Exhibitions

Earlier this year, when the Metropolitan Museum of Art announced Timothée Chalamet, Billie Eilish, Amanda Gorman, and Naomi Osaka as co-hosts of the Met Gala, it signaled a new phase in American celebrity culture. After all, the actor, singer, poet laureate, and athlete are all under the age of 30—the faces of a generation defined by its activism.
Just days after the 20th anniversary of the September 11 terror attacks, and on the same day as the House Foreign Relations Committee grilled top brass on the botched Afghanistan withdrawal, the timing of this year’s Costume Institute show was, in a word, fraught. This was proven when a cadre of demonstrators crashed the tony step-and-repeat—not to mention the fact that a slew of the evening’s guests chose to wear non-American designers.
Nonetheless, the much-anticipated return to in-person red-carpet events was a sight to behold, kicking off a two-part exhibition at the Met. It will open to the public later this week, on a staggered timeline: part one, titled “In America: A Lexicon of Fashion” runs from September 18, 2021 through September 5, 2022; and part two, “In America: An Anthology of Fashion,” will run from May 5, 2022 through September 5, 2022.
Back in April, the Costume Institute curator Andrew Bolton told Vogue that U.S.-centric exhibitions were a long time coming; the last show to home in on the topic was “American Ingenuity” in 1998, and in the intervening years, the fashion industry—as well as the political, social, and cultural realms—have all undergone a serious recalculation.
“I really do believe that American fashion is undergoing a Renaissance,” Bolton told the magazine. “I think young designers in particular are at the vanguard of discussions about diversity and inclusion, as well as sustainability and transparency, much more so than their European counterparts, maybe with the exception of the English designers.”
Andre Walker’s Pendleton Woolen Mills coat, Spring/Summer 2018. Courtesy of Andre Walker Studio. Image © Metropolitan Museum of Art.
The exhibition, in the Anna Wintour Costume Center, is based around the framework of a house, with each imagined room representing a feeling that corresponds to the spirit of a particular garment or runway collection.
The porch, Bolton explained, is categorized by warmth and visualized through a blanket-coat that Andre Walker designed with Pendleton Woolen Mills, paying homage to the Oregon-based company that was founded in 1863. And in the garden room, Oscar de la Renta’s floral-festooned dresses—over the years favored by Taylor Swift and Wintour herself—represent joy and rebirth.
Below, see more images from “In America: A Lexicon of Fashion.”
Ensemble, Fall/Winter 1982-83 Ralph Lauren. Image © Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Gallery view, Nostalgia (right) and Belonging (left). Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Gallery view, Consciousness. Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Sterling Ruby Studio, VEIL FLAG (2020). Courtesy of Sterling Ruby Studio. Photo: Melanie Schiff.
Gallery view, Belonging. Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Gallery view, Delight. Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Gallery view, Assurance. Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Ensemble, Donna Karan Fall/Winter 1985-86. Image © Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Gallery view, Wonder (left) and Warmth (right). Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Gallery view, Wonder. Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Gallery view, Comfort. Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
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As museums begin to reopen in the United States, we cast an eye over upcoming exhibitions for those that promise the most urgent and notable art of our time. The resulting list contains a diverse roster of 14 shows—by solo practitioners and groups chosen by keen-eyed curators—coming to museums from coast to coast.
Some exhibitions will introduce you to artists you may not know, like Bani Abidi at the MCA Chicago, Michaela Eichwald at the Walker Art Center, and Nellie Mae Rowe at the High Museum. Others will offer new insight into artists or eras of artistic production you thought you knew, from a spotlight on Georgia O’Keeffe’s photography in Houston to a sweeping feminist art survey in Berkeley. 
Regardless of what city you’re in, this fall’s season of museum programming is bound to open both eyes and minds.

“New Time: Art and Feminisms in the 21st Century”Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA)August 28, 2021–January 30, 2022
Farah Al Qasimi, It’s Not Easy Being Seen 3 (2016). Courtesy the artist; The Third Line, Dubai; and Helena Anrather.
With 140 works by 76 artists and collectives, this exhibition at the U.C. Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive is one of the largest to date on contemporary feminist art, and will coincide with a year of public programming focused on feminist theory. Works by the likes of Laura Aguilar, Christina Quarles, Zanele Muholi, Wu Tsang, and Francesca Woodman are included, tackling such topics as the fragmented body, domesticity, female anger, and feminist utopias. 

“Raúl de Nieves: The Treasure House of Memory”Institute of Contemporary Art, BostonSeptember 1, 2021–July 24, 2022
Raúl de Nieves, The Fable, which is composed of wonders, moves the more (2021). © Raúl de Nieves.
Multidisciplinary artist Raúl de Nieves is adored for his exuberant works that blend queer club culture, religious iconography, and folklore traditions from his native Mexico. Here, the artist continues his ongoing exploration of his culture and its traditions through a new body of work, created especially for the ICA, that looks at memory and personal transformation.

“Really Free: The Radical Art of Nellie Mae Rowe”High Museum of Art, AtlantaSeptember 3, 2021–January 9, 2022 
Nellie Mae Rowe, This World is Not My Home (1979). Photo courtesy of the High Museum of Art, Atlanta.
Born in Georgia in 1900, the daughter of a formerly enslaved man, Rowe achieved fame as a self-taught folk artist. The first major exhibition devoted to Rowe in more than 20 years celebrates the late artist’s notable drawing career, which was only fostered later in her life, after the deaths of her husband and employer, in the 1960s. The museum bills the show as the first to position Rowe’s creative pursuit as a “radical act of self-expression and liberation in the post-civil rights-era South.”

Joan MitchellSan Francisco Museum of Modern ArtSeptember 4, 2021–January 17, 2022
Joan Mitchell, Untitled (1992). Courtesy of Cheim & Read, New York.
This highly anticipated retrospective devoted to the queen of gestural abstraction contains over 80 works, encompassing everything from early paintings and drawings, sketchbooks, letters, and photographs to the large, color-drenched, multi-panel works that defined her later output.  

“Selena Forever/Siempre Selena”Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, ArkansasSeptember 4, 2021–January 10, 2022
John Dyer, Selena (1992). Courtesy of the artist.
At the height of the beloved Tejano singer’s fame, it was photographer John Dyer whom she entrusted to produce the images of her that were seared into the American pop-culture consciousness. Over the course of two collaborative photoshoots, in 1992 and ‘94, Dyer captured the legendary Selena Quintanilla-Pérez in her signature gemmed bustier and red lip, pictures that became immortal after her tragic death in 1995.

“Bani Abidi: The Man Who Talked Until He Disappeared”Museum of Contemporary Art, ChicagoSeptember 4, 2021–June 5, 2022
Bani Abidi, An Unforeseen Situation 4. Courtesy of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago.
Bani Abidi’s work infuses deadly serious subjects like militarism, nationalism, and memory with humor, holding up a mirror to power structures. The Pakistani artist, who lives in Karachi and Berlin, gets the survey treatment at the MCA, co-organized with the Sharjah Art Foundation, in a show that looks at over 20 years of her career and features new work alongside existing video, photography, and sound installations. 

“Adam Pendleton: Who Is Queen?”Museum of Modern Art, New YorkSeptember 18, 2021–January 30, 2022
Adam Pendleton, Untitled (WE ARE NOT) (2021). Image courtesy of the artist.
Pendleton, who has put forth a “Black Dada” framework inspired by Amiri Baraka, ambitiously takes over MoMA’s Marron Atrium with an immersive floor-to-ceiling installation described as a “spatial collage” containing text, image, and sound. All together, the show’s paintings, drawings, textiles, sculptures, and moving images seek to disrupt the 1:1 relationship of words and images, allowing a complex new vision of Blackness to emerge in abstraction.

“Barbara Kruger: THINKING OF YOU. I MEAN ME. I MEAN YOU.”The Art Institute of ChicagoSeptember 19, 2021–January 24, 2022
Barbara Kruger’s Untitled (Your Body is a Battleground) (1989), at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 2013. Photo by Susan Broman via Flickr.
The prolific Pictures Generation artist has collaborated with the Art Institute to map out a survey of her entire career that takes up the whole of the museum’s 18,000-square-foot gallery space. It’s all here, and squirm-inducingly relevant: her trademark “pasteups,” works on vinyl, animations, and video installations, plus a new site-specific work in the adjoining atrium. On top of this, Kruger has created work for the city at large, making billboards and designs for the Chicago Transit Authority, among other organizations.

“Naudline Pierre: What Could Be Has Not Yet Appeared”Dallas Museum of ArtSeptember 26, 2021–May 15, 2022
Naudline Pierre, Lest You Fall (2019). Courtesy of the Dallas Museum of Art.
Pierre is known for her colorful canvases that depict ethereal beings and explore power struggles in intimate relationships. The Brooklyn-based painter’s first solo museum exhibition will consist of existing works—one of which was recently acquired by the DMA—as well as new creations, with five major paintings making their debut. 

“Greater New York”MoMA PS1, New YorkOctober 7, 2021–April 18, 2022
Robin Graubard, selection from “Peripheral Vision” (1979–2021). Image courtesy the artist and Office Baroque, Antwerp.
One of the hottest survey exhibitions of new art from across New York’s five boroughs is back for its fifth iteration. This latest edition, curated by Ruba Katrib with Serubiri Moses, Kate Fowle, and Inés Katzenstein, was delayed by a year due to the pandemic, but still promises to showcase the best of artists and collectives currently working in the Big Apple, including Carolyn Lazard, Alan Michelson, and BlackMass publishing.

“Georgia O’Keeffe, Photographer”Museum of Fine Arts, HoustonOctober 17, 2021–January 17, 2022
Georgia O’Keeffe, Jimsonweed (Datura stramonium) (1964–68). © Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, Santa Fe.
The artist best known for her paintings of flowers and Southwestern landscapes is recast here in the first exhibition to focus entirely on her photography, with nearly 100 prints from a newly examined archive to go on view. Described as a “Modernist approach” to the art form, O’Keeffe’s pictures document family members, fellow artists, and her travels. 

“Soft Water Hard Stone”The New Museum, New YorkOctober 28, 2021–January 23, 2022
Amalie Smith, Clay Theory (2019) (still). Courtesy of the artist.
The latest triennial from the downtown institution draws its title from a Brazilian proverb: “Água mole em pedra dura, tanto bate até que fura,” meaning “soft water on hard stone hits until it bores a hole.” Curators Margot Norton and Jamillah James have translated this idea into an exhibition of 41 international artists focused on how systems we once considered infallible have been, in fact, proven fragile by recent global crises. 

My BarbarianWhitney Museum of American Art, New YorkOctober 29, 2021–February 27, 2022
My Barbarian, Broke People’s Baroque Peoples’ Theater, 2011–15. Studio photograph, courtesy of the artists.
For the occasion of the performance trio’s 20th anniversary, the Whitney has commissioned a new filmic piece, Rose Bird, about California’s first female chief Supreme Court justice, to accompany this two-part survey of My Barbarian’s work. A series of live events—including a play, a festival, a cabaret-style concert, and a “rehearsal-as-performance”―will be enacted alongside an exhibition containing footage of previous performances, in addition to sculptures, paintings, drawings, masks, and puppets.

Michaela EichwaldWalker Art Center, MinneapolisNovember 14, 2020–May 16, 2021
Michaela Eichwald, Die Unsrigen sind fortgezogen (The Ours Have Moved Away) (2014). Collection Brian Pietsch and Christopher Hermann.
The Berlin-based artist and writer, who is primarily a painter, marks her first solo exhibition in the United States with a presentation looking back at the past ten years of her career. Her palimpsest-like paintings, sculptures, and collages contain surprising materials like candy and chicken bones, and often allude to her interests in philosophy and literature.
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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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