Exhibitions

One does not expect the first big New York fall art show one attends to be Banksy, but the Art Gods will have their say. 
Just hours before the remnants of Hurricane Ida steamrolled the New York region, I made my way to an exhibition space on 14th Street, near a Foot Locker and a Pinkberry, for the sprawling show “Banksy: Genius or Vandal?” The traveling exhibition (one of several currently making the rounds) offers a deluge of some 100 prints by the famed street artist, whose guerrilla works—sometimes politically incisive, sometimes absurdly humorous, sometimes just cute—have captivated a mass audience for years. The show contains a VR experience, a video montage of the anonymous artist’s works, and scene-setting flourishes like a mock British phone booth. 
The artist is not amused by these tributes. When the show appeared in Moscow in 2018, his responses, in an Instagram post, included “What’s the opposite of LOL?” He disavowed the show, saying, “I don’t charge people to see my art unless there’s a fairground wheel.” Tickets to the New York presentation cost $29.50, or $19.90 for kids; to date, it has drawn over 3 million visitors in 15 cities…you do the math. (Banksy’s post did, however, acknowledge the irony of criticizing unauthorized presentations of his unauthorized works.)
The show is organized in cooperation with Banksy dealer Andrew Lilley; a great many of the prints are from his holdings. Helpfully, if you’re feeling acquisitive, the wall labels point you to his website. And the spectacle is produced by Exhibition Hub and Fever, which between them offer exhibitions on artists like Claude Monet, Gustav Klimt, and Michael Jackson. Probably Fever’s best known offering would be “Van Gogh: The Immersive Experience,” which got them in hot water with New York’s Better Business Bureau when customers confused it with “Immersive Van Gogh,” the Emily in Paris one.
Installation view of the immersive (and unauthorized) Banksy exhibition “Genius or Vandal.” Photo courtesy of Erick Pendzich.
Girding myself for what press reps promised was a “family-friendly storytelling experience,” I headed first to the VR presentation. To a politely funky soundtrack, I floated through grit-dusted alleyways, where animated Banksys pop up on the graffitied walls as if being painted live. The 10-minute voyage packs in the works, and they go by too fast. This sets the tone for an overstocked show that screams “I’m a blockbuster!” 
Some of the displays are clever enough. At the entry, the organizers—admitting that they can’t offer the conventional biography—provide the next best thing: a recreation of the artist’s studio from his hit 2010 mockumentary Exit Through the Gift Shop. But it faces off with the show’s worst sin, a curtained room with a blaring videomontage, complete with grating soundtrack (sirens and police radios, get it?), of numerous works connected by red string in the classic evidence board motif. The sound drowns out thought in the neighboring galleries. 
All the hits are here, represented by the prints the artist makes to complement his wall works in the wild—Girl with a Balloon, Riot Copper, Monkey Parliament, Dismaland, Walled-Off Hotel—and grouped under themes like politics, Brexit, consumption, and protest. Taken together, the breadth of Banksy’s output and the many tough subjects he has tackled, from the surveillance state to the police state to the state of constant war, is impressive. I was heartened to be reminded that he puts his money where his mouth is—raising money to assist women in Greek refugee camps, for example, and converting Dismaland’s building materials into housing for refugees. 
A viewer takes in the Banksy exhibition “Genius or Vandal.” Photo courtesy of Erick Pendzich.
But that made seeing this art in a gigantic, money-minting corporate expo all the more disheartening. Overall, the experience of encountering works that give form to ideas expressed in the street, continents apart, divorced here from their local and temporal context, had the effect of taming them, leaving me feeling as if I were observing one of Banksy’s classic feral rats, bathed, combed, and caged. 
Banksy points out in his book Wall and Piece that rats “exist without permission,” that “if you are dirty, insignificant and unloved, then rats are the ultimate role model.” Fun fact: They can also swim for three days on end. As the skies opened up over New York, sending down a record three inches of rain per hour, I realized that maybe Banksy is right. Maybe we need to learn something from the rats. And that even an unauthorized show about a guerrilla artist has, like these animals, a right to exist.
“Banksy: Genius or Vandal” is currently on view at 526 6th Avenue, New York City. 
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An unauthorized Banksy exhibition in Seoul has come under fire from visitors disappointed that the vast majority of the works on view were reproductions, rather than original works of art by the anonymous British street artist.
“The Art of Banksy: Without Limits“—which is currently on view in both Seoul and Warsaw—is slated to travel to the U.S. for the first time next month, arriving in Atlanta before heading to Charlotte and Miami. It’s been touring since its 2016 debut in Istanbul, and has visited 11 countries, reportedly attracting over 1 million visitors.
But it has hit a speed bump during its first stop in Asia.
According to promotional materials for the forthcoming U.S. edition, the show includes “more than 110 of the artist’s works, such as his original art, prints on different kinds of materials, photos, sculptures, and much more. Some of his works have even been reproduced with his stencil technique especially for the exhibition.”
“The Art of Banksy: Without Limits” in Vienna included this replica of his Bowery Wall mural in New York calling for the release of imprisoned Turkish artist Zehra Doğan. Photo courtesy of “The Art of Banksy: Without Limits.”
But of the 150 artworks on view in Seoul, only 27 are originals, according to the Korea Herald, prompting reviews complaining that “it is a pity that the show did not specify that most of works are replicas.”
“There were some misunderstandings about the exhibition. We are preparing some leaflets that indicate which artworks are original,” Park Bong-su, a senior manager at LMPE Company, the Seoul entertainment agency helping stage the show’s South Korean edition, told the Herald.
The company reportedly sold 25,000 advance tickets, but is now offering refunds for those who no longer wish to attend.
The show does include several original sculptures from Banksy’s 2015 “Dismaland” theme park exhibition in the U.K., as well as authentic prints of Smiling Copper, Consumer Jesus (Christ with Shopping Bags), and Bomb Hugger.
“The Art of Banksy: Without Limits” in Vienna. Photo courtesy of “The Art of Banksy: Without Limits.”
The reproductions include Laugh Now, a mural from the Ocean Rooms club in Brighton, U.K., showing a monkey and the caption “Laugh now, but one day we’ll be in charge.” There is also a version of Banksy’s bathroom, which he decorated with stencils of rats during lockdown in 2020 and shared photographs of online with the note that “My wife hates it when I work from home.”
“Without Limits” is not to be confused with the equally unauthorized “Banksy: Genius or Vandal,” opening next week at a former Urban Outfitters store in downtown Manhattan. That show also has been touring for years, most recently Brussels in June and Los Angeles earlier this month.
A third traveling Banksy outfit, “The Art of Banksy,” has been traversing the globe since its debut in Melbourne in late 2016. Curated by Steve Lazarides, formerly Banksy’s official art dealer, the exhibition proudly trumpets its unauthorized status, and currently claims to showcase $35 million worth of work by the artist.
“The Art of Banksy: Without Limits” in Vienna included this replica of the artist’s bathroom, painted during lockdown in spring 2020. Photo courtesy of “The Art of Banksy: Without Limits.”
“This exhibition is a one-off—never will you be able to see this amount of work in one place again,” Lazarides claimed ahead of the initial opening. “Once the show is over, the artwork will dissipate back to the other 40 collectors around the world, and the likelihood of them being brought together again in the future is very slim.”
Presumably, the profitability of the project—it charged $30 per ticket at that inaugural exhibition and has reportedly welcomed more than 750,000 guests to date—changed his mind. It opened in Chicago this month, and is headed to San Francisco in November. (It is produced by Starvox Entertainment, which is also behind “Immersive Van Gogh.”)
By the time the show touched down in Miami during Art Basel Miami Beach in 2018, Lazarides was bragging about how easy it was to reproduce. “You could take this show to every capital city in the world and it could work anywhere. Cab drivers in Karachi know who Banksy is. It could just keep running,” he told Artnet News.
“The Art of Banksy: Without Limits” in Vienna. Photo courtesy of “The Art of Banksy: Without Limits.”
The works in “The Art of Banksy” are all on loan from private collections and are predominantly screen prints—not the illegal graffiti paintings that invariably captivate the internet whenever they pop up in the wild. In Miami, those artworks “looked limp and poster-like on the big warehouse walls,” wrote Artnet News executive editor Julia Halperin.
Recreating some of Banksy’s more famous graffiti works for the exhibition was evidently a way around that problem for the team at “Without Limits.” The exhibition’s website includes the logos for several different companies, including BWO Entertainment, which has offices in New York and London; Expand Entertainment Group, a Saudi Arabian company; and Romanian live entertainment promoters Events. The site also lists Special Entertainment Events (SEE), known for touring shows on topics as varied as King Tut, the Titanic, Star Trek, and Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel (which returns to New York late next month).
“The Art of Banksy: Without Limits” in Vienna. Photo courtesy of “The Art of Banksy: Without Limits.”
Handling ticket sales is Fever, which is involved with many so-called “experience economy” events—including the “Genius or Vandal” Banksy show in New York. That one is produced by Exhibition Hub, which also partnered with Fever on its “Immersive Van Gogh” knock-off, “Van Gogh: The Immersive Experience.” (Earlier this year, the New York Better Business Bureau issued a warning to consumers who might mistake it for the original Van Gogh animated light show popularized by Emily in Paris, and Artnet News critic Ben Davis found it to be the less impressive of the two.)
None of the companies involved responded to inquiries from Artnet News.
The preponderance of shows has not escaped the notice of the artist himself. “Members of the public should be aware there has been a recent spate of Banksy exhibitions, none of which are consensual,” he wrote on his website. “They’ve been organized entirely without the artist’s knowledge or involvement. Please treat them accordingly.”
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On paper, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum’s show of seven paintings by the Italian Renaissance great Titian might sound a modest affair, but make no mistake: “Titian: Women, Myth & Power” is a not-to-be-missed art event.
It’s “the art event of the year, and possibly the decade” wrote Sebastian Smee in the Washington Post. The Boston Globe was even more effusive, calling it “the exhibit of a lifetime—several, in fact.”
That’s because the show reunites a suite of perhaps Titian’s most famous paintings for the first time since the 16th century. Called Titian’s “Poesie” series—he considered them poetic inventions—the six monumental paintings illustrate myths as told in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the famous ancient Roman poem.
“These paintings are not just central in Titian’s career, but are transformational in the history of Western painting,” Nathaniel Silver, curator at the Gardner, told Artnet News.
Titian, Diana and Castillo (1556-59). Collection of the National Gallery London/the National Galleries of Scotland.
Philip II, the future king of Spain and one of the era’s most significant arts patrons and collectors, commissioned the series when the artist visited him in Augsburg, Germany, over the winter of 1550 and 1551. It was the second and final time the two ever met in person. (A portrait of Philip is the seventh Titian included in the show.)
“Titian paints the ‘Poesie’ in his 60s. He’s at the peak of his accomplishments, and he’s working for his most enlightened and important patron,” Silver said.
“They also track this moment in Titian’s technique where he’s transitioning from a more linear, harder edged contour to a much brushier, almost Impressionistic way of painting,” Silver added. “It’s interesting for Titian, but it’s hugely important in the history of art, because it’s this new way of approaching the human figure with a soft contour—the idea of suggesting form rather than meticulously describing it—that really resonates with the next generation of artists.”
Titian, Venus and Adonis (1554). Collection of the Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid.
Yet despite the works’ importance, the royal collection began splitting up the set even within Philip’s lifetime, scattering the “Poesie” canvases throughout Europe, and eventually to the U.S. Isabella Stewart Gardner managed to buy one that had passed to the French royal collection and then to England following the revolution.
“Isabella was a pioneer in her time, especially in the field of Renaissance paintings,” Silver said. “She brought many of the first authentic examples of celebrated Renaissance paintings to the U.S.”
“These paintings all have very different histories,” Silver added. “Perseus and Andromeda was at one point owned by Van Dyke, the English painter, the Danae was owned by Napoleon and taken by the Duke of Wellington from Napoleon’s wagon train as Napoleon was retreating.”
Titian, Perseus and Andromeda (ca. 1554–56). Collection of the Wallace Collection, London.
Only one remains in Spain, at the Museo del Prado in Madrid. Besides the Gardner canvas, and the rest are in the U.K. Two are jointly owned by the National Gallery in London and the National Galleries of Scotland in Edinburgh. The others belong to the Wallace Collection and the Wellington Collection, both in London.
“These six paintings are some of the crown jewels of the collections where they are today,” Silver said. “No one ever really thought it would be possible for each institution to part with them at the same time as the others.”
The Gardner is the only U.S. venue for the exhibition, which debuted in London at the National Gallery and traveled to the Prado. A fourth stop at the National Galleries of Scotland had to be cancelled due to the pandemic, which saw the show shutter its inaugural London presentation no less than three times due to lockdown restrictions.
Barbara Kruger, Body Language (2021) at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston, for “Titian: Women, Myth & Power” (artist rendering). Photo courtesy of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston.
In Boston, the Gardner invited contemporary artists Barbara Kruger and duo Mary Reid Kelly and Patrick Kelley to put their own spin on the classical subject matter that inspired Titian. The museum wanted to acknowledge that Ovid’s myths prominently feature sexual violence against women, and to reconsider these age-old stories from the perspective of women.
Kruger’s Body Language is a banner that hangs from the museum’s facade, featuring a closely cropped detail from Diana and Actaeon, where the hunter Actaeon unwittingly intrudes on the goddess Diana and her nymphs while they are bathing. (She transforms him into a stag and his hounds kill him.)
Kelley and Kelley made a short film, The Rape of Europa, which gives voice to the title character, having her speak in satirical poetry.
Mary Reid Kelley and Patrick Kelley, Still from The Rape of Europa (2021), still. Commissioned for “Titian: Women, Myth and Power” at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston. Photo courtesy of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston.
“It really responds to Ovid, because if you read the Metamorphoses in Latin, he uses a lot of plays on words and they’re quite funny in a very dark way,” Silver said. “Mary picked up on that and reworked it in a modern context, which I thought was a brilliant way of engaging with the classical source and the Titian painting.”
The exhibition was in the works for five years, but was only made possible in 2019, when the Wallace finally got permission to loan works from its collection. The government had previously disallowed loans as a condition of the founder’s bequest.
“The Wallace Collection had never before lent any work of art anywhere,” Silver said. “The director and trustees raised the possibility of an alternative interpretation of the bequest, and the Ministry of Culture agreed. They will from now on be able to lend works of art.”
Titian, The Rape of Europa (1560–62).
Even with that hurdle cleared, reuniting the “Poesie” series was an immense task. Just shipping the works from Spain to Boston was complicated, being delayed by COVID, flooding in Europe, and even the Olympics, due to complications surrounding horses set to travel to Tokyo for the equestrian events.
Realistically, the works are too fragile, the shipping and insurance costs too high, and the logistics too complex, to ever hope to bring them together again.
In painting the “Poesie” series, Titian started with two scenes he had painted before. Danaë, showing the title figure being impregnated by Zeus in the form of a shower of gold, is now at the Wellington Collection. Venus and Adonis, in which Venus, bewitched by Cupid’s arrow, tries in vain to prevent her young love Adonis’s death at the hands of a wild boar, stayed in Spain, at the Prado.
With the remaining four paintings, Titian ventured out into fruitful new territory. The series culminated with The Rape of Europa, now at the Gardner.
Titian’s Rape of Europa hanging in the Red Drawing Room at Isabella Stewart Gardner’s Boston home, now a museum, in 1900. Photo by Thomas E. Marr.
“It’s like Titian’s warming up with subjects he’s familiar with, and then he breaks free and that’s where you begin to see the most visible innovation and creativity,” Silver said.
The painting entered the Gardner collection 125 years ago this very month. It cost £20,000, then a record price for an Old Master—but the museum’s founder was determined to bring the first genuine Titian canvas to the U.S.
“And it wasn’t just any Titian—it was this incredibly celebrated Titian. It became an immediate sensation,” Silver said. “From our perspective today, Isabella got a deal. She got one of the most important paintings in the history of Western Art. Today, The Rape of Europa is considered the most important Renaissance painting in the U.S.”
Reunited with the rest of the series, the painting’s power is all the more apparent today.
“It’s taken almost five centuries to get the ‘Poesie’ back together in one place,” Silver said. “It really is a one-time opportunity to see them all as Philip intended them.”
“Titian: Women, Myth & Power” is on view at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, August 12, 2021–January 2, 2022. 
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The streets of Richmond, Virginia are a lesson in how the past and present converge. Statues honoring Confederate soldiers have been toppled, while Kehinde Wiley’s defiant response to the Civil War, Rumors of War, stands sentry outside the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. Inside, an exhibition explores the creative output and traditions of Black artists through the lens of music and sound art.
The show, titled “The Dirty South: Contemporary Art, Material Culture, and the Sonic Impulse,” features an intergenerational cohort of artists, some self taught, some formally trained, working in a range of media. The show gathers more than 140 sculptures, paintings, drawings, films, photographs, installations, and sound works, all intermingling in the galleries.
Upon entering the cavernous museum, visitors are drawn down a hallway where the show’s introduction is Paul Stephen Benjamin’s Summer Breeze, an installation featuring a lyric from Billie Holiday’s heart-wrenching song about lynching, Strange Fruit, projected on a video screen and filling the gallery.
Installation view, “The Dirty South: Contemporary Art, Material Culture, and the Sonic Impulse” at the VMFA. Photo: Travis Fullerton, © 2021 Virginia Museum of Fine Arts.
The work is surrounded by other screens showing Jill Scott’s 21st-century rendition of the song, while, on a pyramid of televisions behind the singers, a young Black girl plays on a swing set.
“The confluence between the visual and sonic arts in the Black creative expression has long been recognized,” the show’s curator, Valerie Cassel Oliver, said in a press release. “What has remained elusive, particularly in the presentation of these forms, is the long trajectory of this exchange.”
“André 3000’s iconic phrase, ‘The South’s got something to say,’ really sparks for me a meditation to dig deep and to understand how Southern hip-hop artists were shaping their identity within the bedrock of the landscape that they knew and the creative expression born from the history of that landscape,” she added.
See images from the show below.
RaMell Ross Caspera, (2019). Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. Image: © RaMell Ross.
John Biggers, Four Seasons (1990). © 2020 John T. Biggers Estate/ VAGA via Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY, Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, Courtesy of Gibbes Museum of Art/Carolina Art Association.
Installation view, “The Dirty South: Contemporary Art, Material Culture, and the Sonic Impulse” at the VMFA. Photo: Travis Fullerton, © 2021 Virginia Museum of Fine Arts.
El Franco Lee II, DJ Screw in Heaven 2 (2016). Courtesy of the artist.
Rodney McMillian, From Asterisks in Dockery (2012). Courtesy of the artistand Vielmetter Los Angeles.
Installation view, “The Dirty South: Contemporary Art, Material Culture, and the Sonic Impulse” at the VMFA. Photo: Travis Fullerton, © 2021 Virginia Museum of Fine Arts.
Installation view, “The Dirty South: Contemporary Art, Material Culture, and the Sonic Impulse” at the VMFA. Photo: Travis Fullerton, © 2021 Virginia Museum of Fine Arts.
Installation view, “The Dirty South: Contemporary Art, Material Culture, and the Sonic Impulse” at the VMFA. Photo: Travis Fullerton, © 2021 Virginia Museum of Fine Arts.
Installation view, “The Dirty South: Contemporary Art, Material Culture, and the Sonic Impulse” at the VMFA. Photo: Travis Fullerton, © 2021 Virginia Museum of Fine Arts.
Fahamu Pecou, Dobale to the Spirit (2017). Courtesy Fahamu Pecou, Image © Dr. Fahamu Pecou, Courtesy Studio KAWO/Fahamu Pecou Art.
Installation view, “The Dirty South: Contemporary Art, Material Culture, and the Sonic Impulse” at the VMFA. Photo: Travis Fullerton, © 2021 Virginia Museum of Fine Arts.
Nadine Robinson, Coronation Theme: Organon, (2008). High Museum of Art, Atlanta.Image: © Nadine Robinson
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Elizabeth Neel was eight years old when she got her first set of oil paints, a Winsor & Newton paintbox, as a gift from her grandmother, the late, great portraitist Alice Neel.
Neel’s earliest painting experiences were with Alice, working side by side. But there was never any pressure to follow in her footsteps.
“I liked to draw a lot and she wanted to encourage that, because she thought I was good and she had a connection with me. We had a lot of fun together,” Neel told Artnet News. “She was a great grandmother, even though she never allowed anyone to call her that. She was always Alice to us.”
“A lot of people will say to me, ‘It must be hard that your grandmother was always so famous’—but she wasn’t,” Neel added. “For me, she was this intelligent, charming human who made these beautiful, insightful pictures that we lived around all my childhood. I think it would have been really different if she’d been a man and she’d been properly famous—that could have been oppressive.”
Elizabeth Neel, Dog Dog (2021). Photo by Genevieve Hanson, courtesy of the artist and Salon 94, New York, ©Elizabeth Neel.
Instead, Neel, now 46, was able to enter the art world on her own terms, first getting a certificate at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, followed by an MFA at Columbia University in New York. She’s shown her abstract paintings regularly since 2005, and she enjoyed a 2010 solo show at SculptureCenter in Queens.
The past few months, however, have been a particularly busy time, as Neel was preparing for not one, but two solo shows. “Arms Now Legs” is currently on view at her New York gallery, Salon 94. “Limb After Limb,” featuring paintings she originally planned to exhibit in a deconsecrated church, will debut next month at Pilar Corrias, Neel’s London dealer.
“The Salon 94 title references certain kind of transformative imagery in Ovid’s Metamorphosis, and the show at Pilar’s is a more John Milton-esque image of the world in a transformative state of turmoil, so I see the two as very connected,” Neel said. “Given the way I work, which is organically with a set of ideas, it was impossible for them not to be related. Everything that I’m reading about or thinking about or listening to goes into the work.”
Elizabeth Neel, Stranger’s End (2021). Photo courtesy of the artist and Pilar Corrias, London, ©Elizabeth Neel.
Each piece starts with raw canvas and a primer coat of clear acrylic polymer that keeps the painting from sinking in all the way through the fabric. It also allows Neel to use white to create lighter areas against the background, many areas of which she leaves untouched, to “preserve a lot of air in the canvas,” she said.
But unlike her childhood oil painting sessions with Alice, Neel chooses acrylic paint to create her many-layered works.
“When I worked in oil, it took so long for every layer to dry that I would get out of the headspace I needed to feel a kind of continuity in the painting,” she explained.
Neel has a deep bag of tricks at her disposal to achieve her complex compositions, sometimes folding the painted canvas to create a Rorschach-like effect, and employing a wide variety of tools in her mark-making. “I use rollers, I use rags, I use my hands with rubber gloves on—and once in a while, I do use a brush too,” she said.
Elizabeth Neel, Exchange Principle (detail, 2021). Photo by Genevieve Hanson, courtesy of the artist and Salon 94, New York, ©Elizabeth Neel.
Since the beginning of the pandemic, Neel has been living and working almost exclusively at her childhood home in rural Vermont, pressing the barn space above her parents’ garage into service as her studio. The change of scenery from her longtime home in Brooklyn proved inspirational.
“It was incredible to be able to step out into a snowy landscape or a sunny world of grass and flowers. Much more refreshing than stepping out onto a concrete slab with loud noises,” Neel said. “It felt almost like being a hermit or a monk. It was frightening, to a degree, to begin making a show without any human context, but it was a challenge that ended up being really good for me.”
Elizabeth Neel’s Vermont studio. Photo courtesy of Salon 94, New York.
She made one of two trips back to New York for the opening of her grandmother’s critically acclaimed retrospective, “Alice Neel: People Come First,” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in March. (The exhibition closed earlier this month.)
“I’m incredibly happy that she’s getting what I think is her due,” Neel said. “Alice is really inspirational for me. I don’t think I ever met a person who was more tenacious or had more guts in the face of lack of interest than she had.”
Elizabeth Neel, Darlest Dearing (2020). Photo by Genevieve Hanson, courtesy of the artist and Salon 94, New York, ©Elizabeth Neel.
Alice’s struggles for recognition and financial compensation, which were documented in the show, were part of the reason her two sons were drawn to the professional world, becoming a doctor and a lawyer. But Elizabeth and her brother, filmmaker Andrew Neel, turned back to pursue creative careers. (He made a feature-length documentary about Alice in 2007, and is currently completing a documentary short about Neel that Corrias will debut during Frieze London in October.)
“I think that actually happens lot in creative families, where you’ll have a flip-flopping effect,” Neel said. The poverty that her father, Hartley Neel, and her uncle, Richard Neel, experienced as children drove them to seek more stable career paths—an impulse that Neel, who took the LSAT before entering art school, understands fully.
“Alice suffered terribly on a physical and emotional level at the hands of her art and the art world,” she said. “That’s not something that you jump into lightly!”
See more works by Neel below.
Elizabeth Neel, Ark Scenario (2021). Photo by Genevieve Hanson, courtesy of the artist and Salon 94, New York, ©Elizabeth Neel.
Elizabeth Neel, Ark Scenario (detail, 2021). Photo by Genevieve Hanson, courtesy of the artist and Salon 94, New York, ©Elizabeth Neel.
Elizabeth Neel, Following the Birds (detail, 2021). Photo by Genevieve Hanson, courtesy of the artist and Salon 94, New York, ©Elizabeth Neel.
Elizabeth Neel, Eve 2 (2021). Photo courtesy of the artist and Pilar Corrias, London, ©Elizabeth Neel.
Elizabeth Neel, Sister (Sibling 1) (detail, 2020). Photo by Genevieve Hanson, courtesy of the artist and Salon 94, New York, ©Elizabeth Neel.
Elizabeth Neel, Blue Black Bleed (2021). Photo by Genevieve Hanson, courtesy of the artist and Salon 94, New York, ©Elizabeth Neel.
Elizabeth Neel, Eve (2021). Photo courtesy of the artist and Pilar Corrias, London, ©Elizabeth Neel.
Elizabeth Neel, Exchange Principle (2021). Photo by Genevieve Hanson, courtesy of the artist and Salon 94, New York, ©Elizabeth Neel.
“Elizabeth Neel: Arms Now Legs” is on view at Salon 94, 3 East 89th Street, New York, June 30–August 27, 2021.
“Elizabeth Neel: Limb After Limb” will be on view at Pilar Corrias, 2 Savile Row, London, September 16–October 23, 2021.
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The bustling city is visible outside its tall glass walls, but inside the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin, there is a pristine kind of quiet. Little stirs except Alexander Calder’s large mobiles, which are gently spinning from an indiscernible wind. They are part of a monumental first exhibition at the German museum, which is opening for the first time in more than six years on August 22.
One who did not know it would hardly guess the entire museum, designed by Mies van der Rohe, was just turned inside out. The bi-level museum has been meticulously restored by David Chipperfield Architects, paid for by the federal government. Few would argue that the €140 million ($168 million) renovation was unnecessary: The building had fallen into disrepair, with rust, cracks in the glass, and a pesky issue with condensation, among a longer list of issues.
Six years on, entering the museum is somewhat like stepping into a deep past. Chipperfield, who worked with the brief to maintain “as much Mies as possible,” had his team dismantle the structure of glass and steel piece by piece, and each element was painstakingly restored to be as true as possible to the day the museum was unveiled to great acclaim in 1968. The architect died a year later; the building was his last. 
Exhibition view of “The Art of Society 1900–1945: The Collection of the Nationalgalerie,” 2021. © Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Nationalgalerie / David von Becker
Even a famous Calder piece that was there on that postwar opening day has returned. For the Calder exhibition “Minimal/Maximal,” Têtes et queue (1965) is back on the terrace where it stood, in what was then West Berlin. Dark carpets and restored Barcelona chairs, the celebrated seats made by the architect, are back on view and ready for guests.
In the lower level, one finds the restaurant, renewed thanks to artist Jorge Pardo, who has created a contemporary intervention that sensitively draws on the room’s Anni Albers motifs, employing Mexican-Spanish references.
Contemporary positions like Pardo’s will also be presented in temporary shows. Rosa Barba has the first slot, with a major installation called In a Perpetual Now, and more female contemporary artists, including Barbara Kruger and Monica Bonvicini, are on the docket. In 2026, the museum will host works from the Centre Pompidou in Paris when it closes for its own long-overdue renovation.
Alexander Calder Untitled (1954). Calder Foundation, New York; Gift of Andréa Davidson, 2007. © 2021 Calder Foundation, New York / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. VG-Bildkunst, Bonn 2021 / Photo by David von Becker
The main rooms feature a presentation of the museum’s esteemed collection of modern art, which was painstakingly rebuilt after almost all of it was looted and lost during World War II. Since then, the holdings have outgrown the space capacities of the building, so a new and somewhat controversially-designed structure has broken ground next door to house a good portion of the collection, which waits in storage until the new space is ready in 2026.
Like the building’s redesign, its first show, “The Art of Society 1900–1945,” also takes us back in time. The highlight opener is a poignant painting by German painter Lotte Laserstein’s Evening Over Potsdam (1930). A group sits outside, looking forlorn; in the background dark clouds reflect the looming rise of National Socialism. The museum bought it in 2010 at Sotheby’s for £421,250, according to the Artnet Price Database.
Other areas focus on European art and the cultures that informed and surrounded the artists between 1900 to 1945. There is Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s absinthe-soaked canvas Potsdamer Platz from 1914, which shows a landscape from nearby the museum that was totally flattened about three decades later. Powerful pictures evoke the devastations of World War I, too, like Otto Dix’s Die Skatspieler from 1920—a psychedelic collaged painting depicting amputee veterans with machinelike limbs.
Lotte Laserstein, Evening Over Potsdam, 1930. © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2021.Nationalgalerie – Staatliche Museen zu Berlin / Roman März
The museum will continue to focus on western modernism, in all its highs and lows; however, while the building may have been restored to the past, there are moments that bring it into the future, such as new didactic panels that address the racist gaze present in works by painter Emil Nolde and his cohort, made during colonial times in the South Pacific.
At a recent press preview, the museum’s director lamented gaps in the collection, which he is eager to fill. “My hope is that we can add to the collection these positions that are missing,” Joachim Jäger said, noting that despite a limited collecting budget, he would love to bring more diversity into the collection. At the top of his list are long-overlooked artists like Irma Stern and Hilma af Klint, the latter of which has a work currently on loan for the show.
See more images of the exhibitions and galleries below.

Alexander Calder, Têtes et queue, 1965, from “Minimal/Maximal. “Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Nationalgalerie © 2021 Calder Foundation, New York / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / Photo: Stephanie von Becker
Exhibition view of “The Art of Society 1900–1945: The Collection of the Nationalgalerie,” 2021. © Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Nationalgalerie / David von Becker
Otto Dix, Die Skatspieler, 1920. © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2021. Nationalgalerie – Staatliche Museen zu Berlin / Jörg P. Anders
Exhibition view of “The Art of Society 1900–1945: The Collection of the Nationalgalerie,” 2021. © Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Nationalgalerie / David von Becker
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Potsdamer Platz, 1914. © Nationalgalerie – Staatliche Museen zu Berlin / Jörg P. Anders
Exhibition view of “The Art of Society 1900–1945: The Collection of the Nationalgalerie,” 2021. © Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Nationalgalerie / David von Becker
“The Art of Society 1900–1945,” Alexander Calder’s “Minimal/Maximal,” and Rosa Barba’s “In a Perpetual Now” open at the Neue Nationalgalerie on August 22.
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Two photographs by Kate Middleton, Duchess of Cambridge, are part of an exhibition honoring Holocaust survivors at the Imperial War Museums in London.
“While I have been lucky enough to meet two of the now very few survivors, I recognize not everyone in the future will be able to hear these stories first hand,” Middleton said in a statement. “It is vital that their memories are preserved and passed on to future generations.”
For “Generations: Portraits of Holocaust Survivors,” Middleton and 13 fellows from the Royal Photographic Society photographed Holocaust survivors and their descendants.
“We felt it was important to celebrate the survivors of the Holocaust through this exhibition and create a body of work that could be shown in the future, with family members in the photographs who would have a direct connection to them,” Michael Pritchard, the director of education and public affairs at the Royal Photographic Society, told Artnet News.
Kate Middleton, portrait of Holocaust survivor Steven Frank and his two granddaughters, Maggie and Trixie Fleet, at Kensington Palace for “Generations: Portraits of Holocaust Survivors” at the Imperial War Museums, London. Photo ©the Duchess of Cambridge. Steven Frank
The exhibition grew out of a special issue of the Jewish News commemorating the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz.
The show, which is a collaboration between the newspaper, the Royal Photographic Society, the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust, and Dangoor Education, was delayed from a planned 2020 opening by the pandemic.
Middleton photographed Steven Frank with his two granddaughters, Maggie and Trixie Fleet, and Yvonne Bernstein and her granddaughter, Chloe Wright, at Kensington Palace ahead of Holocaust Memorial Day in January 2020.
Kate Middleton with Holocaust survivor Yvonne Bernstein during a portrait session at Kensington Palace. Photo courtesy of Kensington Palace.
Frank, born in the Netherlands in 1935, was one of only 93 children to escape the Theresienstadt concentration camp in German-occupied Czechoslovakia. Remarkably, though his father was murdered at Auschwitz, Frank’s two brothers and mother also survived, in part thanks to the extra scraps of bread his mother acquired by secretly washing prisoners’ clothes through her job at the camp laundry. Frank brought the tin saucepan in which she would mix the bread with hot water to his portrait session with Middleton.
Kate Middleton, portrait of Holocaust survivor Yvonne Bernstein and her granddaughter Chloe Wright at Kensington Palace for “Generations: Portraits of Holocaust Survivors” at the Imperial War Museums, London. Photo ©the Duchess of Cambridge. Steven Frank
Bernstein, born in Germany 1937, was separated from her parents at one year old, when they each individually managed to obtain visas to work in the U.K. War broke out before she could join them, and Bernstein was forced into hiding in France with her aunt, uncle, and cousins. The family was arrested and the uncle killed at Auschwitz, but Bernstein was released and eventually reunited with her parents in Britain in 1945. For her photograph, she posed with her German ID card, stamped with the letter “J” to identify her as a Jew.
“They look back on their experiences with sadness but also with gratitude that they were some of the lucky few to make it through. Their stories will stay with me forever,” Middleton added.
Kate Middleton with Holocaust survivor Yvonne Bernstein during a portrait session at Kensington Palace. Photo courtesy of Kensington Palace.
This isn’t the first time that Middleton’s prowess with the camera has made headlines. In 2017, the Royal Photographic Society awarded her an honorary lifetime membership recognizing her tour photographs and family portraits. She has been a society patron since 2019.
Prior to her life as a royal, Middleton also took photographs for her family’s party planning company, Party Pieces. She also majored in art history at the University of St. Andrews, Scotland, where she met Prince William.
Last year, Middleton began working with the National Portrait Gallery in London on a community photography project documenting life during lockdown in the U.K. She had previously curated a Victorian photography exhibition at the NPG in 2018.
“Generations: Portraits of Holocaust Survivors” is on view at the Imperial War Museums, Lambeth Road, London, SE1 6HZ, August 6, 2021–January 9, 2022.
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