Exhibitions

Several prominent French art critics have lambasted the Musée d’Orsay’s blockbuster exhibition on the Impressionist Gustave Caillebotte, titled “Painting Men.”
The show (on view until January 19, 2025) is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to see a large body of the artist’s oeuvre, thanks to exceptional loans. Despite praise, some critics from across the political spectrum argue that the exhibit places too much emphasis on a gendered interpretation of Caillebotte’s work, suggesting he was gay—a point for which there’s little supporting evidence, and arguably, one that shouldn’t matter. These critics also largely attribute this interpretive approach to American perspectives on art.
“The Musée d’Orsay, under the influence of its American partner coproducers, chose to study the painter’s ‘masculinity,’” writes Le Figaro’s Eric Biétry-Rivierre, leading the charge against the gender-themed exhibit in an early review. The show will travel to the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, and the Art Institute of Chicago (A.I.C.), and was jointly organized by a leading curator from each institution: Paul Perrin at the Musée d’Orsay, Scott Allan at the Getty, and Gloria Groom at the A.I.C.
More recently, a writer at the leftist Libération exclaimed that American-developed gender studies in art history have “crossed the Atlantic and landed,” at the Paris institution. Joined by a third critic at Le Monde, they agreed with Le Figaro, that curators took a “biased” view of the artist’s practice, focusing on his more numerous depictions of men over that of women as further evidence that Caillebotte was gay. This, critics point out, is supported by “suggestive” wall texts throughout the show, featuring some 140 artworks.
In his searing review, Le Monde’s Harry Bellet notes the absence of Caillebotte’s later paintings of flowers. Their “pistils”—the female organs of the flower—”were surely not suggestive enough, or would, on the contrary, contradict the curators’ argument,” he writes. Philippe Lancon, of Liberation, holds little back when he states, “Contrary to what the wall labels heavily insinuate, nothing proves that Caillebotte, who lived with a woman, was gay, and to be honest, it doesn’t matter.”
Gustave Caillebotte Nu au divan (c. 1880) oil on canvas. 129.5 x 195.6 cm. Minneapolis, Minneapolis Institute of art, The John R. Van Derlip Fund, 67.67 Image Courtesy of the Minneapolis Institute of Art
Indeed, no information exists about the artist’s sexual orientation, and the curators have repeatedly said no conclusive information was found on the topic. Nevertheless, the ensuing, rather jumbled debate has brought the question further to the fore, suggesting that to some degree, it does appear to matter after all.
The exhibition’s introductory texts state that the artist made unusual depictions of men for his time, often bachelors captured in domestic, intimate settings typically reserved for the “women’s sphere” in the 19th century. “It is these subjects and that ‘gender trouble’ (as the philosopher Judith Butler put it), that give the artist’s work much of its vital tension and subversive power, which this exhibition and its catalogue seek to explore,” reads the show’s press release.
In interviews, the catalogue, and wall texts, curators vacillate between asserting that we know nothing about his sexual orientation; questioning potentially homoerotic desires on Caillebotte’s part; and stating that he was simply painting his surroundings, which happened to include a lot of men.
The Art Institute of Chicago’s Groom rejected both the notion that the Americans had influenced the French in the show’s making, and that it implied Caillebotte was gay. After reading those accusations in the Figaro review, she told me, “I was amused, because he was saying the Americans inflicted their wokeness on Paris.” In fact, “the idea for this exhibition came from Paris.”
Groom defended the exhibit’s gendered lens, claiming that Caillebotte broke from other Impressionists who regularly painted women (a subject that was easier to sell) and instead showed the male-dominated world around him. His subjects were depicted with stark honesty, whether bathing, rowing boats, lounging on a sofa, or defecating. This was an exceptional, modern approach, deserving of attention, she argued. “His subject matter is very radical during the time, because men were not supposed to stare at men, and he’s staring at men,” she said. “It’s the elephant in the room. It’s what makes him so different.”
She added that several works are “definitely sensuous, [there’s] definitely a gaze, and definitely an appreciation of the male body and the male sportsman, and things that make males male … you can say that. But is that homosexuality? I think that’s a bridge too far,” she said. “He’s looking for a way to come up with a modern form of masculinity.”
Gustave Caillebotte, Raboteurs de parquets (The Floor Scrapers) (1875). Photo © musée d’Orsay, dits. RMN – Grand Palais / Patrice Schmidt
“The exhibit affirms nothing concerning the artist’s sexuality,” the Orsay’s curator Perrin told me. “However, it does not forbid itself from asking the question: ‘What is the gaze of one man on another man about?’ [and] ‘What is eroticism when applied to the masculine body?’”
Perrin notes that one section of the exhibition features three major nudes, including a large painting of a woman and another of a man drying himself after a bath, which was inspired by Degas’ depictions of bathing women. In Caillebotte’s unusual rendering, the toned buttocks of the almost life-sized man become the focal point. With this 1884 painting, Man at His Bath, “we evoke that question because the artwork asks us to […] or to put it differently, the question of desire in painting,” Perrin added. “Caillebotte may not have had a sexual preference that he recognized during his life, but it might also not prevent him from having a kind of gaze, in which there is a bit of desire,” he said.
The French curator also felt the Le Figaro article had unfairly put the exhibit on “trial” for referencing gender studies. The discipline “clearly scares a lot of people, because there’s an impression art is being used for ideological purposes, which is not the case here. [Gender studies] is just a tool for modern art historians, which allows us to better understand the artworks.”
He confirmed the exhibit was not influenced by his American collaborators, and that the Paris museum chose the theme, before it was further elaborated upon by the trio of curators from all three institutions. Still, he observed that American art historians have been more interested in the question of gender and sexuality than French counterparts. “I wouldn’t deny that there is an Anglo-Saxon art historic influence on ways of looking at painting […] but the United States did not impose anything on this exhibit,” he said.
The show organizers had also strived to offer a fresh take on Caillebotte, who is celebrated for his groundbreaking, almost photographic framing, combined with unusual perspective. But if his framing and composition is so critical, shouldn’t we look at his subjects of choice, asks Perrin? “We’re not here to endlessly repeat the same saintly history of Impressionism. It’s the role of museums to also question artworks and place them in relation to current interrogations, without ever falling into an anachronism,” he said.
Gustave Caillebotte, Le Pont de l’Europe (1876). Oil on canvas. 125 x 180 cm. Geneva Association des amis du Petit Palais, 111 © Rheinisches Bildarchiv Köln
Some of the exhibition interpretation does go way out on a limb when describing imagined narratives in some of the paintings. For instance, in the iconic painting showing one of Paris’ new, industrial bridges, Le Pont de l’Europe [The Europe Bridge] (1876) a man walks towards the viewer, said to be a self-portrait of the artist. He turns back slightly to a woman walking just behind and to his left, but he simultaneously glances at a man in front of him, who is leaning over the bridge railing, admiring the view. “Has the man just accosted a sex worker?” the show’s label asks, apparently in reference the woman in the painting. “Is he not, in fact, more interested in the worker towards whom his gaze seems to be directed …?”
Such questions are scattered throughout, adding confusion to the compelling thesis the curators have expressed in interviews and in the catalogue. Namely, that Caillebotte painted men differently than his contemporaries did, just as he painted women differently, for that matter, with an extraordinary, and unmatched modern lens. One that strove at all costs to convey with honesty the life he experienced around him.
Gusave Caillebotte, Boating party also called Rower in a Top Hat (Canotier en chapeau haut de forme) (1877) Private collection Photo by Leemage/Corbis via Getty Images.
It was a vision that considered men in all states and forms, including what would be considered flattering at the time, or not at all, making for an unlikely subject of a painting. It was also a risk Caillebotte could take. Born into wealth, he did not need to sell his paintings to make a living. Thus, male subjects can be found lounging and reading literature on sofas, in what are considered more “feminine” activities for the time, per the exhibit, or as more “manly” men: rowing boats, or else as soldiers bored or relieving themselves.
These men are also painted right up close, as in the Boating Party (ca. 1877-78) acquired by the Musée d’Orsay in 2022, where the viewer is positioned near enough to smell the sweat of the handsome man across from them wielding the oars. Caillebotte radically recoded painting genres of his time, and that seems to be the central takeaway the Musée d’Orsay hopes to convey. Unfortunately, it ultimately stumbles in its efforts. More

British diver Tom Daley has made headlines at the Olympics for 16 years now, not just for the five medals he’s won, but also for his penchant for knitting in the stands, creating some pretty fabulous sweaters while cheering on his fellow competitors. Now, his handiwork is being honored with an exhibition at Tokyo’s Parco Museum.
Tokyo, of course, was where the world first learned of the famed athlete’s prowess with the knitting needle. Daley, hard at work at a handmade sweater, was quite the sight in the stands. The result was an impressive white cardigan, with the Olympic rings and “Team GB” on the back.
“I’d been knitting since March 2020, but no one really cared until they saw me do it at the Olympics,” Daley, now age 30, told the Guardian. “I think some people thought I didn’t care about the Olympics, that I was just knitting. Some people thought it was brave to be knitting in public, and some thought: ‘What the hell is he doing?’”
Great Britain’s Tom Daley knitting as he watches the Women’s Synchronised 3m Springboard Final at the Aquatics Centre on the first day of the 2024 Paris Olympic Games in France. Photo by Mike Egerton/PA Images via Getty Images.
Daley had already been a star since bursting onto the Olympic scene at the 2008 Beijing games, after winning European diving gold at the age of just 13. But his knitting won Daley legions of new fans, who were delighted to see him back at it at this year’s Paris Olympics.
He now has a dedicated knitting Instagram account, @madewithlovebytomdaley, with 1.4 million followers (his main account has another 4 million), a clothing line of the same name, and a book, Made With Love, compiling 30 of his knitting and crochet patterns.  A bona fide museum show will only help further spread the word of his artistic activities.
Tom Daley at the new exhibition in Tokyo, 2024. Photo: Richard A. Brooks / AFP via Getty Images.
“Over a year in the making, I’m proud to share my knitting journey back where it all began!” Daley wrote on Instagram, noting that the show would feature “some of my favorite creations.”
“If there was an Olympic gold for knitting,” the official Instagram account of Olympics responded approvingly.

There may not be a knitting event at the games yet, but Daley has done remarkably well in his chosen sport.
Over five games, he has taken home two individual bronzes in the 10 meter platform event, plus a medal in each color for synchronized platform diving, most recently a bronze in Paris. (The lone gold was in Tokyo, with Matty Lee.)
Tom Daley of Team Great Britain is seen knitting during the Men’s Synchronized 3m Springboard Final on day seven of the 2024 Paris Olympic Games. Photo by Quinn Rooney/Getty Images)
In Paris, Daley completed a fetching blue jumper with his last name written across the back, and a bottom border of alternating French and British flags. He announced his retirement the day after the closing ceremony.
His passion for his crafty hobby is keeping Daley busy now that his diving career has come to an end. He is in Tokyo for the opening, teaching a live knitting workshop at the museum.

“Knitting is an important part of my life and it’s what calms me,” Daley told British craft and entertainment magazine Prima. “Through this exhibition, I would like to share with as many people as possible the joy of making things and the comfort that knitting brings to the heart.”
“Made with Love by Tom Daley” is on view at the Parco Museum Tokyo, Shibuya, Japan, 〒150-0042 Tokyo, Shibuya City, Udagawacho, 15−1 渋谷パルコ 4F, November 8–25, 2025. More

Pomellato founder Pino Rabolini hailed from a long line of goldsmiths. In 1967, however, he broke from tradition to test his hypothesis that a playful pret-a-porter approach and avant-garde eye could shake up the stodgy fine art jewelry sphere. Rabolini’s hunch proved correct.
For six decades now, his Milanese house has adorned cultural icons with inventive designs setting colorful gems set amongst Pomellato’s signature, rich rose gold. Their Nudo ring in particular has become a cult classic. Helmut Newton shot Pomellato’s early black and white campaigns, but today the house experiments with advancements like artificial intelligence. Still, Pomellato remains true to Rabolini’s daring vision by periodically returning to their most legendary silhouettes.
The exhibition’s outdoor entryway. Image: Pomellato.
The luxury jeweler is now ready for its first retrospective, which just opened at Shanghai’s Fosun Art Foundation this past weekend. The exhibition, “Art & Jewelry: Pomellato’s Legacy of Creativity and Craftsmanship, From 1967 to Today,” showcases over 100 mesmerizing jewels alongside rarely-displayed archival campaigns shot by Lord Snowdon, Peter Lindbergh and more over the years. Alba Cappellieri, head of jewelry design at the Polytechnic University of Milan, curated this ultra-luxe showcase.
A photo from Michel Comte’s 1994-95 Pomellato campaign features here to the left amongst the exhibition. Image: Pomellato.
The exhibition opened to the public on November 3, and kicked off with a glitzy gala the night before. Acclaimed pianist Wu Muye and the Shanghai Theater Academy both performed. Star-studded attendees included Hong Kong actress Janice Man, Winter Olympics champion Yang Yang, and fashion columnist Teresa Cheung.
A hallway within the show leading towards a glamor shot from one campaign circa 1970. Image: Pomellato.
Italian photographer Gian Paolo Barbieri’s 1971 shot of actress Lilly Bistrattin wearing Pomellato’s iconic Wave Collection greets guests entering into the show’s red lacquered exterior portal. The spectacle begins with an ode to Milan, before immersing viewers in the aesthetics of each decade in Pomellato’s existence. The 1970s area highlights “bold and highly creative chains that epitomize the era’s free-spirited aesthetic,” Pomellato’s press release explains. The 1980s installment embodies the period’s “audacious spirit” through vivid hues. The 1990s-themed area remembers third wave feminism “through generous, sculptural volumes in jewelry design.”
“Art & Jewelry” concludes with an eye towards the future. Chinese artist Chen Man, who has photographed the likes of Grimes, encapsulates society’s more expansive ideas about femininity through Pomellato’s latest Iconica line. Alberto Maria Colombo—the talent behind their AI ad campaign last year—has joined fellow Milanese artist Anna Paladini in crafting “an artistic experience” intent on “underscoring AI-generated portraits encompassing the multifaceted nature of Pomellato’s timeless women.”
Chen Man’s contribution to the show, shot this year. © Chen Man.
“We are thrilled to share our passion, craftsmanship, and joyful spirit through this beautifully curated exhibition, inspiring a new audience to embrace our jewels as empowering statements of personal style,” Pomellato group CEO Sabina Belli remarked in the release.

“Art & Jewelry: Pomellato’s Legacy of Creativity and Craftsmanship, From 1967 to Today” remains on view through November 24. More

Jim Jarmusch is known for his deadpan films that feature oddball characters and ask big existential questions. Among his best-known works in this vein are Stranger than Paradise (1984), a black-and-white minimalist comedy with a cult following, and Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai (1999), the tale of a principled hitman and pigeon keeper who finds himself marked by the mafia. His cinematography also often employs surreal storytelling devices, such as the trail of pink objects in Broken Flowers (2005) that reveals important character-defining clues throughout the movie but offers little in the way of plot resolution.
Given the quiet absurdism of many of his films, it comes as no surprise that the American director has a long-standing affinity for Surrealism. “The beauty of Surrealism is looking at things in a different way,” Jarmusch said. “It’s about juxtaposing the mundane and fantastical.”
Jim Jarmusch. Photo: Laurent KOFFEL/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images.
As a teenager, Surrealism was a “revelation” to the burgeoning director, first in its visual forms and then its literary ones. In his early twenties, it drew him to Paris, “where I repeatedly used [André] Breton’s “Nadja” as a kind of walking map through the mysterious nocturnal streets of the city,” he said.
Jarmusch returns to Paris this week for Paris Photo, where he has curated a selection of 34 photos at the fair to celebrate the centenary of the Surrealism movement. His picks, Jarmusch added, are not purely Surrealist, but “reflect its tenets of the transformation of the ordinary into the dreamlike, and at times vice-versa.”
Peter Hujar, Catacomb Palermo (1963). ©Peter Hujar Archive, LLC; Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY. Courtesy Stephen Daiter
There are plenty of recognizable works among Jarmusch’s highlights, from David Hockney’s 1970s swimming pool photos, brought by Equinox Gallery, to Peter Hujar’s eerie catacomb images at Stephen Daiter’s booth.
Robert Frank’s portrait of Jack Kerouac at Pace is part of a fair-wide dedication to the late Swiss-American photographer and documentary filmmaker in honor of his 100th birthday; Jarmusch was a close friend of Frank and credits him as an influence in his own work.
Robert Frank, Jack Kerouac–NYC (1965). © The June Leaf and Robert Frank Foundation. Courtesy Pace Gallery
Several works foreground outsider figures, akin to the characters that Jarmusch tends to feature in his films. Japanese photographer Kenshichi Heshiki’s scenes of mid-century Okinawa and those living on its margins stun at Ibasho’s booth. Lisetta Carmi’s subversive images of Genoa’s trans community in the 1960s, brought by Martini and Ronchetti, are both gritty and joyful.
Lisetta Carmi, I travestiti, la Sissi (1965) Courtesy Martini & Ronchetti.
More contemporary inclusions range from Zanele Muholi’s explorations of race, as seen in her portrait OwakheX, Sheraton, Brooklyn, New York (2019), at Yancey Richardson to Dawoud Bey’s ominously dusky shot of an all-American house ringed by a white picket fence at Stephen Daiter.
Dawoud Bey, Untitled #1 (From Night Coming Tenderly, Black), 2018. Courtesy the artist and Stephen Daiter.
Of course, there are classic Surrealist works grounding Jarmusch’s curatorial strategy, 10 of which can be found at Edwynn Houk’s booth, where an entire wall has been given over to Surrealism. Among the highlights are Dora Maar’s Photo Mode II (1931) and several photos by Man Ray.
Dora Maar, Photo Mode II (1931). Courtesy Edwynn Houk.
The evening before the photo fair opened to VIPs, Jarmusch also hosted a preview of Le Retour à la raison, a compendium of four short silent films made by Man Ray in the 1920s that have been restored and scored to post-rock music by SQÜRL, Jarmusch’s experimental guitar band with Carter Logan.
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“I love how Man Ray experimented with photography and film, and treated the camera as a toy,” Jarmusch said before the screening, adding that he had been playing improvisational music to these films for over a decade. The resulting score, guided by Jarmusch’s feedback-heavy guitar and Logan’s synthesizer and occasional drumbeat, feels perfectly in sync with the 100-year-old film. SQÜRL recorded it at Centre Pompidou, which is currently hosting a blockbuster Surrealism exhibition.
Alongside his cinematic work, Jarmusch is also a practicing visual artist specializing in photography and collage. He has an upcoming exhibition with James Fuentes Gallery in Los Angeles next year.
Paris Photo runs through Sunday, November 10, at the Grand Palais, Paris. More

As far as artistic collaborations go, the 1920 debut of Pulcinella was one for the ages. Ballet impresario Sergei Diaghilev pulled the strings with Léonide Massine providing choreography, Igor Stravinsky the music, and Pablo Picasso the costumes and sets.
For Picasso and Stravinsky, it sparked a friendship that lasted a lifetime. Almost exact contemporaries, both had sought out Paris’s febrile energy and were fast becoming master craftsmen who shared an affinity for experimenting with style and form. In later years, they wrote letters to one another, exchanging news, doodles, and musical riffs.
The Ballets Russes performing Pulcinella in 1924. Photo by Sasha Hulton/Getty Images.
One such notation, a fleeting clarinet concerto that Stravinsky titled Pour Pablo, will be brought to life as part of “Picasso Symphony,” a concert experience that tells the story of the artist’s life by pairing artwork with period music played by a live orchestra. When Pour Pablo arrives as a three-minute intermezzo, it’s accompanied by Picasso’s portraits featuring musical instruments.
“Picasso Symphony,” which will open at La Seine Musical in Paris in March 2025 ahead of an international tour is the brainchild of Jason Michael Paul, a producer and musical entrepreneur who has seen success producing video game concerts with titles such as Zelda and Final Fantasy.
Igor Stravinsky, Pour Pablo. Photo courtesy of JMP Entertainment.
The inspiration for his latest outing arrived from another project that has taken an iconic artist beyond the white walls of a museum: Immersive Van Gogh. Upon visiting it, Paul found the event offered audiences an immersive experience of light and sound, something he believed was replicable in a concert hall.
After negotiating the rights to the artwork with Succession Picasso, which manages the artist’s image rights, Paul worked with music director Kevin Zakresky to trace the contours of Picasso’s life chronologically through music. “There’s an emotional mirroring or matching of the music to the art’s mood,” Paul told me via email. “The aim was to create a cohesive and insightful journey through Picasso’s world.”
A musical work Picasso sent Stravinsky. Photo courtesy JMP Entertainment.
What this amounts to is somber cello playing to his Blue Period paintings or lively acoustic guitar for the early Spanish works. Elsewhere, atonal works accompany Picasso’s abstract experiments and neoclassical pieces tie in with the more traditional phases of his career. For good measure, Paul and Zakresky have included music by some of Picasso’s favorite composers, like Eric Satie (a close friend whom he painted), Gustave Holst, Benjamin Britten, and Sergei Prokofiev.
“Music was central to Picasso’s life, in Spain and in France, music was in the air,” Paul said. “Think of the cafes, the bars, the street performers. It was part of his daily existence and he painted musicians repeatedly and he also painted portraits of composers.”
Portrait of Stravinsky by Pablo Picasso (1917). Photo courtesy JMP Entertainment.
One of these portraits, naturally, is of Stravinsky. The composer sits in a chair that seems to bend around him, the lines are thin and exact, his gaze is fixed and expectant, as though searching for some brilliant idea in the far beyond.
“Picasso Symphony” debuts at La Seine Musicale, La Seine Musicale, Île Seguin, Boulogne-Billancourt, France, March 1, 2025, before traveling to the Will Rogers Memorial Auditorium, 3401 W Lancaster Ave, Fort Worth, Texas, on May 10, 2025. More

Shanghai’s dual art fairs, ART021 Shanghai Contemporary Art Fair and West Bund Art and Design, are about to open this week and so are a slew of exhibitions as museums mount all-star shows for the city’s art week.
The pinnacle of China’s art calendar, this week in Shanghai offers an unmatched opportunity to connect with nearly everyone in the Chinese art world. While the excitement is palpable, many say that the fairs’ offerings seem “quieter” this year and attendees are coming mostly from mainland China, as the presence of international visitors remains limited for now.
Outside of the fairs, however, it’s a different story. International artists are headlining some of the biggest venues in the city, among them Marina Abramović, whose work continues to make waves at the Modern Art Museum Shanghai. The Chi K11 Art Museum Shanghai is hosting French artist César Piette’s first museum show in China while the Rockbund Art Museum showcases American artist and poet Rindon Johnson in his most comprehensive museum exhibition to date and his first in the Asia-Pacific region.
Meanwhile, homegrown talents are getting top billing at some of the city’s museums. At the Start Museum, a trio of shows opening simultaneously spotlight young Chinese artists while at Fotografiska Shanghai, Chinese artists Li Weiyi and Chen Wei are both getting the solo-show treatment. At the state-backed, Jean Nouvel-designed Museum of Art Pudong, “Cao Fei: Tidal Flux” has now been extended through February due to popular demand, alongside a captivating exhibition on JMW Turner, the museum’s latest collaboration with Tate.
But that’s just the start. Here are five other must-see shows opening this week.
“Yin Xiuzhen: Piercing the Sky”  
Power Station of Art
Yin Xiuzhen, Flying Machine (2008). Shanghai Art Museum. Courtesy of the artist.
Curated by the acclaimed art historian and critic Wu Hung, sculptor and installation artist Yin Xiuzhen is presenting a major retrospective at the Power Station of Art (PSA). It’s overdue for the artist who, at 61, is one of China’s most influential female artists. Spanning the entire first floor, the exhibition opens with the monumental Piercing the Sky, a 15-meter-long, rocket-like metal sculpture with a base reminiscent of a trombone. Sharing its name with the exhibition, this powerful piece symbolizes the courage to strive beyond earthly limitations. Featuring approximately 20 monumental works that utilize diverse materials and approaches, the highlights Yin’s signature pieces alongside her more recent creations, all of which tease out the dichotomies of heaven and earth, human and divine, and the inner self and the outside world. The show runs through February 16, 2025.
Additionally, for the fashion aficionados out there, PSA is also hosting “Gabrielle Chanel: Fashion Manifesto“, the first retrospective devoted to the work of Gabrielle Chanel in China. Supported exclusively by the French fashion label, the exhibition is open through November 24. 

“Distance of the Moon”
Prada Rong Zhai
Shuang Li, Our Lady of Sorrows (2024). Courtesy the artist, Peres Projects, and Antenna Space.
In Italo Calvino’s “Distance of the Moon,” Earth and Moon once shared a close gravitational pull, allowing people to climb between the two to collect “moon milk.” But a sudden shift in gravity leaves some stranded on the Moon, separated from those on Earth. Artist Li Shuang (b. 1990) found solace in this tale during lockdown, as she remained in Europe, cut off from family in China. This sense of isolation became central to her artistic practice, translating her disconnection into new works that explore alienation, distance, and attempts at connection.
Now based between Berlin and Geneva, Li will transform Shanghai’s historic Prada Rong Zhai into a reflective, autobiographical house. The exhibition, which runs through January 16, 2025, will feature light and sound installations, videos, and resin objects she created during the pandemic, each piece invoking themes of solitude and fragmented communication. A standout element, a “telegraph-coded letter,” is embedded within the show for viewers to decipher, inviting them to engage directly with her narrative of personal distance and the challenge of bridging separations across space and time.

“Daniel Crews-Chubb: Immortals”
Long Museum
Daniel Crews-Chubb in his studio. Photo: Tim Craig
The London-based painter Daniel Crews-Chubb (b. 1984) makes his first major museum solo debut at the Long Museum in Shanghai, which will feature more than 30 works from two pivotal series that delve into the evolution of figurative representation across history. Known for his dynamic and vibrant compositions, Crews-Chubb creates chimerical figures through a complex, intuitive process involving painting, drawing, and collage. He employs spontaneous methods of applying paint—such as spilling, throwing, and spraying ink and pigment—to create a lively base that brings his figures to life.
On view through January 5, 2025, the exhibition features “Immortals” (2022–24), a series that explores the age-old human endeavor of creating art as a gesture toward immortality. This series considers how representations of figures, from cave drawings to classical statues, achieve a sense of timelessness. His latest series, “Out of Chaos” (2024), takes a broader perspective, reflecting on the interconnectedness of all life and cosmic entities, using the human figure as a central theme to unify a plethora of spontaneous marks. The series’ title, inspired by the ancient Greek concept of chaos as the origin of the universe, underscores the thematic depth of Crews-Chubb’s work, presenting a narrative of creation and interconnectedness.

“Another Avant-Garde. Photography 1970–2000”
West Bund Museum 
Sandy Skoglund, Radioactive Cats, (Chats radioactifs) (1980). Photo: Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI/Service de la documentation photographique du MNAM/Dist. GrandPalaisRmn
As part of the notable collaboration between Centre Pompidou and West Bund Museum, “Another Avant-garde: Photography 1970–2000” delves into of the French museum’s rich photography collection. This exhibition, running through February 16, 2025, marks the first time in decades that key photographic works from 1970 to 2000 are showcased together, juxtaposing a diverse array of works—from modest conceptual pieces to expansive tableaux, and from singular photographs to experimental video pieces. The show not only reflects on photography’s multifaceted role as sculpture, performance, moving image, and its intersections with painting but also emphasizes its significance across varied artistic contexts. Special attention is given to works from China, featuring several loans that foster a dialogue between distinct avant-garde histories, enhancing the narrative of global photographic practices during this transformative period.
The museum is also hosting “A Cloud in Trousers: Painting Today,” co-organized with Pond Society, a non-profit founded by collector Xue Bing, that features works by 23 artists from diverse generations and backgrounds, providing a look to see the breadth of contemporary Chinese painting. 

“Issy Wood: What I Eat In A Day” 
“Pictures of the Post-80s Generation —Generational Leap”
Tank Shanghai
Issy Wood, Self portrait 60 (2024). © Issy Wood 2024, courtesy the artist and Carlos/Ishikawa, London. Photo: Damian Griffiths.
Issy Wood will present her first large-scale exhibition of small-scale works at Tank Shanghai, an ambitious institution founded by mega collector Qiao Zhibing. Unlike conventional sketches, Wood’s pieces are intimate glimpses into her daily life, each acting like a diary entry or a snippet from her internet search history, reflecting even her dietary habits. These deeply personal works, which Wood treasures, have evolved into a key part of her daily routine and a playground for visual experimentation. The show runs through January 19, 2025.
In addition to Wood’s show, the museum is hosting a group exhibition featuring works from 35 Chinese artists of the 1980s generation, through May 4, 2025. Curated by Sun Dongdong, it aims to address pressing contemporary issues. Sun describes it as a reflection of the connection between modern Chinese society and the evolving global landscape. He hopes to encourage viewers to dig deeper into the narratives presented, engaging with the complexities of our times while inspiring a renewed sense of hope for the future.  More

A couple of years ago, Egyptian archaeologists excavating a necropolis south of Cairo discovered a papyrus marked with ancient Greek. Analysis eventually showed it bore Euripides’s Ino and Polyidos, two lost works, previously known only by hazy plot summaries and quoted snippets. Of the 5th-century B.C.E. playwright’s estimated 90 works only 19 survive, making the discovery among the most considerable contributions to Greek literature in half a century.
The achievement will be dwarfed if progress continues to be made on the Herculaneum scrolls, a collection of 1,800 texts that were carbonized into lumps by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in in 79 C.E. It’s a potential gold mine of writings currently absent from the classical canon and a Silicon Valley-backed competition is pushing machine learning and computer vision enthusiasts to train their focus on virtually unwrapping the texts.
The thrill, in both cases, is of a past rendered ever-so-slightly richer by the discovery of things believed lost. But what of the countless other lost, disappeared, and abandoned books? What might literature (and the world perhaps) be like if it included Homer’s lost comedy Margites or the Bible still contained the Book of the Battles of Yahweh? What might it be like to stand in a room of these books? These are among the historical counterfactuals explored in an upcoming exhibition at New York’s Grolier Club, America’s oldest society for bibliophiles.
George Gordon Noel, Lord Byron. Byron’s Memoirs. Unpublished manuscript. Photo: Reid Byers/Grolier Club.
Set to run from December through February 2025, club member Reid Byers has been handed the curatorial keys for “Imaginary Books: Lost, Unfinished, and Fictive Works Found Only in Other Books.” It’s the grand extension of a thought experiment Byers has been toying with for some time and arrives courtesy of thorough collaborations with printers, bookbinders, artists, and calligraphers.
Byers has given life to more than 100 books and will spread them around the Grolier’s cozy second floor gallery. It is, the organizers admit, part conceptual art project and part literary indulgence. Visitors are asked to judge works entirely by their covers and, in so doing, dream up the stories and characters that these the unknowable books might hold inside. In turn, we find ourselves considering the first words and keystrokes for the books we know and love.
Abdul Al-Hazred, Necronomicon. In Vinegia: Appresso Gabriel Giolito de Ferrari et Fratelli, 1541. Anthropegal grimoire. Photo: Reid Byers/Grolier Club.
“An encounter with an imaginary book brings us forcibly to a liminal moment, confronted with an object that we know does not exist, but then it leaves us suspended in this strange space,” Byers said in a statement. “Every book in the world was an imaginary book when it was first begun to be written.”
Byers has devised three broad criteria for “Imaginary Books.” The first, Lost Books, counts among its number William Shakespeare’s Love’s Labours Won, the vanished complement to Love’s Labour’s Lost; Ernest Hemmingway’s first novel that was stolen from his wife (along with its carbon copies) in Paris; and Lord Byron’s tell-all memoir that was deemed worthy of burning by his publisher in 1824.
Sylvia Plath, Double Exposure (1962). London: Heineman, 1964. Manuscript disappeared c. 1970. Photo courtesy of the Grolier Club.
The second, Unfinished Books, presents works that were started but never finished or published. This includes Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s opium inspired reverie Kubla Khan, Sylvia Plath’s autobiographical Double Exposure that Ted Hughes allegedly prevented being published, and Raymond Chandler’s Shakespeare in Baby Talk.
Last are Byers’ Fictive Books, which emerge from the pages of fiction to find physical form at the Grolier Club. Chief among which is The Necronomicon the toxic, forbidden tome from H.P. Lovecraft’s writings. As is canon, it appeared locked away in a heavy-set safe. You can look and speculate but, as Byers said, “the book is not to be touched.” More

Mary Sully (1896–1963) is enjoying, perhaps, the most unlikely museum solo show debut in all of art history. A self-taught, 20th-century Dakota Sioux woman artist whose entire life’s work sat forgotten in the family home for decades, Sully is now the subject of a fascinating posthumous exhibition at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, which recently acquired a suite of 19 of her works.
“This is a reclamation project,” Sylvia Yount, the Met’s American wing curator, said in a tour of the show, which also included 10 works on loan from the Mary Sully Foundation. “We are inserting Mary Sully into the canon of American art.”
“Mary Sully: Native Modern” follows the 2019 book Becoming Mary Sully, by Sully’s grandnephew, Phillip J. Deloria, a historian and Harvard professor who inherited the artist’s work, packed away in a suitcase under the stairs. Miraculously, he not only recognized its worth, but made it his mission to ensure that others did as well.
“Nobody ever took her seriously as an artist—no one in the family. They thought she was the crazy woman who just doodled up in her room,” Deloria said. “I think of her as the Indian Emily Dickinson.”
Mary Sully, Babe Ruth (ca. 1920s–40s). Collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, purchase, Morris K. Jesup Fund and funds from various donors, 2023.
Drawn on paper from the late 1920s to the early ’40s, Sully’s multi-panel compositions feature carefully composed, often symmetrical designs that employ pattern and geometry. The top panel is typically the most figurative, with Modernist-inspired abstractions of this imagery in the center page, and more overtly Native American designs on the bottom sheet.
Many of these kaleidoscopic colored pencil works, of which roughly 200 are known to exist, were what the artist called “personality prints,” inspired by the celebrities of the day, from Gertrude Stein to Babe Ruth to Fiorello La Guardia. Upon close examination, each one contains figurative elements that relate to their subject’s life, like a baseball diamond for Ruth—although the imagery, while beautiful, can be hard to parse.
Mary Sully, JT (Julia) (ca. 1920s–40s). Collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, purchase, Morris K. Jesup Fund and funds from various donors, 2023.
That these pieces are now in the collection of the nation’s foremost art institution, which is showing no less than 25 of her drawings, would have been a dream come true for Sully.
Suffering from social anxiety and mental illness that was never formally diagnosed, she had struggled to find her way as an adult, with an unsuccessful stint as a shop owner after failing to complete her college education. Sully lived with and relied financially on her sister, Ella Deloria, an ethnographer who, like Margaret Mead and Zora Neale Hurston, trained under the noted anthropologist Franz Boas.
Though the family may not have appreciated them, her drawings were something that Sully excelled at, and gave purpose and meaning to her life.
Mary Sully, Fiorello La Guardia (ca. 1920s–40s). Collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, gift of the Mary Sully Foundation, 2023.
“Her being isolated in her room, spending hours—years really—drawing, that’s actually now something that’s really encouraged in regards to self-care,” Patricia Marroquin Norby, the Met’s associate curator of Native American art, said. “Now we have all the adult coloring books for people.”
Sully took up her art with a unique vision, exacting detail, and a determined dedication, creating her own personal style and visual language. She was informed both by her Native heritage—techniques such as quillwork, beadwork, and quilting—and the prevailing trends of the day, including commercial design and fashion, as well as mainstream pop culture.
In this, Sully was unique among other Indigenous artists working at the time, who typically hewed more closely to traditional Native subject matter.
Mary Sully, Eugene Field (ca. 1920s–40s). Collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, purchase, Morris K. Jesup Fund and funds from various donors, 2023.
Despite her lack of formal training, Sully saw art as her birthright. Her great-grandfather was Thomas Sully (1783–1872), one of the most famous and successful early American painters.
Thomas Sully’s son, Alfred Sully (1820–1879), was also an artist—as well as a military man, rising to the level of a brigadier general in the Army. Alfred’s service brought him out West, where he commanded U.S. forces in the 1863 Whitestone Hill Massacre, killing as many as 300 Native Americans.
But before that, he had an intimate relationship with a Dakota woman named Susan Pehandutawin, who gave him a pair of beaded moccasins that he sent back East—and, more importantly, bore him a daughter, also named Mary Sully.
It’s not clear if Alfred ever knew Pehandutawin had given birth to his child, but his daughter and grandchildren knew the artistic lineage from which they were descended. And when Sully began making her art, she eschewed her birth name, Susan Mabel Deloria, in favor of her mother’s name, which reflected this ancestry.
“Mary Sully: Native Modern” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Photo by Paul Lachenauer, ©the Metropolitan Museum ofArt, New York.
Just as Thomas Sully painted portraits of the leading citizens of Early America, his great-granddaughter looked to celebrities—some of whom have long since been consigned to obscurity—for inspiration. Her “Personality Prints,” Deloria said, “are really a portrait of America in the 1930s,” and reflect the artist’s engagement with literature, theater, and popular music.
Sully was born on the Standing Rock Reservation in South Dakota, but spent her life between two worlds, Native and non-Native. Her father, Philip J. Deloria, was a leader of the Sioux Episcopal Church. Ella Deloria’s work took the sisters across the country, with Sully serving as driver, and the sisters even lived for a time in New York.
But in her only brush with fame, as the subject of one of Paramount Pictures’s “Unusual Occupations” shorts in 1944, Sully was exoticized. Shooting her drawing in the desert in a stereotypical “Indian Princess” outfit, the film identifies her as a member of New Mexico’s Zuni tribe.
“Mary Sully: Native Modern” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Photo by Paul Lachenauer, ©the Metropolitan Museum ofArt, New York.
“Obviously cultural and historical accuracy were not of concern. There was more for entertainment value,” Marroquin Norby, who is herself a Purépecha Indian woman, said of the footage, which is included in the show. “It’s just such a quirky, fun video.”
Some of Sully’s drawings delve into the complex question of Native American identity, like the Three Stages of Indian History: Pre-Columbian Freedom, Reservation Fetters, the Bewildering Present, and Indian Church.
The former wrestles with the sad trajectory of Native life under colonial rule, her people shown trod beneath the foot of the white man and forced off their land into reservations. (Sully conveys this masterfully in four vertical layers.) The latter depicts a Native congregation gathered before an altar in front of the cross, but inside a tipi, illustrating the ways in which Indigenous communities blended their own traditions with settler culture.
Mary Sully, Three Stages of Indian History: Pre-Columbian Freedom, Reservation Fetters, the Bewildering Present (ca. 1920s–40s). Courtesy of the Mary Sully Foundation and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
Despite some efforts to attract collectors, Sully never sold her work. And she appears to have only exhibited three times, at two Indian schools and at the Milwaukee Women’s Club. But Deloria’s book opened new doors for the late artist, as scholars and academics began to discover her extraordinary art.
In 2019, a trio of Sully’s works appeared in “Hearts of Our People: Native Women Artists,” which opened at the Minneapolis Institute of Art (Mia), and traveled to the Frist Art Museum in Nashville; the Renwick Gallery at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C.; and the Philbrook Museum of Art in Tulsa. (The Met show was originally going to be organized in partnership with Mia, which has also acquired several Sully drawings; instead, a separate exhibition will open there in March.)
Mary Sully, Indian Church, top panel (ca. 1920s–40s). Courtesy of the Mary Sully Foundation.
At the Met, the drawings are shown exactly as Sully intended—thankfully, they were carefully packed away in neat groups, still with the tape she used to present them as vertical triptychs during her lifetime. Otherwise, it might have been quite a challenge to match the corresponding panels together.
“When my wife and I saw them on the wall, we just kind of burst into tears,” Deloria recalled. “To see Mary Sully’s works now hung on the walls of major museums, it’s just this amazing thing. But she’s wholly and completely deserving of it.”
“Mary Sully: Native Modern” is on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Avenue, New York, New York, July 18, 2024–January 12, 2025. More