Exhibitions

To mark its 175th anniversary, the Smithsonian Institution is staging a massive celebration in the form of a sprawling exhibition featuring works from many museums under the Smithsonian umbrella. To tie them all together, the organization is also commissioning site-specific art commissions from Beatriz Cortez, Nettrice Gaskins, Soo Sunny Park, Devan Shimoyama, and Tamiko Thiel and p/.
The show, titled “Futures,” will be held at the Smithsonian’s storied Arts and Industries Building, which has been largely closed to the public for two decades. Dating to 1881, the building, which served as the first home for the U.S. National Museum, has undergone a $55 million renovation and is once again ready to welcome the public with an interdisciplinary, immersive exhibition asking them to consider how art and technology continue to shape our world.
The show is due to open in late 2021; after its closure, the building will undergo another round of renovations before opening permanently.
“We have tried to get a piece from each other Smithsonian museum to reflect that diversity of knowledge and celebrate that legacy within the construct of the future,” Ashley Molese, the Arts and Industries Building curator, told Artnet News.
Expanded Present, an iridescent installation by Park, will greet visitors outside, surrounding the doorway with a sparkling cloud—because when a building has been closed for 20 years, you need to have something letting the public know you’re open for business.
Soo Sunny Park, Expanded Present. Concept Design courtesy of the artist.
The piece, which will change in appearance based on the time of day and shifting weather conditions, is made from reflective materials such as fencing, metal studs, and dichroic glass, which was invented by NASA.
Once inside, there will be more than 150 objects to examine, including artifacts of scientific and technological advancement placed alongside works engaging the tools of the future.
Highlights include the solar panels that Jimmy Carter installed on the roof of the White House during his presidency in the 1970s and the prototype of Virgin’s Hyperloop used in a successful test late last year. There’s  also the Bakelizer, the original machine that chemist-entrepreneur Leo Hendrik used to produce the first synthetic commercial plastic.
Soo Sunny Park installing work at the Rice Gallery. Photo by Nash Baker courtesy of the artist.
In addition to the commissions, other artworks will be scattered throughout the exhibition, including Stephanie Syjuco’s altered photographs of Filipinos put on forced display in “Living Villages” at the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis—shown alongside a pamphlet from the event from the Smithsonian collection.
But it is the five art commissions that will serve as anchors throughout the show.
For her piece Chultun El Semillero, Cortez was inspired by chultunes, underground storage chambers built by the Maya in pre-Columbian Mesoamerica. She’s filled her own welded steel versions with living plants, seeds, and other tools.
“She’s had the structure be excavated from the earth to create these future space time machines that are transporting knowledge and seeds and medicine to this indeterminate place in the future,” Molese explained.
The Smithsonian Arts and Industries Building. Photo courtesy of the Smithsonian.
Thiel and p/’s ReWildAR uses augmented reality to show viewers a Washington, D.C., that has returned to nature, transforming the halls into a re-wilded garden. The artist consulted Smithsonian horticulture experts to determine what the environment might look like if climate change continues unchecked.
“Tamiko was doing A.R. installations before anyone else was using that technology in the art world,” Molese said. “She’s imagining a moment in time in the future where… the landscape in Washington, D.C., has warmed and altered.” (Viewers can download an app to wander through the AR space, or use iPads provided by the museum.)
Gaskins also explores new technologies with her “Featured Futurists,” portraits of such figures as Buckminster Fuller and Octavia Butler made using a A.I. neutral network application called Deep Dream.
Nettrice Gaskins, Octavia Butler from “Featured Futurists.” Image courtesy of the artist.
Shimoyama based his installation The Grove on utility poles, creating a sort of manmade forest where visitors can sit and reflect on the show and our more tumultuous recent history.
“You come to a kind of clearing where you’re greeted by these stunning bedazzled Swarovski crystal-covered totems,” Molese said. “It’s almost a mourning garden or a labyrinth.”
Despite the many challenges facing our world and the creation of intentional moments of meditation, the exhibition strikes a purposely optimistic note.
“‘Futures’ is dedicated to a hopeful vision of a future that we choose, not one that we fear. We wanted to create it almost as a choose your own own adventure, defining pathways that build a more equitable, relatable, and inclusive future,” Molese said. “It was a very conscious choice not to be too dystopic in our vision.”
“Futures” will be on view at the Smithsonian Institution, Arts and Industries Building, 900 Jefferson Drive, SW, National Mall, Washington, D.C., November 2021–July 2022. 
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Damien Hirst‘s over-the-top art has landed in Rome, where works from his love-it-or-hate-it series “Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable” are on view alongside antiquities and Renaissance and Baroque masterpieces at the Galleria Borghese.
The Galleria Borghese’s storied art collection, started by Cardinal Scipione Borghese in the 17th century, includes life-size sculptures by Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Caravaggio paintings, and classical antiquities. They are displayed amid richly decorated marble halls—an ornate setting that offers the perfect backdrop for Hirst’s elaborate “Treasures.”
“Inserted among the masterpieces of the Galleria’s collection, these works celebrate the desire for variety held by the museum’s founder, Cardinal Scipione Borghese,” the museum said in a statement.
As Italy looks to rebound from the pandemic, which has limited tourism, the government sees the opening of the Hirst show as the start of “a new renaissance for Italy,” minister of culture Dario Franceschini said in a statement.
Damien Hirst, Cerberus (Temple Ornament) (2009). Photo by A. Novelli © Galleria Borghese Ministero della Cultura © Damien Hirst and Science Ltd. All rights reserved DACS 2021/SIAE 2021.
Featuring expensive materials such as bronze, rock crystal, Carrara marble, and malachite, Hirst’s sculptures—which initially debuted in Venice in 2017—come with an elaborate (and untrue) backstory. Purportedly 2,000 years old, they were supposedly uncovered in the cargo of a sunken ship rescued off the coast of East Africa in 2008, part of an underwater archaeology venture funded by the British artist (hence the coral and barnacles encrusting some of the works).
Even though Hirst produced a flashy Netflix mockumentary about the so-called recovery effort, there were always hints that the dramatic backstory was nothing more than a fantastical fiction. Cif Amotan II, the freed slave said to have amassed the massive collection in the first or second centuries, is actually an anagram for “I am fiction.”
The works, which reportedly cost $65 million to produce, debuted at the Palazzo Grassi and the Punta della Dogana in 2017 to decidedly mixed reviews. (There was also an animal rights protest involving large quantities of poop.) Artnet News called it “a contemporary-art spectacle of unparalleled ambition,” while ARTnews said it was “undoubtedly one of the worst exhibitions of contemporary art staged in the past decade.”
The Galleria Borghese exhibition also features works from Hirst’s polka-dotted “Colour Space” series, which has never been shown in Italy before. The paintings are a departure from his well known “Spot Paintings,” made with mechanical precision on a uniform grid, in that they are much looser, with circles of varying sizes and shapes overlapping one another, betraying the presence of the artist’s hand.
See more photos of the show below.
Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Ratto di Proserpina (1621–22) and Damien Hirst, Grecian Nude (2013). Photo by A. Novelli ©Galleria Borghese Ministero della Cultura © Damien Hirst and Science Ltd. All rights reserved DACS 2021/SIAE 2021.
Damien Hirst, Hydra and Kali (2015). Photo by A. Novelli © Galleria Borghese Ministero della Cultura © Damien Hirst and Science Ltd. All rights reserved DACS 2021/SIAE 2021.
Damien Hirst, Female Archer (2013). Photo by A. Novelli ©Galleria Borghese Ministero della Cultura © Damien Hirst and Science Ltd. All rights reserved DACS 2021/SIAE 2021.
Damien Hirst, Reclining Woman (2012). Photo by A. Novelli ©Galleria Borghese Ministero della Cultura © Damien Hirst and Science Ltd. All rights reserved DACS 2021/SIAE 2021.
Damien Hirst, Neptune (2011). Photo by A. Novelli ©Galleria Borghese Ministero della Cultura © Damien Hirst and Science Ltd. All rights reserved DACS 2021/SIAE 2021.
Damien Hirst, Fern Court (2016) and The Skull Beneath the Skin (2014). Photo by A. Novelli, ©Galleria Borghese, Ministero della Cultura © Damien Hirst and Science Ltd. All rights reserved DACS 2021/SIAE 2021.
“Damien Hirst: Archaeology Now” is on view at the Galleria Borghese, Piazzale Scipione Borghese 5, Rome, June 8–November 7, 2021. 
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“New Grit: Art and Philly Now” makes a heckuva case for Philadelphia as a creative capital.
The show, surveying 25 artists based in the city, opened alongside Frank Gehry’s big, highly anticipated expansion of the Philadelphia Museum of Art last month. Gehry’s work adds multiple access points, a dreamy underground promenade, and sweep of new gallery spaces—but the goal was clearly not to do anything that would disrupt the grand, stately museum’s vibe.
That leaves “New Grit” to project the museum towards the future. And its curators land the trick wonderfully.
Almost everything in the show hits. Overall, the tone of “New Grit” feels both engaged with the world and personally invested. The show has heartfelt and bracing moments, but also offbeat and even funny ones.
A visitor to “New Grit” viewing two works by Ken Lum. Photo by Ben Davis.
Wonderfully textured abstractions by Howardena Pindell play off the wonky tapestries Mi-Kyoung Lee made from twist ties. There are large, witty text paintings by Ken Lum that channel the verbose titles of 19th-century books to tell contemporary stories. And there’s a pleasingly strange installation by Doug Bucci of intricate little sculptures floating in an endless circuit on water.
There’s really too much good stuff. Here are just five artists that stick out as reference points.

Judith Schaechter
Judith Schaechter, Over Our Dead Bodies (2020). Photo by Ben Davis.
For sheer formal verve, Judith Schaechter’s intricate stained-glass works stick in my head. Radiant in color, with the feeling of needing to be read like some exciting coded surface, they are dense with details of swirling flora and fauna and suggested narrative.

Kukuli Velarde
Kukuli Velarde, San Sebas (2011) from the “Corpus” series. Photo by Ben Davis.
Equally great are Kukuli Velarde’s painted ceramic figures from her “Corpus” series. They represent pre-Columbian deities bursting forth from the shell of Baroque Catholic icons, merging into new gene-spliced contemporary entities.

Tiona Nekkia McClodden More

Since his tragic death from an overdose at just 27 years old in 1988, street artist Jean-Michel Basquiat has become an art-market darling and near-legendary figure, the subject of seemingly countless exhibitions, organized by leading institutions such as the Brooklyn Museum and London’s Barbican Centre, and mega-collector and former arts publishing magnate Peter Brant.
Now, for the first time, Basquiat’s family is organizing a show of its own, drawn entirely from their extension collection of his work, most of which has never been shown publicly.
The exhibition, which is billed as an immersive experience, is set to touch down at New York’s landmarked Starrett-Lehigh Building in early spring 2022.
Though largely dedicated to offices, the building is home to the School of Visual Arts’ Chelsea Gallery, and hosted a Mr. Brainwash show to benefit a throat and neck cancer charity in 2018.
Jean-Michel Basquiat, Jailbirds (1983). Courtesy of ©the Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat.
Basquiat’s sisters, Lisane Basquiat and Jeanine Heriveaux, who run the Jean-Michel Basquiat Estate with their stepmother, Nora Fitzpatrick, came up with the idea during lockdown.
“Much of what has been shared about Jean-Michel, thus far, has stemmed from the perspective of those who met or knew Jean-Michel at a specific point in time,” the sisters told Artnet News in an email.
“We are constantly approached by people who want to know and hear more about who Jean-Michel was. Many are budding artists themselves who are seeking inspiration through connecting to Jean-Michel’s story,” they added. “Only we can provide the broader context of his cultural and familial roots, and how those played into the narrative of his art.”
Jean-Michel Basquiat, Untitled (World Famous Vol. 1. Thesis), 1983. Photo ©the Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat.
The show, titled “Jean-Michel Basquiat: King Pleasure,” will feature 200 “never-before and rarely seen paintings, drawings, multimedia presentations, ephemera, and artifacts,” according to a statement. The family and the estate have brought on ISG Productions and Superblue to produce the show, with Spotify and Phillips as sponsors.
Details about the experiential aspects of the exhibition, as well as specific works on view and ticketing information, remain forthcoming, but the sisters are confident the show will resonate with audiences.
“We hope they take away inspiration [and] a deeper appreciation for Jean-Michel’s humanity, journey, and all that he brought to pop culture and art,” Lisane Basquiat and Heriveaux said.
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The curator and artistic director of the next Venice Biennale, Cecilia Alemani, has announced the title and theme of the 59th edition of the prestigious international art exhibition.
The biennale will be titled “The Milk of Dreams,” a name borrowed from a book by the surrealist artist Leonora Carrington. While living in Mexico in the 1950s, the artist invented and illustrated a series of mysterious tales which, according to Alemani, describe “a magical world where life is constantly re-envisioned through the prism of the imagination, and where everyone can change, be transformed, become something and someone else.”
The exhibition, which Alemani promises will take us on an equally imaginative and transformative journey, will run in Venice from April 23 through November 27 in 2022. It was originally slated to take place this year but was pushed back due to the public health situation.
Roberto Cicutto and Cecilia Alemani. Photo by Andrea Avezzù Courtesy La Biennale di Venezia.
Alemani, who is the first Italian woman and the fifth woman ever to helm the prestigious event, announced the details this morning, June 9, with the biennale’s president Roberto Cicutto.
The curator said in a statement that the exhibition concept has been grounded in conversations she has had with artists since she was named to the role last January.
“The questions that kept emerging seem to capture this moment in history, when the very survival of the species is threatened, but also to sum up doubts that pervade the sciences, arts, and myths of our time,” Alemani said. “How is the definition of the human changing? What constitutes life, and what differentiates animals, plants, humans, and non-humans? What are our responsibilities towards the planet, other people, and the other organisms we live with? And what would life and the Earth look like without us?”
Alemani said that the exhibition will focus on three primary themes: the representation of bodies and their metamorphoses; the relationship between individuals and technologies; and the connection between bodies and the Earth.
She also expanded on the links to Carrington’s mysterious tales that have served as a jumping off point for the concept. “Told in a dreamlike style that seemed to terrify young and old alike, Carrington’s stories describe a world set free, brimming with possibilities,” Alemani said. “But it is also the allegory of a century that imposed intolerable pressure on the individual, forcing Carrington into a life of exile: locked up in mental hospitals, an eternal object of fascination and desire, yet also a figure of startling power and mystery, always fleeing the strictures of a fixed, coherent identity.”
The biennial’s president Cicutto said in a statement that Alemani’s concept ties in with the title of the ongoing architecture biennale in Venice, “How will we live together?” 
“These two choices are the product of the current times, which lack all certainty and burden humanity with immense responsibilities,” he said. Following a temporary exhibition investigating the history of the biennale last summer, which Alemani co-curated, the president added that the starting point for the next biennale seems to be “the reinvention of new and more sustainable relations between individuals and the universe we live in.”
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An astoundingly ambitious show hopes to capture the many artistic languages across the continent of Europe at a time when nationalism is on the rise and many countries remain isolated by travel restrictions.
The exhibition “Diversity United,” which will travel to Moscow, Berlin, and Paris, brings together work by 90 artists from 34 European countries that ruminate on freedom, democracy, and dignity. The show was originally scheduled to coincide with the the 75th anniversary of the end of World War II, but was pushed back due to the pandemic.
Now, it is finally ready to open on June 9 across two hangars of the former Nazi airport Tempelhof in Berlin. It will travel to Moscow’s Tretyakov Gallery before heading to a final stop early next year at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris. The final dates have yet to be announced. (The show was originally due to open in Moscow first, but the plans were scrambled by logistical complications.)
Anselm Kiefer Winterreise (2015-2020) Private Collection. © Anselm Kiefer. Photo: Georges Poncet.
Initiated by German curator Walter Smerling, the show is expected to bring major turnouts in each capital.
“The aim is for the countries to come into a dialogue that is beyond their particular interests,” Smerling said on a recent tour. “Europe is 44 countries, and each country is different from the other, with its own identity, history, problems, and visions. But they belong together. And similarly, each artist here has their own language but the works can communicate with each other.”
The star-studded exhibition is supported by the countries’ three presidents, Germany’s Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier, Russian President Vladimir Putin, and French President Emmanuel Macron. Steinmeier helped inaugurate the show this week in Berlin, describing it as “an expression of the self-confidence of art and artists in Europe.”
Some might note the irony of a show about democracy having the blessing of Putin. According to DPA, there is some fear that works in the show critical of Russia might endanger the exhibition’s display in Moscow.
Flughafen Tempelhof Hangar © Tempelhof Projekt GmbH. Photo Claudius Pflug
Nine curators in different cities were tapped to pull together their own pot of artists, nearly a third of whom created new commissions for the occasion. Chinese painter Yan Pei-Ming, who has been living in Dijon, France for decades, made a brooding new painting called The Cave—so new its paint was not yet dry during a preview. Nearby, a series pays tribute to Napoleon. “The effects of Napoleon, his wars, his strategies are huge—he changed Europe,” Smerling said.
A series of 60 overpainted photographs by Gerhard Richter is installed near Anselm Reyle’s Winterreise (2015). Work by younger names, including Estonian artists Kris Lemsalu and Katja Novitskova, collective Slavs and Tatars, and France-based Kapwani Kiwanga are also on view.

One of the most memorable works in the sprawling show is Italian artist Marzia Migliora’s FIL DE SËIDA (2016), a view of two tightrope walkers in business suits wobbling against the backdrop of the Alps. After all, while the show embraces a certain celebratory air and a true variety of viewpoints, a cautious political warning tows the line: Europe and European diversity are, after all, deeply fragile concepts.

“Diversity United” is on view from June 9 to September 19 at two hangars in the former Tempelhof airport.
Diversity United. Flughafen Tempelhof Berlin. Photo: Silke Briel / © Stiftung für Kunst und Kultur, Bonn
Diversity United. Flughafen Tempelhof Berlin. Photo: Silke Briel / © Stiftung für Kunst und Kultur, Bonn
Diversity United. Flughafen Tempelhof Berlin. Photo: Silke Briel / © Stiftung für Kunst und Kultur, Bonn
Diversity United. Flughafen Tempelhof Berlin. Photo: Silke Briel / © Stiftung für Kunst und Kultur, Bonn
Diversity United. Flughafen Tempelhof Berlin. Photo: Silke Briel / © Stiftung für Kunst und Kultur, Bonn
Diversity United. Flughafen Tempelhof Berlin. Photo: Silke Briel / © Stiftung für Kunst und Kultur, Bonn
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After a year’s delay, London’s Serpentine Galleries have unveiled the latest iteration of the summer architectural pavilion.
Designed by up-and-coming architecture studio Counterspace, which is led by architect Sumayya Vally, it is the 20th pavilion to be mounted in the green space of Kensington Gardens in Hyde Park.
With its unveiling, the 30-year-old architect—the youngest to receive the commission—has joined a long line of leading practitioners including Frank Gehry, Zaha Hadid, and Jean Nouvel.
The temporary pavilion will be on view from June 11 through October 17.
In a statement, Vally said the pavilion “is centered around amplifying and collaborating with multiple and diverse voices from many different histories with an interest in themes of identity, community, belonging, and gathering.”
Serpentine Pavilion 2021 designed by Counterspace, Interior View. ©Counterspace Photo: Iwan Baan.
The Johannesburg-based architect has taken design inspiration from public gathering spaces across London, from mosques and other places of worship, to open-air markets, restaurants, bookshops, and libraries. 
Vally has also extended the commission outside the plush setting of Kensington Gardens by installing four fragments of the pavilion in different locations across London (New Beacon Books in Finsbury Park, one of the first Black publishers and booksellers in the UK; the Tabernacle, a multipurpose community space in Notting Hill; the Albany arts hub in Deptford; and Valence Library in Barking and Dagenham) to create new gathering spaces.
The pavilion also presents a commissioned program foregrounding the stories and sounds of lost spaces around London. Called Listening to the City, it includes works by artists including Ain Bailey and Jay Bernard.
Serpentine Pavilion 2021 designed by Counterspace, Interior View. ©Counterspace Photo: Iwan Baan.
To mark the anniversary of the  commission, and in response to Counterspace’s approach to architecture, the Serpentine has announced a new £100,000 ($140,000) fellowship program to support artists called Support Structures for Support Structures.
The funds will support up to 10 London-based artists and collectives working at the intersection of art, politics, and community practice with unrestricted grants of at least £10,000 ($14,000). The recipients, to be announced in July, will also form the beginnings of a network for support, development, and mentoring. 
“The spirit of community that has carried us as an institution throughout such a challenging year is the same that we hope to enliven this project,” Serpentine artistic director Hans Ulrich Obrist and chief executive Bettina Korek said in a joint statement. “Here’s to a new chapter.”
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The museum giveth, and it taketh away. Decades later, compelled by law, it giveth back.
That’s the best approximate description of the journey taken by Austrian Jewish collector Richard Neumann’s masterpieces.
Neumann (1879–1959) came of connoisseurial age as Vienna’s royal collections (particularly Habsburg holdings) opened to the public. But the very arts institutions that shaped the young textile manufacturer’s aesthetic taste—to which he lent works, and with whose leaders he had close relationships—subsequently facilitated the Nazi plunder of his art.
He and his heirs sought restitution for decades, with the most recent work being returned to Neumann’s descendents last November.
The Worcester Art Museum’s exhibition, “What the Nazis Stole From Richard Neumann (and the Search to Get It Back)” (through January 16, 2022) tells the story of Neumann and his collection, which Vienna documented in 1921, designating 28 works as “landmarks.” The designation scored Neumann tax breaks and required occasional public access to his pictures.
Less than two decades later, the Albertina curator Otto Benesch, who had advised Neumann on his collection, was appraising the works for the Nazi government—despite Benesch being married to a Jewish woman, said Claire Whitner, the Worcester museum’s director of curatorial affairs.
“It gets very murky in that summer of 1938,” Whitner said, reached via Zoom in Copenhagen. 
To Whitner, the exhibition—which includes 14 of the 16 works returned to Neumann’s heirs to date—highlights a collector who sought Old Master works at a time when his Austrian Jewish colleagues gravitated to contemporary art. Whitner calls him a collector’s collector.
“He was a lover of Christian Old Masters, and his house was filled with ‘Madonna and Childs and altarpiece wings,” she said. “He was a real art historian.”
Giovanni Battista Pittoni the Younger’s Hannibal Swearing Revenge against the Romans (1720s). Courtesy Worcester Art Museum.
The show also offers a cautionary tale for collectors, as aesthetic fault lines shift. Mirroring the riches-to-rags journey of Neumann—who lost everything fleeing to France then Cuba, ultimately immigrating to the United States—the works he collected have seen their stars diminish in passing decades. Artists whose works Austria’s top museums sought out 100 years ago may draw blank stares today.
“The way we experience art museums are all constructs of taste and who was buying this art, when they were buying it, when the museum had money to make acquisitions on their own, and who was helping them buy things,” Whitner said.
Neri di Bicci was once one of the best-known 15th-century Florentine painters due to his extensive journals. Yet his name is rarely familiar to non-experts, even though his Madonna and Child (1400s) is a personal favorite of Whitner’s. 
Whitner suggested that Neumann was drawn to the work because it reflected the transition from medieval symbolism to Renaissance naturalism. “Jesus is starting to look a little bit more like a baby and less like an old man,” Whitner said, although the nursing Mary is “just so bizarre. Her breast seems to be coming out of her collarbone.” 
By serendipity, di Bicci’s family tree—which Giorgio Vasari bungled—twice echoes Neumann’s.
The Italian artist (1419–91) was the third in a grandfather-father-son chain of painters, just as Neumann followed his father and grandfather in the family business after earning a philosophy doctorate at Heidelberg.
Maerten van Heemskerck’s right altar wing with female donor (around 1540). Courtesy Worcester Art Museum.
Meanwhile, Giovanni Battista Pittoni the Younger’s Hannibal Swearing Revenge Against the Romans (1720s) is “so alive,” Whitner said. “The brushwork is so fluid; the color is so vibrant. It’s clearly a connoisseur’s painting.”
A contemporary of Giovanni Battista Tiepolo’s, Pittoni, like di Bicci, is relatively obscure today. That’s despite the Portland Art Museum noting he was among Venice’s greatest painters, with “airy, courtly treatments of Biblical and mythological subjects [that] brought him an international clientele.”
Then we get to Maerten van Heemskerck’s 1540 altar wings depicting male and female donors, which were Neumann’s prized possessions, and were the subject of a lawsuit he filed against Austria in 1950.
We may not all know the artist today, but Whitner notes that the panels “have all the hallmarks of Netherlandish painting, with crisp naturalism, extraordinary attention to detail, and this incredible variety of surfaces.”
Interestingly, the American businessman and collector Henry Walters (1848–1931) collected many of the same artists at the same time as Neumann.
In 1902, for example, Walters bought two di Biccis (Virgin and Child Enthroned with Four Saints and The Coronation of the Virgin with Angels and Four Saints) and van Heemskerck’s Panorama with the Abduction of Helen Amidst the Wonders of the Ancient World. Perhaps five years later, he bought Pittoni the Younger’s The Sacrifice of Polyxena at the Tomb of Achilles.
Neri di Bicci, Virgin and Child Enthroned With Four Saints (around 1450). Courtesy Walters Art Museum.
What explains his interest?
“Henry Walters ended up with Heemskerck and di Bicci and people like that, all the early Italian panel paintings, because he was too cheap to buy like Frick,” said Gary Vikan, who directed Baltimore’s Walters Art Museum from 1994 until 2013 and is author of the 2020 book The Holy Shroud: A Brilliant Hoax in the Time of the Black Death.
Joseph Duveen, a baron and British art dealer, was instrumental in the deals, Vikan said.
“Walters believed Duveen was acting on his behalf, but in fact Duveen was acting on Frick’s behalf, so all the good stuff went to Frick,” Vikan said. “Duveen’s wife said that Walters was in the business of buying bric-à-brac.
Vikan suggested that Neumann’s finances may have been similarly constrained: “To play in the big leagues, even at those days, took a lot of money.”
That said, Vikan added that the canon is dysfunctional and predisposes people to think certain artists are better than others.
“If I haven’t heard of the artist, if he’s not in Janson in the class I took as a sophomore in 1965, how could he be any good? Janson was a guy who knew what was going on,” Vikan said of the art historian H. W. Janson, whose art history textbook taught generations of college students. 
“God willing, people will form their own judgment, and all of these guys are good,” Vikan added. “But Beethoven is Beethoven after all, isn’t he? Nobody is cheating the system on that one.”
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