Exhibitions

A major retrospective is looking back at the last 30 years of Cecily Brown’s career.
“Themes and Variations,” on view at the Dallas Museum of Art, sees Brown’s artworks—which sit between figuration and abstraction and which draw on and subvert historic scenes—in their full spectrum. Works tease out the historic views of hunts and garden landscapes, or conjure wreckages and interiors. The British painter is known for engaging with art history and subverting tradition to portray empowered female protagonists.
“From her engagement with historical traditions of eroticism and voyeurism from which women have traditionally been subjects and not authors, to her insistence of her own agency through her form and practice, Brown’s work compels us to look closely not only at her layered compositions but also the world around us,“ noted co-curator of the Brown retrospective, Anna Katherine Brodbeck.
Her 2004 Girl on a Swing, for example, is in conversation with Rococo Fête galante masterpieces like Fragonard’s The Swing (1767), and The Splendid Table (2019-2020) is reminiscent of the still life painting that dominated 17th-century Flemish art, with its sense of overspilling bounty on the table; in Brown’s Splendid Table, this notion is transformed via her wild use of color into something more like a sacrificial altar. In several works, the artist draws on the male masters of art history, like Titian, Bosch, Peter Paul Rubens, Goya, and Bruegel, and spins them on their head.
Jan Davidsz de Heem, Still Life with Ham, Lobster and Fruit (ca. 1653). Courtesy of Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen.
The curator added that Brown “continues to challenge artistic conventions and engage audiences with her revisionist approach to the history of art.”
The exhibition includes work from Brown dating back to the mid-1990s. The artist, who graduated from Slade School of Art in 1993, was a contemporary of the YBAs but not officially a part of the group. Over 30 paintings and drawings—with two new works on paper and two large-scale oil monotypes among them receiving their public debut—have been brought together from international private collections and major institutions.
Cecily Brown, The Splendid Table (2019-20). © Cecily Brown, photo Genevieve Hanson.
This mid-career retrospective also comes at an exciting point in Brown’s career, two years after her painting Faeriefeller (2019) hit the headlines amid a scandal around art flipping. In general, market interest in her work has grown hugely since 2007 when her prices hit over $1 million. Her auction record was set in 2018 when the painting SUDDENLY LAST SUMMER (1999) sold at Sotheby’s New York for $6.8 million, well above the high estimate of $2.5 million.
“Although Brown’s work has reached notoriety during her three-decade-long career,” Brodbeck added, “her sensitivity to the social context from which her work emerges has been little explored.”
Cecily Brown: Themes and Variations closes at Dallas Museum of Art on February 9, 2025, and moves on to Pennsylvania’s Barnes Foundation where it will be on display from March 9 through to May 25, 2025. A hardback survey of Brown’s career has been published to accompany the show.
See more images of work in the exhibition below.
Cecily Brown, Untitled (1996). © Cecily Brown, photo Rob McKeever, courtesy Gagosian.
Cecily Brown, Picture This (2020). © Cecily Brown, photo Genevieve Hanson.
Cecily Brown, High Society (1998). © Cecily Brown, photo Rob McKeever, courtesy Gagosian. More

“Everything has been destroyed in Gaza—institutions, galleries, artifacts, historical sites, mosques, and churches,” Andre Ibrahim said in a phone interview with Artnet recently, speaking from the West Bank. “The most powerful response you can have to that is to create again.”
Ibrahim is one of the organizers of the recently announced Gaza Biennale. The initiative looks to bring together a group of artists, some working under fire amid the ongoing war in Gaza and some who have fled, supported by colleagues in the West Bank.
An installation view of work by Aya Juha in her studio in North Gaza. Photo courtesy of the Forbidden Museum
Ibrahim is affiliated with the Al Risan Art Museum, which is helping sponsor the exhibition. He explained that the Gaza Biennale initiative was originally born from conversations with Tasneem Shatat, an artist from Khan Younis in Gaza. Shatat contacted the institution in April 2024 and has since become its first resident artist.
“Tasneem said that there are all these artists in Gaza who are working,” Ibrahim recalled. “So, a network started to develop to connect artists in Gaza, which eventually led to the project. Calling it a ‘biennale’ during the early planning phase was the best way to describe what we were trying to undertake collectively. The term was debated for a bit and it sort of stuck. It has evolved from there into a real biennale with more than 50 artists.”
The organizers do not currently have any institutional partners to show the work inside Gaza. Ibrahim said participating artists are more interested in having their work reach a wider audience in Europe or the United States, and he’s leading the efforts to find the biennale a home, seeking institutional partners both at home and abroad. The initiative is raising $90,000 to fund the artists.
“It is a message to the art world that there are artists working under unbelievable circumstances, facing obstacles and the harshest conditions, and still creating work, talking about art, teaching art, and running workshops with kids,” Ibrahim said.
Aya Juha. Anas (2024). Photo courtesy of Forbidden Museum
The artists in the biennale come from all over Gaza, Ibrahim added, including from the particularly devastated region of North Gaza. “As horrible as everything is all over Gaza, North Gaza is a whole other level. These artists totally blow my mind.”
He expressed particular awe about the work of the artist Aya Juha. “She’s creating unbelievable work that’s about what happened to her and dedicated to her brother, who was martyred,” Ibrahim said. “She’s addressing issues of imprisonment, torture, and the brutality of what’s happening to the people of Gaza by telling the story of her brother through a series of paintings made in her bombed-out studio.” In fact, Juha’s partly destroyed workspace has become a gallery to exhibit her work to the people of North Gaza, Ibrahim explained.
Fatema Abu Owda. For the exhibition “The Red Feet.” (2024). Photo courtesy of the Forbidden Museum
Other participating artists such as Ahmed Muhanna are making work using very limited supplies, adapting out of necessity to the conditions in Gaza. Reached by Artnet through social media, Muhanna said he had been a specialist in art therapy for children before the war while maintaining his own artistic practice in his studio on the side.
“Since the war entered Gaza, everything was turned upside down from the feeling of fear and excessive anxiety,” he said. During the first three months of the conflict, Muhanna explained, he could not hold a pen or brush from the shock, but he has since returned to a studio overlooking the streets of Gaza.
“With the passage of time, at the beginning of 2024, I gathered my strength as if something inside me was telling me, ‘You are strong and you are an artist, you must gather yourself and send a message that you have something in this world,’” he said.
Alaa Al Shawa. From the exhibition “Fading Gestures.” (2024) Photo courtesy of the Forbidden Museum
Muhanna has created a series of works using aid boxes air-dropped or delivered into Gaza. “He started taking the boxes apart and using the pieces to tell the story of life where he is, using the box as part of the artwork,” Ibrahim explained. “He only had a few supplies, so he found charcoal from burnt sticks from a fire. If you look at the images, you think it’s someone in a studio making it, but he’s figuring out things around him to make the work.”
Ghanim Said Al-din, meanwhile, has found a way to make the separation of the Palestinian enclaves of the West Bank and Gaza part of his work. The artist conceptualized his artwork from his tent in Gaza. Notes and instructions for installation are fed to artists in the West Bank who collaborate in its creation by fabricating the work.
“To what extent his notes will be part of the exhibition remains to be seen, but they are quite beautiful images of his desk where he’s working and what he’s constructing,” Ibrahim said. “It’s a very interesting project which is his way of bringing politics into everyday life.”
Meanwhile, Malaka Abu Owda is creating work using a tablet computer in the town of Al-Mawasi in the Rafah region of Gaza. Ibrahim commended her for making digital work in a way that it is still “very textured.” Her mother, Fatema Abu Owda, is also an artist, though one who prefers to work with physical media and even creates her own colors for her vivid artworks.
Yasmeen Al Daya. Embrace (2024). Photo courtesy of the Forbidden Museum
“Fatema is an incredible woman and artist,” Ibrahim said. “She has been doing these beautiful workshops for kids for free. They are displaced in a tent. She also has very limited supplies. So she started making colors for her paintings, red maybe from some spice or something.”
Like Malaka, the artist Osama Naqqa is making black-and-white drawings digitally from his phone in the Khan Younis region of Gaza. “It’s unbelievable, the detail and the power he’s creating on his phone with his finger,” Ibrahim said.
Not all the artists participating in the Gaza Biennale are still in Gaza. Some have been able to leave and are now in Egypt, Europe, or elsewhere. One of these is Hala Eid Al-Naji, a young female artist now in Cairo.
People are seen participating in the interactive exhibit “Nazah’s Lexicon” from Palestinian artist Hala Eid Al-Naji, currently on display in Cairo and part of the planned Gaza Biennale. Photo courtesy of Hala Eid Al-Naji
Al-Naji has created a project called Nazeh’s Lexicon, a single large installation with multiple parts that the artist described to Artnet as an “immersive journey” showing the displacement of Palestinians from their homeland in Gaza. The installation is currently mounted as a solo show at Kodak Courtyard in Cairo. The work is inspired by a character named “Nazeh” created by her colleague Mohammed Alhaj, who is separately a participant in the Gaza Biennale.
“Although it is a solo exhibition, I consider it the culmination of a collective effort,” Al-Naji said. “Launching this work amidst an ongoing genocidal war was no easy task. The idea began as a modest gathering of displaced artists and architects from Gaza who had relocated to Egypt. It started with us recounting the painful narratives of displacement.”
As this group of artists talked, she noticed that the stories were filled with “rich linguistic expressions” that uniquely describe the situation in Gaza and the subsequent experience of exile. The installation “showcases a collection of terms, expressions, and colloquial words that capture the manifestations of daily life during displacement,” she said.
A person is seen viewing an art installation by Palestinian artist Hala Eid Al-Naji, currently on view in Cairo. It is part of the planned Gaza Biennale. Photo courtesy of Hala Eid Al-Naji
At the heart of Nazeh’s Lexicon is an interactive map of the Gaza Strip with stories “etched into its wooden surface.” The oral histories of Palestinians being passed on through storytelling often “feel inadequate.” As a consequence, she said, “a stronger, more respectful medium was needed—one that honors their pain and wounds.”
Displaced Palestinians from Gaza are invited to participate in the interactive installation and trace their own displacement journeys, she said.
“We are doing this to stop the war,” Ibrahim said. “It is in the hands of Western and Arab governments to stop this war, we all know that. Our message to them, to their institutions, is that we are over 50 artists telling the world that Palestine is still alive and Palestinians in Gaza are not victims but our guides to lead us out of this crisis.” More

A beloved piece of Irish history—both beautiful and scandalous—is back in the spotlight in Miami Beach this year, on view in “Harry Clarke and the Geneva Window” at the Wolfsonian FIU.
The work is a luminous stained glass window by Harry Clarke (1891–1931), commissioned by the Irish Free State in 1926 for the International Labor Court at the League of Nations building in Geneva.
The show at the Wolfsonian juxtaposes the jewel-like window with late 19th and early 20th-century Irish decorative artworks. It also delves into the controversy surrounding the piece, as well as Clarke’s life and career, which was tragically cut short by his premature death at the age of just 41.
Battling ill health from tuberculosis and juggling multiple projects, Clarke finally finished the Geneva Window in May 1930. By the following January, he was dead—and so too was the commission.
Harry Clarke, Geneva Window (1926–30). Collection of the Wolfsonian–Florida International University, Miami Beach, Florida, the Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection.
The Geneva Window is one of the artist’s greatest masterpieces, but the Irish government ultimately rejected the window due to its shocking content, including drunkenness, nudity, and—perhaps worst of all—Protestants.
“Ireland was incredibly conservative at this moment in time,” exhibition curator Lea Nickless told me, admitting that Clarke probably should have known that the work would not be well received.
The nation had just won its independence from Great Britain five years prior, in 1921. Clarke, for his part, was greatly influenced by the turbulent moment at which he came of age, characterized by nationalism and the Celtic Revival, which sought to craft a modern Irish identity informed by its ancient history and the Gaelic language.
Harry Clarke, The Demi-Gods by James Stephens and Juno and the Paycock by Sean O’Casey from Harry Clarke Geneva Window (1926–30). Collection of the Wolfsonian–Florida International University, Miami Beach, Florida, the Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection.
The Geneva Window was meant to be a reflection of Irish culture. But in the contract for the commission, the artist remained vague about his vision for the window, saying only that he would highlight the modern Irish writer with “opportunities for phantasy.”
“At that moment in time, Irish literature was really at the apex of Irish cultural output,” Nickless said, noting that the Irish Literary Revival was closely tied to the country’s nationalist movement.
Harry Clarke, The Wayfarer by Patrick (Pádraig) Pearse and The Story Brought by Brigit by Lady Gregory from Harry Clarke Geneva Window (1926–30). Collection of the Wolfsonian–Florida International University, Miami Beach, Florida, the Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection.
One of the Geneva Window panes honors Patrick Pearse, a poet and revolutionary who was one of the leaders of the Easter Rising in 1916. The rebellion failed, and Clarke even lost his illustrations for The Rime of the Ancient Mariner in a fire that broke out during the uprising. He commemorated the conflict in the Geneva Window by including a poem Pearse wrote the night before his execution by the British.
But of the 15 writers Clarke chose to highlight in the commission—George Bernard Shaw, James Stephens, Sean O’Casey, Liam O’Flaherty, George William “Æ” Russell, Seumas O’Kelly, James Joyce, George Fitzmaurice, Padraic Colum, Lennox Robinson, William Butler Yeats, Seamus O’Sullivan, John Millington Synge, Lady Gregory, and Pearse—seven were Protestant. That was a problem, considering the nascent country’s staunch Catholicism.
Harry Clarke, The Playboy of the Western World by John Millington Synge and The Others by Seumas O’Sullivan from Harry Clarke Geneva Window (1926–30). Collection of the Wolfsonian–Florida International University, Miami Beach, Florida, the Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection.
And some of the window panes were considered too provocative, like the depiction of the titular character from Synge’s popular 1907 play Playboy of the Western World, with tight breeches highlighting his manhood in an erotic manner. In the same pane, another male character from a Seumas O’Sullivan poem seems to place a woman’s hand over his crotch. Several of the featured literary scenes prominently included alcohol consumption, which was not the image of Ireland that its leaders wished to present to the world.
And then there was the pane taken from the 1926 novel Mr. Gilhooley, where a woman clad in a gauzy gown revealing her naked bosom dances for a middle-aged man. The author, O’Flaherty, had actually had work banned under Irish law, as had Joyce, for immorality.
Harry Clarke, Mr. Gilhooley by Liam O’Flaherty from Harry Clarke Geneva Window (1926–30). Collection of the Wolfsonian–Florida International University, Miami Beach, Florida, the Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection.
After the window’s completion, a government official warned Clarke that showcasing Protestants as Irish representatives “would give grave offence to many of our people.” The window was “beautiful,” but the other elements of the work deemed problematic “would give rise to misunderstanding and much adverse comment.”
In the end, the risk of public controversy was just too great, and Ireland never gifted the Geneva Window to the League of Nations. Clarke’s widow, the artist Margaret Clarke (1881–1961), bought the painting back from the government in 1932.
Though Clarke may not be a household name in the U.S., he is a key figure in Irish art history.
Harry Clarke, The Weaver’s Grave by Seumas O’Kelly from Harry Clarke Geneva Window (1926–30). Collection of the Wolfsonian–Florida International University, Miami Beach, Florida, the Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection.
“In Ireland, Harry Clarke is considered the greatest artist of the 20th century—and forget stained glass, that’s across the board,” Nickless said. “He is incredibly venerated.”
Born on St. Patrick’s Day, Clarke trained in stained glass from the age of 14, apprenticing at his father’s church decorating firm in Dublin. He actually first achieved renown as an illustrator, creating drawings for widely disseminated works such as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Faust. (One of those drawings, featuring a self portrait of the artist with Mephistopheles, is part of the Wolfsonian show.)
But when Clarke began focusing on glass, he was doing things with the medium that no one else could do, achieving painterly effects with rich color and fine details. He used acid etching on “flashed” glass that is clear on one side and layered on on the other. Clarke would dip the glass in wax, and then scrape parts of the wax away before immersing the glass in hydrofluoric acid, creating subtle gradations in color where the wax had been removed.
Harry Clarke, A Cradle Song by Padraic Colum from Harry Clarke Geneva Window (1926–30). Collection of the Wolfsonian–Florida International University, Miami Beach, Florida, the Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection.
“He was known to go through the process sometimes as many as six times
for each piece,” Nickless said. “Working with this acid bath, he was right on top of these vats of acid, breathing that in for years on end. It definitely contributed to his ill health and to his tuberculosis and his lung problems.” (Clarke checked in to a Swiss sanatorium for treatment in 1929 and again in 1930, dying on his journey home.)
The Geneva Window is something of his magnum opus. The majority of Clarke’s other stained glass works were done for the Catholic church. Though it was ultimately censored, the Geneva Window gave him a unique artistic freedom.
“This was the true Harry Clarke expressing himself,” Nickless said. “And this was an opportunity to create a modern identity for Ireland.
So that’s what he was so excited about.… and just the way he’s done it is not like any other stained glass artist that you see.”
Harry Clarke, The Dreamers by Lennox Robinson and The Countess Cathleen by W.B. Yeats from Harry Clarke Geneva Window (1926–30). Collection of the Wolfsonian–Florida International University, Miami Beach, Florida, the Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection.
Though it might seem strange that one of Ireland’s most important 20th-century treasures landed in Florida, Margaret Clarke was so upset by the government’s censorship of the work that she vowed it would never go to an Irish museum.
When Wolfsonian founder Mitchell “Micky” Wolfson Jr. was amassing his collection, which focuses on the years 1850 to 1950, he worked closely with the Fine Art Society, a gallery in London. The dealer helped arrange a loan of the window for an exhibition Wolfson held in Miami in 1982.
Then, after a 1988 show of the artist’s work at the gallery, Clarke’s sons agreed to sell Wolfson the work. (The price was in excess of £100,000 [$178,000], according to a London Times article at the time.)
For 25 years, the Geneva Window was the star of the show at the Wolfsonian, which opened in 1995. It became part of Florida International University when Wolfson  donated its collection and Miami Beach building to the state of Florida. But when the museum deinstalled its permanent collection galleries for a renovation project in 2020, the window went into storage.
Harry Clarke, St. Joan by George Bernard Shaw from Harry Clarke Geneva Window (1926–30). Collection of the Wolfsonian–Florida International University, Miami Beach, Florida, the Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection.
“We would get the most heartbreaking emails and calls from Irish people who said ‘we travelled all the way to Miami to see the Harry Clarke window, but it had been taken down,’” Nickless said. “We realized we had to put it back up!”
The museum intends to keep the current exhibition on view indefinitely. But when the time comes to rotate the collection’s display, the Geneva Window won’t be going anywhere.
“On the surface, it is a spectacularly luminous, incredible piece just to look at. It’s beautiful,” Nickless said. “But then it has all of these other stories. The literary stories of each of these 15 writers, but also the narrative of Irish resilience and Ireland’s striving to become its own independent nation.
So it’s one of those complicated works to really figure out and understand. That’s what makes it even more fascinating.” More

Most people think of mobiles as simple children’s toys designed to distract babies and help them fall asleep. Yet the origin of this soothing gewgaw actually marked an important turning point in the history of sculpture.
Alexander Calder first began crafting mobiles in the early 1930s, not as a commercial product to fill the shelves of toy shops, but as a means of turning sculpture from a static medium into a kinetic one, capable of defying the forces of gravity and interacting with the physical space they inhabit. (The name “mobile” doesn’t come from Calder but rather from conceptual artist Marcel Duchamp, who identified movement as their primary characteristic.)
A visionary, Calder went on to inspire scores of rebellious young sculptors eager to blow new life into this millennia-old artform. Among these was Thaddeus Mosley. The Seattle Art Museum (SAM) is exploring the connection between these two artists and their approaches to playing with movement, weight, and time in an exhibition titled “Following Space: Thaddeus Mosley & Alexander Calder,” now on view.
Alexander Calder, Dispersed Objects with Brass Gong (1948). Photo courtesy of Calder Foundation, New York / Art Resource, New York © 2024 Calder Foundation, New York / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
Calder and Mosley enjoyed radically different upbringings. Both were born in Pennsylvania, the former in 1898 and the latter a quarter century later, in 1926. Calder was the son of artists, a sculptor and a painter, while Mosley’s parents worked as a miner and a seamstress. Both artists traveled extensively in their youth, Calder with his parents and Mosley while serving in the U.S. Navy.
Struggling to be taken seriously as a sculptor, Calder was inspired by circus acrobats and how they contorted their bodies to maintain balance on trapezes and tightropes. “The idea of detached bodies floating in space seems to me the ideal source of form,” he later said of his mobiles, whose basic constructions resemble acrobatic performances.
Calder working on the pierced disc of Bougainvillier (1947) in his Roxbury studio, 1947. Photo: Herbert Matter. Photo courtesy of Calder Foundation, New York / Art Resource, New York © 2024 Calder Foundation, New York / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
Mosley took a different path. Turning to sculpture in the 1950s after working as a freelance journalist and Postal Service Employee, he was inspired by Calder. His fascination began after seeing one of Calder’s large-scale outdoor mobiles, 6 Dots Over a Mountain (1956), on a collector’s lawn.
Yet while their interests overlapped, their execution took them down separate paths. “Both artists stress a heightened awareness of forms in space and instill an anticipation of change,” Catharina Manchanda, a curator of modern and contemporary Art at the Seattle Art Museum, told Artnet. “Calder does this with his gently moving mobiles, Mosley by balancing heavy volumes that seem to defy gravity.”
In comparing the work of these two artists, “Following Space” functions as a tour of 20th and 21st century art developments, taking visitors from the foundation of modern sculpture as shaped by Calder to more contemporary 3-D work as exemplified by Mosley, who fuses Calder’s influence with other sources of inspiration, including traditional African art.

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“My work, like Calder’s, has a sense of balance and imbalance,” Mosley explains in a video SAM put out along with the show. “People always say, ‘gee, it looks like they should fall over’… that’s my idea of ‘weight in space.’”
That particular concept is well-illustrated by the work that opens the show, Mosley’s Following Space (2016), one of 17 of his sculptures on display. Constructed over the course of two decades, its graceful form is reminiscent of a wave or a serpent, accentuated at SAM by the gallery’s curved wall
It finds its complement in Calder’s White Panel (1936). Considering that both these sculptures are meant to be seen from multiple vantage points, the museum has installed them in such a way that visitors will be able to view them from different floors.
Photo: Natali Wiseman.
“My hope,” Manchanda said, “is that visitors will see each of the artists in a fresh light, animated by the aesthetic contrasts: Calder’s works in this exhibition, selected in collaboration with Mosley, move delicately, whereas Mosley’s monumental sculptures rise from the ground and reach into space.”
Or, as Mosley himself says in SAM’s video, the exhibition promises to give its viewer “the idea of levitation, in two different ways.” More

 In 1919, while at school in the Spanish city of Figueres, a 15-year-old Salvador Dalí volunteered to write a series of articles for the school’s magazine, Studium. Titled “The Great Masters of Painting,” the assignment allowed Dalí to study and pay tribute to the artists he most admired, including the 17th-century Spanish court painter Diego Velázquez, whose “color distribution and placement” he saw as a precursor to Impressionism and, by extension, Surrealism.
Nowadays, most people view Dalí’s work as sui generis: a dazzling Surrealist concoction of dreamlike imagery that has little to do with the waking world, much less with the artists who came before him. But as the anecdote above indicates, Dalí was anything but disconnected from art historical tradition. Not only do his paintings draw on religious and historical imagery, but he also considered himself deeply indebted to scores of European artists, from Velázquez to Albrecht Dürer.
Salvador Dalí, Old Age, Adolescence, Infancy (The Three Ages) (1940). Courtesy: The Dalí Museum, St. Petersburg/Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
That indebtedness is on full display at “Dalí: Disruption and Devotion,” an exhibition at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts (MFA), which places Dalí’s work side by side with that of his favorite classical painters from Spain, Italy, and the Low Countries of Belgium and the Netherlands, all while highlighting how the ever-eccentric Surrealist had to learn the rules of traditional painting before he could effectively break them.
“Even as a teenager, Dalí looked to great artists of the past for guidance and inspiration,” Julia Welch, the MFA’s assistant curator of paintings, art of Europe, said in an interview. “He frequently referred to a series of art books that he had as a child, which introduced him to many great artists of the past, and for Studium [he] wrote about Velázquez, Dürer, Goya, Leonardo and Michelangelo.”
“Dalí: Disruption and Devotion” exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Photo: Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
Although Dalí was drawn to art from many countries and cultures, he gravitated most towards painters from his native Spain. “Many major Spanish artists held particular significance to him,” notes Welch, “having spent many hours roaming the galleries at the Prado Museum while a young art student in Madrid. Velázquez, above all, would remain one of his greatest and lasting influences throughout his long career.”
According to Welch, Dalí was drawn to the “power and strength that Velázquez conveyed through his portraiture.” He attempted to channel Velázquez’s “vigor and energy” into Velázquez Painting the Infanta Marguerita with the Lights and Shadows of His Own Glory (1958), which shows the shadow of the Spanish master as he labors over a portrait of the future Holy Roman Empress.
Left, Salvador Dalí, Velázquez Painting the Infanta Marguerita with the Lights and Shadows of His Own Glory (1958), and, right, attributed to Juan Bautista del Mazo, Infanta Maria Theresa (previously attributed to Velázquez). Photo: Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
Velázquez Painting the Infanta Marguerita is displayed next to this very portrait, produced in Velázquez’s workshop and currently attributed to one of his students, Juan Bautista del Mazo.
Leonardo da Vinci also made a strong impression on Dalí. Just look at his 1935 painting Paranonia, whose small figures and horses in the background were, Welch points out, “directly inspired by Da Vinci’s sketches. Meanwhile, “the double image of a woman’s face produced within those small figures”—a hallmark of Dalí’s oeuvre—“is pulled directly from Da Vinci’s The Woman with Disheveled Hair [1506–1508].”
All in all, “Dalí: Disruption and Devotion” juxtaposes close to 30 of Dalí’s paintings and prints (loaned from the Dalí Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida) with European paintings from the MFA’s own collections, including portraits, religious and historical scenes, and still lifes by the likes of El Greco, Orazio Gentileschi, and, of course, Velázquez.
Salvador Dalí, The Ecumenical Council (1960). Photo: Salvador Dalí, Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí, Artists Rights Society/Doug Sperling and David Deranian, 2021/Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
Some of these juxtapositions are surprising, even to art historians. “One of the earliest works by Dalí in the show, Girl’s Back from 1926, is most often described in literature in connection with the Dutch predecessors, like Vermeer,” says Welch. “But we found a really interesting juxtaposition with an early portrait by Velázquez in the MFA’s collection of Luis do Góngora from 1622. In both works, there is a similar attention to the modeling of forms, the textures of hair and skin, and the dramatic use of lighting effects against dark backgrounds.”
Those visiting the exhibition may just walk away with a new conception of the artist’s work and Surrealism as a whole. Even though many of his works feature what Welch calls “bizarre, often fantastical or indecipherable imagery,” they will find, it is deeply rooted in traditions which the Spaniard held in the deepest esteem.
“Dalí: Disruption and Devotion” is on view at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, 465 Huntington Ave, through December 1, 2024. More

A major retrospective of Art Deco darling Tamara de Lempicka has opened at the De Young Museum in San Francisco, ranging from some of her most celebrated paintings to lesser-known drawings that are only now getting their deserved attention.
Furio Rinaldi, who co-curated the show with Gioia Mori, said in an emailed interview that the exhibition has been “very popular,” even if many people from the audience “admittedly never heard Lempicka’s name before.”
“They respond passionately to her iconic Art Deco portraits and to the artist’s resilient life journey,” Rinaldi said. “Those from the audience who are more ‘in the know’ have expressed their particular appreciation in discovering the artist’s drawings—her draftsmanship is exquisite—and some lesser-known and rarely seen paintings, like her early Cubist still lifes.”
The show marks the first major retrospective of the artist’s work in the United States, more than four decades after her death. It unites over 120 paintings as well as other Art Deco sculptures and objects from the museum’s collection that help put her practice into historical context.
Tamara de Lempicka. Kizette on the Balcony (1927). Photo courtesy of Jacqueline Hyde/Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco
Born in Warsaw, Poland, in 1898, Lempicka survived the Russian Revolution and relocated to Paris, where her bold, stylized portraits of society figures and her opulent lifestyle gained her fame and clientele amid the cultural elite of the 1920s and 1930s.
“In her time, Lempicka received critical praise at the Parisian salons and international exhibitions: as early as 1927 her works were acquired by museums, including the Musée d’art de Nantes and the future Pompidou,” Rinaldi said.
But the painter’s legacy was nearly lost to obscurity. Despite success in Paris, the Jewish artist was forced to flee at the outbreak of World War II and fell victim to changing art trends after the war. Her work was only rediscovered again in the 1970s, following a resurgence of interest in Art Deco. Even then, her legacy had to compete with those of famous male artists.
Tamara de Lempicka. The Communicant (1929). Photo courtesy Arnaud Loubry/Centre Pompidou/Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco
In recent years, the creative world has made efforts to give Lempicka the limelight and capitalize on the glamor of her character, including a short-lived Broadway show starring Eden Espinosa as Lempicka. Sotheby’s also presented a selling exhibition of her work earlier this year.
“This exhibition aims to reassess her defining role within the development of Art Deco and, more broadly, to present her as a highly original artist who contributed to the international modernist movement—specifically to its classical declination in the ‘rappel a’ l’ordre,’ or ‘return to order,’” Rinaldi said.
Which of the works in the De Young exhibition were particularly pivotal in the artist’s career? Rinaldi pointed to Kizette at the Balcony (1927), La belle Rafaëla (1927), and Young Woman in Green (1931).
Tamara de Lempicka, Young Woman in Green (1927–30). Centre Pompidou, Paris, purchase, 1932, inv. JP557P. © 2023 Tamara de Lempicka Estate, LLC / ADAGP, Paris / ARS, NY.
In Kizette, the artist painted her daughter Marie-Christine in what Rinaldi called a “symphony of metallic grays.” It was among the first of her works that received widespread critical praise when it was shown at the Salon d’Automne of 1927. “It can be seen as an allegory of pubescence, as the young Kizette occupies, quite physically, a liminal space between the world of childhood and the modern metropolitan world of adulthood, seen behind the rails,” Rinaldi said.
As for the painting of Rafaela, a model who served as a muse for the artist for several of her most famous paintings, Rinaldi called it “quite phenomenal” for how she depicted the female nude with a feminine perspective rather than with a heterosexual male gaze.
Tamara de Lempicka. Male Nude (ca. 1924). Photo courtesy of Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco
“What she brings to this historical cannon is an entirely modern feminine perspective that celebrates womanhood and women’s sexuality,” Rinaldi argued. “The model in the painting is completely self-absorbed in her own pleasure.”
But the key Lempicka painting in the show is likely her work Young Woman In Green, which Rinaldi called an “emblematic image” of Art Deco. That work, he said, “encapsulates the optimism” and the “feminine freedom” of the interwar period.
Installation view showing a sculpture and paintings by Tamara de Lempicka at the de Young Museum. Photo courtesy of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco
Within this show’s attempt to show the complexity of her practice, a fourth work stands out to Rinaldi for providing special insight: Woman with a Green Glove (1928). An unfinished work, it highlights her layered design process.
The painting depicts an androgynous and unidentified woman with a boyish haircut who is wearing a “hyperfeminine” white dress that emphasizes her “powerful sensuality,” in Rinaldi’s words.
A photograph of the artist Tamara de Lempicka at the entrance to an exhibit of her work at the de Young Museum in San Francisco. Photo courtesy of Randy Dodson/Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco
It was painted with a polished finish on a large wood panel, perhaps inspired by the artist’s knowledge of religious icons. It also has elements that reprise the 16th-century Italian Mannerist portraiture by the likes of Bronzino and Pontormo.
“In the research leading to the exhibition, I was particularly impressed to learn how the knowledge and appreciation of the Old Masters informed Lempicka’s figural vocabulary and infused her pictorial language with great sophistication,” Rinaldi said. “Her use of visual sources from the past is quite clever and extremely creative, for example in her adoption of details from a 16th-century Madonna by Parmigianino for her Sapphic painting Printemps (Spring).”
“Tamara de Lempicka” is currently on view at the de Young Museum, 50 Hagiwara Tea Garden Drive, San Francisco, through February 9, 2025.  More

Opened on November 16, “The Art of French Wallpaper Design” has filled the Rhode Island School of Design Museum with over 100 “exceptionally rare” samples of French wallpaper designs created in the 18th and 19th centuries.
The exhibition promises to explore the “intricacy and innovative quality of French wallpapers.”  A key theme in the show is the innovations that were possible in wallpaper design thanks to the development of woodblock printing techniques in France. The use of intricately carved blocks and hand-finished details gained French craftspeople an international reputation for the vibrancy and texture of their work, and these methods continued to be used by designers in Western Europe long after the dawn of mechanized printers.
The French decorative paper—or papier dominoté—industry produced book covers, decorative stationary, and furniture lining during the 1700s, growing into a bustling wallpaper industry that saw French designs coveted and exported around the world. The exhibition includes preliminary drawings and drafts, borders, and individual fragments in addition to larger samples. All manner of subject matter, too, is showcased in the exhibition, from abstract and floral patterns to classical imagery and extravagant narrative scenes.
Bon Wallpaper Design, 1799. Image courtesy of RISD Museum, Rhode Island.
The exhibition is made up of works from the 500-object collection of Charles and Frances Wilson Huard, which has been in the care of the RISD Museum since it was purchased by the institution in 1934. The Huards—Charles a respected French illustrator and Frances an American author and translator—who married in 1905, assembled their wallpaper collection in the 1920s and 30s. They built up their collection with purchases from antique dealers as well as rescuing wallpaper from abandoned homes and working directly with designers.
Given the ephemeral nature of wallpaper, and the likelihood of it being damaged, covered, or simply discarded, the Huard Collection is remarkable for its quality as well as its quantity of exceptional samples. The fragility of paper artifacts like those in the Huard Collection mean that “The Art of French Wallpaper Design” is a rare opportunity for the public to see so many high quality pieces.
French, Flocked Wallpaper Border, 1820 – 1830. Image courtesy of RISD Museum, Rhode Island.
Emily Banas, the Associate Curator of Decorative Arts and Design at the museum and the curator of “The Art of French Wallpaper Design” has said she’s “thrilled to have the opportunity to re-introduce this extraordinary collection, which has not been presented in depth for many years, to a broad audience”.
RISD Museum have also partnered with Adelphi Paper Hangings, based in Sharon Springs, New York, on a special project for the exhibition. Adelphi, an artisanal wallpaper producer with a specialty in historic wallpaper designs founded in 1999, have been commissioned to recreate one of the wallpapers in the exhibition using the traditional woodblock printing method used by the wallpaper’s original manufacturer in the 18th century.
Wallpaper Border, The Adventures of Don Quixote; Panel from Don Quixote series; The Adventures of Don Quixote, ca. 1830. Image courtesy of RISD Museum, Rhode Island.
The exhibition is accompanied by a digital publication which includes essays exploring the history of the Huard Collection and wallpaper design in the context of printmaking, as well the preservation processes involved in working with objects of this nature. RISD Museum have also created two videos, one a walkthrough of samples in the Huard collection, and the other a look at Adelphi’s intricate production process to create their commissioned design.
Banas has said she is “certain the material will excite our visitors and challenge notions of what “historic” design looks like. From its foundations in drawing and printing, to its dynamic forms and creative uses that enlivened and personalized spaces, there is so much more to wallpaper than meets the eye. I look forward to sharing the many discoveries this exhibition holds.”
Wallpaper Border, ca. 1820. Image courtesy of RISD Museum, Rhode Island.
Banas told Artnet News exclusively: “Many people have preconceived ideas about wallpaper, from what it looks like to how it’s used. Colorful floral patterns are often the touchstone, but historical wallpapers offered so much more. The Art of French Wallpaper Design captures the diversity of inspirations and forms that emerged in wallpapers in France from the late 18th to mid 19th century. Produced using the technique of woodblock printing, these wallpapers are highly sophisticated in composition, scale, and color and reflect an often unacknowledged history of that discipline. I think visitors will be amazed by how fresh and contemporary these designs are, but also the unique ways in which people arranged them in their spaces. I’m excited to see the ways in which these wallpapers will surprise and inspire.”
“The Art of French Wallpaper Design” is on display at RISD Museum until May 11 2025. More