to think of an artist whose work is more visually pleasing than that of British artist Bridget Riley. The Op Art painter is known for her eye-catching canvases featuring geometric patterns, lines, and color arrangements that collectively pay homage to her favorite artist, the Pointillist Georges Seurat.
    “The eye can travel over the surface in a way parallel to the way it moves over nature. It should feel caressed and soothed, experience frictions and ruptures, glide and drift,” she once said of her work. “One moment, there will be nothing to look at and the next second the canvas seems to refill, to be crowded with visual events.”
    Bianca Jagger at “Bridget Riley: Past Into Present” at David Zwirner. Photo courtesy David Zwirner.
    In one of summer’s boldest exhibitions, David Zwirner has presented “Past Into Present,” an exhibition of paintings by Riley that features works from the past two years. Together, they reference “the work of the past, both in her own practice and in the art of painting itself,” according to the gallery.
    The exhibition features, among other works, an an extension of Riley’s “Measure for Measure” series, which includes the addition of a fourth color (turquoise), as well as a series of new “Measure for Measure Dark” paintings, which emphasizes deeper tones. The artworks are intended to “enrich the viewer’s enjoyment,” notes the gallery, “giving them something more to look at.”
    The exhibition is on view now at David Zwirner’s Grafton Street gallery in London, and online here.
    Bridget Riley, Intervals 12 (2021). Photo courtesy David Zwirner.
    A close up of Bridget Riley, Intervals 12 (2021). Photo courtesy David Zwirner.
    Installation view of Bridget Riley’s Measure for Measure Dark 2 and 3 (2019). Photo courtesy David Zwirner.
    An installation view of Riley’s exhibition “Past into Present” at David Zwirner in London. Photo courtesy David Zwirner.
    An installation view of Riley’s exhibition “Past into Present” at David Zwirner in London. Photo courtesy David Zwirner.
    An installation view of Riley’s exhibition “Past into Present” at David Zwirner in London. Photo courtesy David Zwirner.
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    The Baltic Triennial Has Brought Together Some of Europe’s Most Promising Emerging Talents—See Images Here

    The Baltic, a region typically seen as encompassing Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, has always boasted a dynamic art scene in Europe. One of its foremost contemporary art exhibitions, the Baltic Triennial, taps into that landscape of talent every three years—its 14th edition just opened this June in Vilnius, Lithuania.
    Since 1979, the Baltic Triennial has brought together these nations’ diverse yet overlapping art scenes, which were then still a part of the former Soviet Union until its dissolution in 1991. As such, the exhibition has long straddled a shifting notion of East and West, offering a unique perspective on Europe.
    Appropriately then, this year’s exhibition, which has brought together more than 60 artists from the region and from Central and Western Europe has been organized under the title, “The Endless Frontier.”
    Zsofia Keresztes at the Contemporary Art Center, Vilnius, for the Baltic Triennial 14 “The Endless Frontier.” Photo: Ugnius Gelguda.
    Helmed by Valentinas Klimašauskas, curator of the Latvian pavilion at the 2019 Venice Biennale, and Portugese curator João Laia, chief curator of the Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma in Helsinki, the show is anchored at the Contemporary Arts Center in the historic center of Vilnius, but spirals outward across various project spaces through the city. Each invited space developed their own autonomously curated projects that overlapped in some way with the core exhibition of the Contemporary Arts Center.
    “The Endless Frontier” offers a compelling survey of young and emerging artistic talents, featuring works by Flo Kasearu, Zuzanna Czebatul, and Klara Hosnedlova in the main concourses of the Contemporary Arts Center. Dreamy surrealist paintings and small sculptures from Polish painter Tomasz Kowalski takes over the project space Swallow.
    At Rupert, Lithuania’s prominent international artist residency, a group show curated byAdomas Narkevičius features new works by Kosovo-born artist Flaka Haliti, Karol Radziszewski from Poland, and Finnish artist Jaakko Pallasvuo alongside two historically overlooked artists from Lithuanian’s postwar art scene, photographer Virgilijus Šonta and abstract painter Juta Čeičytė.
    The Baltic Triennial 14: The Endless Frontier is on view until August 15, 2021. See images below.
    Baltic Triennial 14 “The Endless Frontier.” Exhibition performance “Who are you?”, Žygimantas Kudirka and felicita at Atletika. Photo: Andrej Vasilenko.
    Natalia LL at the Contemporary Art Center, Vilnius, for the Baltic Triennial 14 “The Endless Frontier.” Photo: Ugnius Gelguda.
    Klara Hosnedlova at the Contemporary Art Center, Vilnius, for the Baltic Triennial 14 “The Endless Frontier.” Photo: Ugnius Gelguda.
    Karol Radziszewski at the Contemporary Art Center, Vilnius, for the Baltic Triennial 14 “The Endless Frontier.” Photo: Ugnius Gelguda.
    Flo Kasearu at the Contemporary Art Center, Vilnius, for the Baltic Triennial 14 “The Endless Frontier.” Photo: Ugnius Gelguda.
    Works by Zuzanna Czebatul, Jura Shust, and Dominika Trapp at the Contemporary Art Center, Vilnius, for the Baltic Triennial 14 “The Endless Frontier.” Photo: Ugnius Gelguda.
    Works by Flaka Haliti, Zsofia Keresztes, Czebatul, and Danutė-Kvietkevičiūtė at the Contemporary Art Center, Vilnius, for the Baltic Triennial 14 “The Endless Frontier.” Photo: Ugnius Gelguda.
    Works by Agnieszka Polska and Voitech Kovarik at the Contemporary Art Center, Vilnius, for the Baltic Triennial 14 “The Endless Frontier.” Photo: Ugnius Gelguda.
    Works by Emilija Skarnulyte Polska and Voitech Kovarik at the Contemporary Art Center, Vilnius, for the Baltic Triennial 14 “The Endless Frontier.” Photo: Ugnius Gelguda.
    Alex Baczynski Jenkins at the Contemporary Art Center, Vilnius, for the Baltic Triennial 14 “The Endless Frontier.” Photo: Ugnius Gelguda.
    Aleksandra Domanović at the Contemporary Art Center, Vilnius, for the Baltic Triennial 14 “The Endless Frontier.” Photo: Ugnius Gelguda.
    Tomasz Kowalski at Swallow, as a part of the Baltic Triennial 14. Photo: Ugnius Gelguda
    Tomasz Kowalski at Swallow, as a part of the Baltic Triennial 14. Photo: Ugnius Gelguda
    Exhibition view, ‘Authority Incorporeal’, Rupert Centre for Art, Residencies and Education, 2021. Photo: Ugnius Gelguda
    Jaakko Pallasvuo, Miša Skalskis, Rachel McIntosh, Stephen Webb Angels Instead (2020). Photo: Evgenia Levin
    Žilvinas Dobilas, Jonas Zagorskas I was bored, (2000). Photo: Ugnius Gelguda.
    Anni Puolakka “Feed” at Editorial, as a part of the Baltic Triennial 14. Photo: Ugnius Gelguda.
    Anni Puolakka “Feed” at Editorial, as a part of the Baltic Triennial 14. Photo: Ugnius Gelguda.
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