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      A New Show Offers Face Time With Ancient Egyptian Funeral Portraits

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      A new exhibition at the Allard Pierson Museum in Amsterdam brings together a large collection of funeral paintings from post-Ptolemaic Egypt, some loaned from the Louvre and the J. Paul Getty Museum. Known as the Fayum portraits, the bulk these artifacts were unearthed in the necropolis in Egypt’s Faiyum region, where they were found laid over the faces of mummified bodies. As one of the rare surviving Classical art forms, these works are unique for several reasons.
      The first concerns their medium. Most of the art produced during classical antiquity survives in the form of statues and monuments. Not because that’s all the ancient Romans, Greeks, and Egyptians made—they had rich painting traditions—but because stone is much more durable than paint, which survived only in the rarest of instances. Just as the frescoes from the ash-covered ruins of Pompeii were preserved through volcanic eruption, the Fayum portraits survived as a result of Egypt’s desert climate.
      A Fayum portrait. Photo courtesy of Musée du Louvre, Department des Antiquités égyptiennes.
      The second reason concerns their subject. Where the vast majority of Greco-Roman artwork depicts gods, mythological heroes, and quasi-divine emperors, the Fayum portraits are snapshots of ordinary people. The exhibition’s title, “Face to Face: The People Behind Mummy Portraits,” is fitting, for when you stare at some of these portraits, you interact with individuals who lived thousands of years ago.
      One of the most striking features of the Fayum portraits is their style, which curator Ben van den Bercken describes as a melting pot of cultural influences. “They were made to be placed on top of mummified bodies,” he said. “That’s the Egyptian component: a means of keeping the diseased recognizable for the gods as well as their loved ones.”
      Installation view of “Face to Face: The People Behind Mummy Portraits” at the Allard Pierson Museum. Photo courtesy of Allard Pierson Museum.
      Hellenistic culture—introduced to Egypt through the reign of the Ptolemaic pharaohs, whose lineage traces back to the Greco-Macedonian conqueror Alexander the Great—is present in the clothing of the subjects as well as the materials with which they were put on canvas. Tempera, an originally Egyptian tradition where pigment is mixed with water-soluble binders like egg yolk, is frequently combined with encaustic or hot wax painting—a Greek approach Van den Bercken speculates may have been taught in Egypt’s Hellenistic schooling systems.
      “The interesting thing about encaustic painting is the skill involved,” he said. “Since you cannot make adjustments once the wax has cooled, portraits were constructed layer by layer, giving them an almost Impressionistic quality. It’s reminiscent of what we find in the 17th century with artists like Rembrandt.”
      A Fayum portrait. Photo courtesy of Allard Pierson Museum.
      The realism of the Fayum portraits was also imported, primarily from Rome, which officially annexed Egypt in 30 C.E., and indirectly from Greece. Their lifelike detail, demonstrating a clear understanding of human anatomy, stands in stark contrast to the more abstract and symbolic visual language associated with ancient Egypt today.
      But while the portraits are lifelike, the question of whether they were true to life remains up for debate. “It’s difficult to judge the extent to which the paintings reflect what these people actually looked like,” Van den Bercken noted. “If, for instance, they really owned the jewelry we see in the images. It’s possible people were presented a bit wealthier than they actually were.”
      A Fayum portrait. Photo courtesy of Musée du Louvre, Department des Antiquités égyptiennes.
      At the same time, funeral portraits would not have been cheap: “Look at the wood panels on which they were painted. Many of these are made of basswood, which came from outside Egypt. The same goes for some of the pigments.” This, he said, suggests the subjects were members of society’s upper class: men and women of considerable means.
      Sticking with the subject of realism, keen observers will note that paintings produced in the 3rd and 4th centuries look different from those dated closer to the time of Julius Caesar. Where the latter rival Roman busts in their accuracy and precision, the former are more evocative of Byzantine icons, their personality obscured by a certain level of abstraction.
      Installation view of “Face to Face: The People Behind Mummy Portraits” at the Allard Pierson Museum. Photo courtesy of Allard Pierson Museum.
      Coincidence? This, too, is difficult to say. While Van Bercken does not rule out that evolving artistic currents on the Italian peninsula and Asia Minor influenced Egyptian brushwork, there simply isn’t enough evidence to draw a definite conclusion here. Differences in style, he explained, could just as easily be attributed to differences in geographic location or preferences of individual painters. On top of this, many of the portraits cannot be dated with 100 percent accuracy.
      What is certain is that the tradition of funeral painting, which emerged during the 1st century B.C.E., gradually fizzled during the 4th century C.E. One possible explanation for development this is the rise of Christianity, declared the official religion of the Roman Empire by Theodosius in 380. When the religion spread from Rome to Egypt, mummification rituals made way for Christian burial ceremonies. As mummification disappeared, mummy portraiture followed suit.
      “Face to Face: The People Behind the Mummy Portraits” is on view at the Allard Pierson Museum, Oude Turfmarkt 127-129, Amsterdam, Netherlands, through May 20.
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      From Chagall’s Bible to ‘Sgt. Pepper’ Art—See 5 Highlights at the N.Y. Antiquarian Book Fair

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      The ABAA New York International Antiquarian Book Fair is considerably more exciting than its name suggests.
      Each April, dealers, collectors, and the casually curious descend on New York’s Park Armory for a weekend of bookish fun. In truth, “book” is a misleading, limiting word compared to the scope and diversity of items laid out in the cavernous hall. Offerings span early maps, groundbreaking patents, historic letters, fledgling advertisements, political banners, concert posters—each with its own specialist dealer.
      Here are five intriguing art-related offerings from the 64th Edition.

      The Cottingley Fairies PrintsRare Burnside Books
      The first of the five photographs, taken by Elsie Wright in 1917. Photo: Burnside Rare Books.
      In an era of deep fakes and photoshop trickery, the Cottingley fairy images are a reminder that photographic manipulation is as old as the medium itself. In 1917, two girls set out to photograph fairies dancing in the Yorkshire countryside. They hoped to prank their parents. Instead, the series of five photographs captured the imagination of the British public. Most compelled were the theosophists, including Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who understood the prancing white-winged things as protoplasmic thought forms produced by the girls’ psychic auras. In reality, the fairies were cardboard cut outs held in place with hatpins. The pair admitted as much in a 1983 interview—sort of, the fifth photograph, they insisted, was authentic.

      The Original Artwork for Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club BandVoewood Rare Books
      The original artwork created by Dutch design company The Fool for The Beatles. Photo: Voewood Rare Books.
      Exhausted by touring and keen for a refresh, the Beatles took a mini-hiatus in late 1966. Ringo relaxed, John traipsed through art galleries, George learned the sitar in India, Paul dropped LSD. Art, psychedelics, and musical experimentation underpinned the subsequent record: Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, a concept album that saw the Beatles adopt Edwardian alter-egos. For artwork, they commissioned The Fool, the playful Dutch design collective that had worked with Cream and Procol Harum. Its offering was a psychedelic garden of Eden, a scene of mermaids, lush flora, and symbolic birds. Ultimately, the design was considered too overtly trippy and wasn’t chosen. Not that The Fool minded; they took the decision almost as a point of pride. Voewood Rare Books has priced it at $110,000.

      David Hockney’s poster for a university lectureSims Reed Gallery
      A poster David Hockey created for a 1965 lecture at Newcastle University. Photo: Sims Reed Gallery.
      In 1965, with David Hockney’s reputation steadily growing, his friend Mark Lancaster convinced him to give an informal talk about his practice to students at Newcastle University. Hockney created a poster for the occasion, a palm tree (inspired by recent visits to California) together with a simple red sun and the playful all-cap words “David Hockney Will Come.” Lancaster would develop his screen-printing skills further as an assistant to Andy Warhol and Jasper Johns. The Newcastle rendezvous was an important beat in a lifelong friendship that saw the pair travel to Hawaii, Japan, and Hong Kong.

      Marc Chagall Bible with burning bush designPhilip J. Pirgaes
      Marc Chagall Bible with bindings by Renee Haas. Photo: Philip J. Pirgaes.
      In 1931, the renowned art dealer Ambroise Vollard inquired after Marc Chagall’s interest in illustrating the Bible. Chagall was keen. First, however, he wanted to feel and experience the Holy Land for himself. Upon his return, he studied the masters of engraving, in particular the work of Rembrandt, and methodically produced 105 engravings over a 25-year period. The final work is considered a peerless illustrated Old Testament of modernity with age-old stories made fresh through Chagall’s ability to capture human emotion. Released unbound in 1957, Philip J. Pirgaes offers René Haas’ design ($95,000), one that evokes a burning bush ablaze on a stain-glass window.

      Sylvia Plath’s high school paintingType Punch Matrix
      Sylvia Plath, Portrait of an Unidentified Young Woman (1948/49). Photo: Type Punch Matrix.
      As a child, Sylvia Plath drew, painted, and sketched with abandon. She arrived at Smith College in 1950 determined to major in fine art. Plath painted this portrait of an unidentified young woman as a high schooler in the late 1940s. It shows a characteristic sensitivity to mood and gesture. As explored in a 2017 Smithsonian exhibition on Plath, art fueled and inspired her writings, and vice versa. Upon hitting a publishing drought in the late ‘50s, Plath turned to contemporary art, finding in the works of Rousseau, Paul Klee, and De Chirico a kinship that led her to write a series of art poems. Type Punch Matrix has priced the work at $135,000.
      The New York Antiquarian Book Fair is on view at Park Avenue Armory, 643 Park Avenue, New York, April 4–7.
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      A Milan Exhibition Reunites an Augustinian Altarpiece for the First Time in Centuries

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      In 1454, the Augustinians in San Sepolcro wanted a grand polyptych for the high altar of their church. They commissioned hometown master Piero della Francesca for the task. It took Piero 12 years—Pope Nicholas V kept demanding and hogging his services at the Vatican—and stood as a magnificent demonstration of the painter’s talents.
      Across 30 panels, Piero placed two saints on either of the Virgin and the surrounding predella was filled with New Testament scenes and Augustinian figures. The polyptych evidenced Piero’s mastery of space and light, as well as his familiarity with trendy Spanish painting.
      Piero della Francesca, San Nicola da Tolentino (1454–69). Photo: Poldi Pezzoli Museum.
      The popularity of such polyptychs didn’t last. By the end of the 16th century, it had been disassembled and sold off panel-by-panel.
      Eight panels have survived and are scattered across five museums in Europe and the United States. For the past two decades, museums have tried, but failed, to reassemble Piero’s polyptych.
      Piero della Francesca, Saint Michael the Archangel (1454–69). Photo: Poldi Pezzoli Museum.
      Now, the Poldi Pezzoli Museum in Milan has succeeded. Through June 20, visitors will be able to enjoy what remains of the Augustinian Polyptych 555 years after it was painted.
      The break came when Alessandra Quarto, the director of Poldi Pezzoli Museum, learned that New York’s Frick Collection, which owns four panels, would be closed for six months ahead of its 2024 grand reopening. The Frick proved willing leading to an exhibition that Quarto has called “the reunion of the century.”
      Piero della Francesca, Saint Augustine (1454–69). Photo: Poldi Pezzoli Museum.
      Milan holds Piero’s Saint Nicholas of Tolentino and with the Frick onboard, it proved possible to convince London’s National Gallery, Washington D.C.’s National Gallery of Art, and the Museum of Ancient Art in Lisbon to make the requisite loans.
      The exhibition presents the four saints (St. Michael the Archangel, St. John the Evangelist, Saint Nicholas, and Saint Augustine) in a staggered formation with a blank space for the central panel.
      Piero della Francesca, San Giovanni Evangelista (1454–69). Photo: Poldi Pezzoli Museum.
      Curated by Machtelt Brüggen Israëls of the Rijksmuseum and Nathaniel Silver of Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, the exhibition also offered an opportunity to conduct diagnostic investigations on the panels. Studies revealed the central panel depicted the coronation of the Virgin, as opposed to a scene of Virgin and Child, as had long been assumed.
      Piero della Francesca, The Crucifixion (1454–69). Photo: Poldi Pezzoli Museum.
      This conclusion was reached through discovering traces of two wings on the panels flanking the centerpiece. The wings, one pink and one blue, were removed when the altarpiece was disassembled because it would have seemed incongruous. Furthermore, experts found a foot beneath a brocade dress on the panel depicting Michael the Archangel, which suggests a kneeling Virgin. Both details are consistent with period depictions of the Virgin’s coronation.
      The four panels depicting the saints reappeared miraculously in Milan in the 1800s and organizers are hopeful the exhibition might prompt more to resurface.
      “Piero della Francesca: The Augustinian Polyptych Reunited” is on view at the Poldi Pezzoli Museum, Via Alessandro Manzoni, 12, Milan, Italy, through June 24.
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      From Raucous to Revelatory: The Unflinching Eye of Frans Hals

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      Just how aggressively did the artist booze?
      That question has kept plenty of art historians busy studying the fallow years of Jackson Pollock, the darker passages of Martin Kippenberger’s career, and the tragic behavior of Vincent van Gogh—sad tales, ultimately, that make their achievements all the more remarkable.
      Frans Hals’s alleged carousing presents a more complicated case. The 17th-century Dutch painter’s reputation as a lush comes in large part from a posthumous biography by the artist and writer Arnold Houbraken, who was born in 1660, six years before Hals’s death in his 80s. Relying on secondhand reports (and, perhaps, his imagination), Houbraken declared that the artist must “generally have been filled to the throat with drink every night.” There is circumstantial evidence, too. While he was a revered portraitist in Haarlem for a half-century, he left only about 200 pictures, and he had money troubles late in life.
      Banquet of the Officers of the St George Civic Guard, 1616.
      Still, Hals’s vivid, drink-filled paintings have undoubtedly played a role in helping that reputation endure. About 50 of them (a quarter of the oeuvre!) now fill a rollicking eponymous retrospective at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, many of their subjects raising glasses to toast or imbibe. Whether or not some potent elixir is present, his sitters tend to be some combination of pink-cheeked, ruddy, very jolly, and off-balance. These people are vividly, awfully present, and they are inviting you to join them. Do so with caution. I have not had this much fun in an exhibition in many years. But afterward, I did find myself rushing to the museum’s Gallery of Honor for the calm and equanimity of Vermeer and Rembrandt.
      The knock against Hals, the unholy member of Dutch Golden Age trinity, has always been that his portrayals are superficial, lacking the soul of his two leading contemporaries (who have also been feted by the Rijksmuseum in recent years). That is fair, up to a point. No, he was not Rembrandt, but in even his most gilded portraits of the high and mighty (of which there are many), you will receive heavy doses of personality—or maybe even hints of satire.
      Portrait of Jaspar Schade, 1645.
      There is a faintest trace of insecurity in the eyes of his famous, fabulously dressed, and fulsomely mustachioed Laughing Cavalier (1624), on loan from London’s Wallace Collection. And in a 1645 portrait, a vertiginously wealthy 22-year-old named Jaspar Schade gives a look so withering that you can just about hear him uttering some insufferable bon mot. I hate him. “Nothing was trendier than this in the 17th century!” the wall label crows of Schade’s get-up: a black floppy hat and a dark top decorated with zig-zagging silver marks.
      It is difficult to write this without sounding corny, but Hals was a genius with paint. The 19th-century French critic Théophile Thoré said that his brushwork was like that of “a fencer wielding his saber,” the show’s curators—Friso Lammertse, of the Rijksmuseum, and Bart Cornelis, of the National Gallery in London—relay in the show’s richly researched (and illustrated) catalogue. (The exhibition originated at the National Gallery, and will travel to the Gemäldegalerie in Berlin in July.) The Impressionists loved him for his loose and daring touch, which grew more pronounced over the decades.
      In any case, Hals’s fixation on (and his mastery of) surface-level appearances should not be held against him. He understood that self-presentation is at the heart of life in the ultra-competitive public sphere of a bustling democracy. Everyone in his pictures is angling for status—or being put in their place.
      Malle Babbe, circa 1640.
      Hals allowed his wealthy sitters to delight in their fineries, and when he painted children (he had 10 of his own at home at one point), he filled them with giddy mischievousness and a certain lack of sobriety. (Beer was safer than water at the time; everyone partook.) When depicting the impecunious or mentally ill, he could be unflinching, even cruel. In Malle Babbe (“Mad Babbe,” ca. 1640), we see a woman with a tortured grin, believed to be a local named Barbara Claesdr, with an owl, a symbol of folly, on one shoulder. A few years later, she would be sent to a workhouse.
      Much about Hals’s life is not known, including the exact year of his birth, but we know that there were difficult stretches. Born in Antwerp in the first half of the 1580s, he fled with his family in 1586, amid the Eighty Years’ War, for the South Netherlands. Two of Hals’s children were sent to the same workhouse where Claesdr would end up—a son for a mental issue, a daughter for promiscuity. He certainly frequented taverns, but that was a prerequisite for artists courting patrons, the art historian Jaap van der Veen notes in the catalogue. “While in all probability alcohol flowed freely in the Hals household, this in no way diminishes the importance of culture within the family,” he writes.
      Boy with Flute, about 1627.
      Both of those things, alcohol and culture, can provide recompense for tough times. Can Hals? His values may not be as profound as Vermeer’s or Rembrandt’s, but they are, in their own way, as important. He urges you to live in the moment—to enjoy your glass of wine and then ask for another, as some of the sloshed men do in his cinematic group portraits of militias. Embrace your vanity and excuse your foibles, he says, because life is precarious, and fraught, but at least for a while, we can keep the celebration going. We can stay together.
      Fittingly, Hals excelled at painting musicians. In Boy with Flute (about 1627), the young instrumentalist looks away, raising one hand as if he is acknowledging applause: “That’s all for tonight, folks.” However, the audience, awed by his performance, won’t stop. The flautist demurs, and then demurs some more. But just look at the expression on his face. He will soon acquiesce. He will play another. Just one more.
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      Dalí Headlines a New Show Exploring Artistic Takes on the Passion of Christ

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      “Ecce Homo: Behold the Man,” an expansive new exhibition at the Museum of the Bible in Washington, D.C., explores how artists have interpreted the Passion of Christ over the past five centuries.
      The Passion, derived from the Latin word patior meaning “to suffer, bear, endure,” refers to Christ’s final days as described in the New Testament. Celebrated during Easter, it includes his entry into Jerusalem, the Last Supper with his disciples, his betrayal by Judas, his trial before the Roman adjudicator Pontius Pilate, and his crucifixion. A popular theme in Christian religious art, the Passion symbolizes the belief that the Son of God sacrificed himself to absolve the sins of all mankind.
      Installation view of “Ecce Homo: Behold the Man” at Museum of the Bible. Photo courtesy of the Museum of the Bible.
      The title of the exhibition borrows from the phrase that Pontius Pilate is said to have uttered upon presenting Jesus, bound and lashed, to a Roman crowd. “Then came Jesus forth, wearing the crown of thorns, and the purple robe,” reads the Bible passage John 19:5. “And Pilate saith unto them, Behold the man!”
      To trace how representations of the Passion have changed significantly throughout art history, the show encompasses the figurative woodcuts of the Medieval era through the lifelike works by artists of the 18th and 19th centuries. A bulk of the exhibition is given over to art of the 20th century, when the Passion was abstracted and appropriated to comment on themes beyond the religious.
      Salvador Dalí with his painting, Christ of Saint John of the Cross. Photo: PA Images via Getty Images.
      Here, Dalí’s Ecce Homo (1969) takes the spotlight. The watercolor drawing was created with the technique “bulletism,” involving firing an antique gun loaded with ink capsules at a blank sheet of paper. The splatters, in this case, formed the face of Christ’s thorn-crowned face.
      Drawn to the Catholic traditions of his native Spain, particularly in the postwar period, Dalí’s interest in the Passion, a topic he tackled more than once, was a response to his anxieties about the “atomic age.” As he wrote in his 1942 autobiography: “I believe, above all, in the real and unfathomable force of the philosophic Catholicism of France and in that of the militant Catholicism of Spain.”
      Tyrus Clutter, Jesus Reviled (2006). Photo courtesy of the Museum of the Bible.
      Other contemporary interpretations of the Passion include Hubertus Giebe’s sad-faced Christ, rendered in the style of German Expressionism; Romanian artist Ioana Datcu’s collaged portrait of Jesus; and Ralph Hall’s vivid painting that captures the lashes that Jesus suffered before his crucifixion.
      See more images from the exhibition below.
      Installation view of “Ecce Homo: Behold the Man” at Museum of the Bible. Photo courtesy of the Museum of the Bible.
      W. French, Ecce Homo (after Guido Reni) (ca. 17th century). Photo courtesy of the Museum of the Bible.
      Ralph Hall, Ecce Homo (1986). Photo courtesy of the Museum of the Bible.
      Unknown artist, Man of Sorrows and Mater Dolorosa (1524). Photo courtesy of the Museum of the Bible.
      Installation view of “Ecce Homo: Behold the Man” at Museum of the Bible. Photo courtesy of the Museum of the Bible.
      Félix Bonfils, Ecce Homo (ca. 1880s). Photo courtesy of the Museum of the Bible.
      Cornelis Cort, Ecce Homo (1602). Photo courtesy of the Museum of the Bible.
      “Ecce Homo: Behold the Man” is on view at the Museum of the Bible, 400 4th St SW, Washington, D.C. through May 15.
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      A Show of ‘Interview’ Covers Revels in the Celebrity-Studded Culture of the 1980s

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      “The Crystal Ball of Pop” was the nickname bestowed upon Interview magazine after its founding in 1969 by Andy Warhol. The magazine celebrated the zeitgeist’s values of wealth, beauty, and fame, apparent at first glance with their iconic cover photographs of A-list celebrities. Many thought Warhol himself was behind the covers, but the work was all Richard Bernstein’s.
      Richard Bernstein and Andy Warhol in 1978, photographed by Bobby Grossman. Photo courtesy of NeueHouse Madison Square.
      “Richard Bernstein is my favorite artist. He makes everyone look so famous,’ said Warhol, who took interest in the artist after attending his solo show in 1965. Between 1972 and 1989, Bernstein made 189 mixed-media, polychromatic covers for the magazine, featuring the likes of Cher, Stevie Wonder, Mick Jagger, and his dear friend Grace Jones, whose son he was godfather to. His work has been shown at the Museum of Modern Art, the Met, and the National Portrait Gallery. A new exhibition at NeueHouse in New York will showcase more than 20 of his star-studded portraits.
      Grace Jones on the cover of Interview magazine in October, 1984. Photo courtesy of NeueHouse Madison Square.
      Working out of a studio in Chelsea, Bernstein thrived in the beating heart of NYC’s social scene amid a celebrity-heavy culture of hedonism. He had a Studio 54 VIP card. If the club ever wanted a particular celebrity to attend, they would call Bernstein and invite him directly. His work is emblematic of the high-glamor of its time
      Bernstein was also an innovator, creating deepfake nudes of celebrities decades before the advent of A.I. In 1968, he created one of his most controversial pieces, The Nude Beatles, a neon technicolor group portrait with the Fab Fours’ heads superimposed on lithe, naked male bodies. The prints were confiscated by order of a French judge, and the Beatles label, Apple Records, filed a losing lawsuit against him. When Bernstein later met John  Lennon, he impressed upon him the missed opportunity of using the scandalous image for an album cover.
      Bernstein’s cover image of Isabella Rossellini from the January 1982 issue of Interview magazine. Photo courtesy of NeueHouse Madison Square.
      For the magazine covers, Interview would commission other hot analog photographers who produced a silver gelatin print that was delivered to Bernstein for manipulation and bedazzlement before going to print. Rory Trifon, the president of the estate of Richard Bernstein, elaborated on the process: “the cover subject was decided by Bob Colacello, art directed by Marc Balet, and photographed by the world’s most renowned photographers such as Greg Gorman, Matthew Rolston, Albert Watson, and Peter Strongwater among others.” Each of those photographers would supply Bernstein with a group of silver gelatin prints, who “would then choose the best image and then crop, enlarge, and illustrate; airbrush, paint, and collage to achieve the final piece. The artwork would be approved by Andy and then it would go to print. Taken together, the overall collaborative covers are the final result from the greatest photographers, illustrated by Pop Art’s greatest illustrator, and approved by the Pope of Pop himself making them truly remarkable.”
      The June 1984 cover of Interview magazine featured Kevin Costner, by Richard Bernstein. Photo courtesy of NeueHouse Madison Square.
      Thirty years before Damien Hirst’s famous paintings of pills, Richard Bernstein was exhibiting paintings of pills while he lived and worked in Paris. Paloma Picasso, daughter of Pablo Picasso, was his art assistant. Praising her former boss, Picasso once said, “Bernstein puts wit into the beauties, fantasy into the rich, depth into the glamorous and adds instant patina to newcomers.”
      The exhibition The Interview Magazine Covers, 1972-1989: Richard Bernstein’s Portraits of Andy Warhol’s Interview Magazine runs from March 26–June 30, 2024 at NeueHouse, Madison Square, New York.
      September 1981, Fran Lebowitz made the cover of Interview magazine. By Richard Bernstein. Photo courtesy of NeueHouse Madison Square.
      “The Interview Magazine Covers, 1972–1989: Richard Bernstein’s Portraits for Andy Warhol’s Interview Magazine” is on view at NeueHouse Madison Square, 110 E 25th St, New York, through June 30.
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      The British Pre-Raphaelites Meet the Italian Renaissance at This New Exhibition

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      The San Domenico Museum in Forlì, Italy, is hosting a monumental exhibition, “Pre-Raphaelites: Modern Renaissance.” The show brings together 360 works of art, borrowed from major European, American, and British museums, as well as private collections, foregrounding Italian masterpieces spanning from Cimabue to Veronese. The first multi-disciplinary exhibition of its kind in Italy, the show delves into the profound influence of Italian Renaissance art on the British Pre-Raphaelite movement of the mid-19th to early 20th centuries.
      Frederic Leighton, Greek Girls Picking up Pebbles by the Sea (1871). Collection Pérez Simón, Mexico.
      “Never before has there been an opportunity to put so many British works from this period in conversation with the Italian forerunners,” said Peter Trippi, a co-curator of the show. This is largely because borrowing Italian Renaissance and medieval art out of Italy is incredibly complicated due to the expense as well as the fragility and rarity of the works, which are typically cherished by the churches and museums in which they reside.
      Among the highlights are celebrated works by Italian masters such as Cimabue, Botticelli, Michelangelo, and Titian, juxtaposed with major pieces by renowned British artists including Dante Gabriel Rossetti, John Everett Millais, Edward Burne-Jones, and William Morris. Notably, the exhibition spotlights often overlooked contributions of women artists like Evelyn De Morgan, Elizabeth Siddal, and Julia Margaret Cameron to the Pre-Raphaelite movement.
      The installation was designed by Lucchi & Biserni. Photo: Emanuele Rambaldi.
      Structured as a captivating visual dialogue across time, the exhibition traces three generations of Pre-Raphaelites, a group founded in 1848 with the the mission to rejuvenate British art during the industrial age. Determined to recapture the spirit of medieval and Renaissance Italian artists who worked before the death of Raphael in 1520, Pre-Raphaelites rejected the academic conventions of their time by re-envisioning styles and themes from the past in strikingly modern ways. They drew on a dynamic array of Italian precedents, embracing Venetian Gothic architecture, the “Primitive” paintings at London’s National Gallery, and the sophisticated sensuality of artists like Veronese and Titian.
      The installation, designed by Lucchi & Biserni of Forlì, showcases an array of works by prominent Pre-Raphaelite artists such as Burne-Jones, Frederic Leighton, and John Ruskin. More than 50 design objects, including four tremendous Holy Grail tapestries by Morris & Co. and a grand piano adorned by Burne-Jones, enrich the display. Additionally, the exhibition features bronzes by leaders of the “New Sculpture” movement and proto-Decadent works by Charles Ricketts and Aubrey Beardsley.
      Edward Burne-Jones, William Morris, and John Henry Dearle (designers), Holy Grail Tapestries: The Arming of the Knights (1890). Private collection.
      Trippi describes the exhibition’s display of Burne-Jones’ work, set in the church’s dining room, as “magical.”
      “You look up and see a gorgeous medieval painting of flowers and leaves on the church’s ceiling, and you look down ahead of you and see Burne-Jones’ 19th-century paintings of flowers and leaves,” he said. On one wall of the room, a painting by Mantegna and another by Bellini are on display. In a vitrine, a drawing by Michelangelo can be found. Between all these works, the Burne-Jones Pre-Raphaelite paintings hang, in flirtation with the works of the old Italian masters. “It’s a love affair, really,” he says.
      A view of the Edward Burne-Jones room, described by co-curator Peter Trippi as “a love affair.” Photo: Emanuele Rambaldi
      The grand finale of the exhibition offers a fresh perspective on the Pre-Raphaelite legacy through 19th- and early 20th-century paintings by Italian artists including Adolfo de Carolis, Giovanni Costa, Giulio Aristide Sartorio, and Filadelfo Simi.
      “Pre-Raphaelites: Modern Renaissance” is organized by the Fondazione Cassa dei Risparmi di Forlì in collaboration with the Municipality of Forlì. The Italian catalogue is published by Dario Cimorelli Editore (Milan).
      A view of the “Pre-Raphaelites: Modern Renaissance” exhibition at the Museo Civico San Domenico in Italy. photo: Emanuele Rambaldi.
      “Pre-Raphaelites: Modern Renaissance” is on view at the San Domenico Museum in Forlì, Italy, through June 30, 2024.
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      in Exhibitions

      The Whitney Biennial Can’t Go on Like This Forever

      by

      What’s on the Whitney Biennial’s mind this year?
      In the museum’s ground-floor gallery, the show begins with an American flag, crumpled and dead on a grimy piece of sectional sofa, courtesy the youngest artist in the galleries, the budding art star Ser Serpas (born 1995). It feels like a found-object political cartoon for “the exhaustion of the American dream,” a sentiment felt by a lot of the rising generation.
      Assemblage by Ser Serpas at the 2024 Whitney Biennial. Photo by Ben Davis.
      The show comes to a climax in one of its few truly photo-worthy images, Kiyan Williams’s Ruins of Empire II or The Earth Swallows the Master’s House (2024), a sculpture of the north facade of the White House, made of earth, listing like a ship going under. An upside-down American flag flutters in the wind.
      At first, I thought Williams’s sculpture was a little obvious. On second thought, I realized it was very ambiguous. What, exactly, is being pulled down here? The “master’s house” of the title—as in the bad, corrupt, bigoted America?
      Maybe. But the White House seems made of earth, not being swallowed by the earth. This double of the White House—the alternative, the reversal, the imagined negative image of the bad, corrupt, bigoted America—is what appears to be in the process of collapsing, like the limp flag on Serpas’s couch.
      This kind of ambiguity—intentional and unintentional—permeates the 2024 Whitney Biennial, which is called “Even Better Than the Real Thing” and curated by Chrissie Iles, a veteran Whitney curator who also co-organized the 2004 and 2006 biennials, and Meg Olni, a curator-at-large there. The artists here seem to both claim art as a form of resistance and feel all resistanced out. Which fits the moment where art’s core audience seems both transfixed by politics and exhausted, oscillating between urgency and futility.
      Works by K.R.M. Mooney. Photo by Ben Davis.
      Everything here feels slightly withdrawn, alluding to an experience held out of range. Big or small, the sculpture of the 2024 Whitney Biennial is a sculpture of fragments, ruins, and quirky bits of things that telegraph absences or aspire to a material state so specific that it is hard to describe or explain.
      As for the film, it is almost uniformly in a vein of historical lecture or healing ritual, ranging from flatly didactic to lightly lyrical, with a lot of hushed, halting narration. The painting is all abstract or abstract-adjacent.
      Installation view of Isaac Julien, Once Again… (Statues Never Die) (2022). Photo by Ben Davis.
      Notable trends include casting body parts (B. Ingrid Olson, Jes Fan, Julia Phillips) and the taking of rubbings (Dala Nasser, Dora Budor)—both techniques that are about expressing an intimate, direct experience of something past, bearing the trace of that experience but suggesting rather than representing it.
      Julia Phillips, Nourisher (2022). Photo by Ben Davis.
      A variety of works also make a point of referring to an imperceptible decay or unspectacular flux in their material state that will unfold over time, as if to suggest resistance to any direct and immediate expression (Eddie Rudolfo Aparicio, K.R.M. Mooney, Lotus L. Kang).
      Installation view of Lotus L. Kang, In Cascades (2023-24). Photo by Ben Davis.
      Unlike biennials past, there’s almost no photography here, which I find telling. Where it appears, it’s quite deliberately to negate visibility rather than affirm it, e.g. P. Staff’s ghostly self-portrait wallpaper with their face covered, or B. Ingrid Olson’s elliptical photo works, showing fragments of the artist’s own body, barely visible in the studio.
      The exception that proves the rule is Carmen Winant’s wall of photos capturing the daily work at abortion clinics. The sheer mass of documentation blurs into one collective portrait, as if to give the individuals the protection of the group. And even there, a point is made that no patients are depicted without their permission, and that in some cases scenes have been restaged to capture important moments without exposing the original subjects. Visibility is vulnerability.
      Carmen Winant, The Last Safe Abortion (2023). Photo by Ben Davis.
      What is legible as positive representation is almost all about the past, and almost all in the (blessedly few) film installations. These works feel as if they are meant to be educational, while also being too distended and indirect to be great teaching tools.
      Much of the film is about looking back, recalling some historical figure—usually from the pantheon of radical history (Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich on Suzanne Césaire, Isaac Julien on Alain Locke, Tourmaline on Marsha P. Johnson)—and creating a video essay that somehow feels like both homage and lament.
      Installation view of Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich, Too Bright to See (2023-24). Photo by Ben Davis
      It occurs to me that all this sounds a lot like I am also describing the last Whitney Biennial, from 2022.
      In spirit, the 2024 show fits the previous edition’s title, “Quiet as It’s Kept,” much better than “Even Better Than the Real Thing,” which rings too defiant and optimistic for this show. The cardinal themes are the same—opacity and invisibility, honoring radical elders, non-canonical abstraction, healing rituals—though the previous biennial had more going on, particularly with experimental media (the Berlin-based duo Holly Herndon and Matt Dryhurst’s A.I. experiment is the exception here, and it feels completely on its own, unsupported by any of the other work). The present biennial feels like it has drilled even deeper into one specific vibe of atonement and withdrawal, into “a rhetoric of difficulty, of holding space but also retreating from legibility,” as I said in 2022.  It feels as if art has curled itself up into a ball.
      Well, I am sure a lot of people feel like curling up into a ball right now.
      Beneath all the diverse modes of retreat, what is on this show’s mind is actually not at all ambiguous, and it’s pretty clear exactly when the atmosphere that is now all-pervasive kicked in. I looked back at my take on the 2017 Whitney Biennial, a show that was planned before the election of Donald Trump, but arrived after. My review—which came out before the thunderstorm of paralyzing controversy over the 2016 painting by Dana Schutz, Open Casket—was titled “The Whitney Nails a Balancing Act Biennial.” It reflected my sense that the show felt relevant to a turbulent moment but that it also contained art of an engaging variety, some groovy, some punk, some angry, some mournful, some healing, some troubling.
      Amid the disorienting crosscurrents of protests of Trump and protests of museums themselves as bastions of power in the years that followed, the Whitney Biennial—and a lot of biennials, for that matter—shifted into its present register, where “the reckoning” became the implicit main theme. (The fact that this is a sharp narrowing is reflected by the fact, which a lot of curators will complain about, that the cadre of artists in the 2024 Biennial is very familiar from other similar recent events.) As the historian Matt Karp wrote in his 2021 essay “History as End,” a project of perpetually pondering the sins of the past came to dominate at a time when any path toward a better future was frustrated in the mainstream liberal cultural imagination. The goal of culture became to signal awareness of the magnitude of the world’s brokenness, and to cope.
      Sharon Hayes, Ricerche: four (2024). Photo by Ben Davis.
      Sharon Hayes has a video here, Ricerche: four (2024), unspooling a group conversation with queer elders in Tennessee, where demagogic politics targeting gender nonconforming people are ascendant. There’s a moment that hit me, as they recall the loss of spaces of community—how there used to be many gay bars and how the options are now so limited. (Incidentally, the 2022 biennial also had a Nayland Blake work that was a tribute to a lost gay club.) Hayes’s installation is ringed by chairs where visitors can gather to watch this conversation, and in general the installation captures the sense of an art trying, through the force of its good intentions, to make up for lost real spaces of possibility.
      Eddie Rudolfo Aparicio, Paloma Blanca Deja Volar/White Dove Let Us Fly (2024). Photo by Ben Davis.
      But we all know that something so modest as an art show is not up to the enormous scale of the problems of a world that is degenerating fast. That disjunction makes any symbolic act feel “performative,” like empty theater. The art here is explicitly summoned to speak for the concerns of the marginalized—that’s what the curators say this biennial’s main mission is as you step into the galleries, in the show text. But the art itself seems suspicious of or indifferent to giving an art audience anything like easily consumable content to make it feel virtuous or righteous (indeed, one function of the interest in historic abstract painting by Black artists is to provide the occasion to remind us that the demand to represent Black struggle has been a burden).
      What results, overall, is a kind of “I can’t go on/I must go on” sensibility. The show characteristically avoids both outrage and joy, instead conveying a restrained and depressive air.
      Eddie Rudolfo Aparicio’s monolith made of amber is actually embedded with scraps of documents, which, we are informed, were “produced by white activists in Los Angeles and New York looking at the complex relationship between privilege and solidarity.” Unable to understand what this meant, I went to the audio guide, where the artist says he feels like we are stuck in history, “how time and history is very cyclical,” with today’s struggles of Central American migrants mirroring struggles from the past. He does say we should learn from the inspiring examples contained in the texts here. Yet in the galleries, it is impossible to make out what any of the texts are, as if the form of the art itself were pushing back against the thought, conceding we are stuck.
      Detail of Eddie Rudolfo Aparicio, Paloma Blanca Deja Volar/White Dove Let Us Fly (2024). Photo by Ben Davis.
      So far, the critical reaction to this show has been “meh.” That’s my first impression, too, though as with “Quiet as It’s Kept,” when I dig in, I find more to love (though I ultimately liked “Quiet as It’s Kept” more). To be clear, I don’t find the big themes of “Even Better Than the Real Thing” objectionable, on their own. But, also, there’s more going on in contemporary art than mournful post-conceptualism and personal ritual. I do think that it is a big mistake that biennials have given themselves over so completely to one vibe, which robs even good works in this vein of the contrast they need to connect.
      Takako Yamaguchi, Clasp (2022) in the Whitney Biennial. Photo by Ben Davis.
      Because of the lack of contrast, I guess the works that stand out for me most are the ones that cut a bit against those dominant tones. The hard-edged, stylish geometric landscape paintings by Takako Yamaguchi are very pleasurable, with a lot of crystalline visual beauty.
      Detail of Pippa Garner, Inventor’s Office (2021). Photo by Ben Davis.
      Down on the third floor, I appreciate the wall of fake product pitches by Pippa Garner, an elder artist here (b. 1942). These are the only really funny works in the show, and in their occasional lustiness and consistent wackiness, cut against the somber, ethical aura of a lot of the rest.
      Installation view of Ligia Lewis, A Plot, A Scandal (2023). Photo by Ben Davis.
      Of the film installations, Ligia Lewis’s work is burdened with a text I could not make sense of before watching, and can only barely make sense of after (“Utopian or mundane, how might scandal reveal what lies unwittingly close to our fantasies? Is it the demand for repair? Or the otherwise brutish desire for revenge?”) But its subject, the practice of 19th-century Dominican Vudú, is interesting, and the use of dancers to act out an aggressive, bawdy burlesque of European colonial authority has an in-your-face, unnerving edge.
      Diane Severin Nguyen, In Her Time (Iris’s Version) (2023-24). Photo by Ben Davis.
      I also appreciate Diane Severin Nguyen’s hour-long film about a young woman who goes to work in the Chinese film industry, chasing dreams of being discovered as a star via her role as a background player in an epic film about the Nanjing Massacre, one of the most brutal military crimes of the 20th century. You hear the woman, Iris, talk about her aspirations; see her dutifully studying the gruesome history in her tiny apartment; watch her playact choking herself with a cord, as if internalizing her allotted role.
      On a meta level, I think Nguyen’s film highlights the mix of perversity and melancholy of a culture built on revisiting, over and over, historical tragedy. But it also avoids the total cynicism that could come with that thought.
      Finally, the most-talked-about work of the show will certainly be Demian DinéYazhi’s neon text-art signs flickering phrases such as, “We must stop predicting apocalypse + fascist governments + fascist hierarchies!” They face the windows on the fifth floor, buzzing out towards the waterfront. Truth be told, I at first considered the actual texts a little grad-student-y, though I appreciate their sentiment. My colleague Annie Armstrong was the first to note that the flickering letters in the sign subtly read out the words “free palestine,” and it turns out that the message was basically smuggled into the biennial without the curators knowing.
      Demian DinéYazhi, we must stop imagining apocalypse/genocide + we must imagine liberation (2024) at the opening of the 2024 Biennial. (Photo by Sean Zanni/Patrick McMullan via Getty Images)
      Now I am obsessed with the idea that this smuggling operation is the art. It makes DinéYazhi’s work about the paradoxical invisibility and inescapability of this raging political issue, given the horrifying hourly news from Gaza and the robust repression of antiwar sentiment that has ripped through culture (my god, even Jonathan Glazer, the director who made an impeccable, freshly horrifying movie about the Holocaust, has had his name dragged through the mud for basically saying the equivalent of “not in my name” at the Oscars).
      Granted, a hidden message in neon is little to celebrate, given the fact that about a million people face starvation in Gaza right now. “We must stop predicting apocalypse…,” the sign says, even as it also alludes to a vast human disaster unfolding in real time. But I don’t take lightly the potential professional consequences of such gestures. They take courage.
      “Whitney Biennial 2024: Even Better Than the Real Thing” is on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, through August 11, 2024.
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