Exhibitions

In Gwen John’s hazily beautiful La Chambre sur la Cour (1907-8) we see a solitary, contemplative woman seated in a small room, a cat curled on a wicker chair opposite her. Interior scenes were all the vogue at the time, with French artists like Édouard Vuillard and Pierre Bonnard among the leading practitioners. But John did something wholly unique with the genre, making it about a woman’s experience and needs rather than a depiction of the domesticity in which contemporary society would like to see her confined.
John was a woman who consistently refused to conform to the norms expected of her. Brave and bohemian, she moved between London and Paris where she immersed herself in the art and thinking of her time.  Yet because of her sex and later conversion to Catholicism, her subject matter has been used to define her as a timid, insular woman, too pious or afraid to engage with the world around her.
“It’s quite a seductive image, the archetypal artist in a garret,” says art historian Alicia Foster, author of a new biography of John and curator of an accompanying exhibition at the Pallant House Gallery in Chichester, England, which both aim to challenge the myths that have built up around her.  However, as Foster laughingly points out, “if you want to be a recluse, there are better places to go than London in the 1890s or Paris in 1904.”
Gwen John, La Chambre Sur la Cour (c.1907–08), oil on canvas. Photo: © Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.
Spending most of her early life in Pembrokeshire, Wales, John followed her celebrated brother Augustus to London to study at the Slade School of Art in 1895. A lack of funds meant that she had to eke out her existence in a series of cheaply rented rooms, but she relished her newfound independence, embracing life as one of the “New Women” who were then challenging societal norms. She excelled at the Slade, winning two prizes, and in 1898 she made her first sojourn to Paris. While there, she studied under American painter James Abbott Whistler, and reveled in the heady sense of freedom the city gave her.
In the years immediately afterwards, John painted her first great works, both self-portraits (neither unfortunately could be lent for the Pallant House show). In the first, painted around 1899, John stands with her hand on her hip, haughtily meeting the viewer’s gaze, an uncompromising take on the Grand Manner style. The second, painted around 1902, sees her portraying herself with the intensity of an Ibsen heroine. “The fact that she was so assured and playing with these ideas of who she was so early on is fascinating,” Foster says. “I think they’re statements of presence, and intent.”
That intent was always to be a great artist, and to that end John knew she had to move to Paris, settling there in 1904. It was here that she began to focus on the interiors with which she would become so closely associated. While her male peers painted rooms as part of the domestic sphere, for John they were always “a woman’s space for work and thought,” Foster says.
Gwen John, A Corner of the Artist’s Room in Paris (c.1907–09), oil on canvas. Photo: © Sheffield Museums Trust.
Money was as always short, and to make ends meet John worked as an artist’s model, a career choice which would have been unthinkable in London, and one which—even in Paris—took significant courage. Yet John ended up working for the most famous sculptor of the era, Rodin, becoming not only a favored model, but also his lover.
The massive power differential has often seen John cast as a victim when the affair ended, but Foster doesn’t think she ever yearned for a conventional domestic set up. “A relationship with someone magnificent at one remove was what she wanted,” she says. “And it’s no coincidence I think that when the relationship with Rodin ended, there was God.”
John converted to Catholicism in 1913, but rather than signaling an end to her career, it was the spur for another creative leap. In France, there was a move to establish a Modern art movement that was also religious, one in which the techniques and methods were as important as the subject matter. Taking her cue from Cézanne, “she extends her painterly practice in a quite risky manner. She pares down her palette and paints in blocks, leaving brushes of paint that are visible,” Foster explains. The results can be seen in the cool serenity of a work such as The Nun (c. 1915–21).
Gwen John, Autoportrait à la Lettre, (Self-portrait with a letter) (c.1907–09), pencil and watercolour. Photo: © Musée Rodin
The patronage of the wealthy American John Quinn had already resulted in John’s work being shown in the 1913 Armory Show in New York, and following World War I, her simple yet radiant style was perfectly in tune with the times. Works such as the “Convalescent” series, which Foster believes alludes to the post-war recovery of France, led to significant success in the Paris salons.
Yet in 1925 she abruptly stopped exhibiting. For someone so sure of their talent it seems an inexplicable decision, but it was perhaps a fit of pique at having been nominated as a Salon Associate only to be disqualified later when it was discovered that she wasn’t French.
Despite that disappointment, the following year John had a solo show at the New Chenil Galleries in London. It was a great success, yet it was here that the myths around her began. The art historian and curator Mary Chamot described her as an “elusive personality” who has to be “besought for years before she will consent to show anything.” It was a somewhat mystifying comment given her success in America and France, yet the idea persisted. When her work appeared in a 1952 Tate exhibition, a catalog entry described her as “by nature a recluse, devoid of ambition.”
Gwen John, Young Woman Holding a Black Cat (c.1920–25), oil on canvas. Photo: © Tate: Purchased 1946.
Whether playing into misogynistic myths, or a canny attempt to manipulate the art market, the idea of John as reclusive and unambitious simply doesn’t hold water. “For a woman to have built such a sustained career at that time is very rare, it’s an enormous achievement,” Foster says. John herself was always aware of the value of her work.  In 1910, she wrote to her friend Ursula Tyrwhitt: “I cannot imagine why my work will have some value in the world – and yet I know it will.”
Visitors to the Pallant House show are likely to concur. “The work has a radiance to it that is quite shocking when you see it face to face, it can’t be reproduced,” Foster says. And how should we now think of John herself? “Intensely brave, self-assured to the point of ruthless, driven, and profoundly gifted,” she concludes.
 
“Gwen John: Art and Life in London and Paris,” Pallant House Gallery, 8-9 North Pallant, Chichester, U.K., through October 8, 2023.
Gwen John: Art and Life in London and Paris by Alicia Foster is published by Thames & Hudson. It will be released in the U.S. on July 25.
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The major shifts that took shape in the 1960s—from the civil rights movement and rock and roll to the rise of mass consumerism and the sexual revolution—still echo in contemporary society and throughout the art world. A new show at France’s Pinault Collection explores not just the era’s creative upheaval, but what it represents to us today.
“Forever Sixties: The Spirit of the Sixties in the Pinault Collection,” which marks the third edition of the annual arts and culture Exporama in Rennes, explores the decade’s resounding shifts in art history and beyond through 80 emblematic artworks—many of which have never been on public display. “What did the 1960s represent?” their release reads, citing “tension between conservatism and democratization, dominant culture and alternative countercultures, commercial conformism and dreams of escape.”
The 13-room show spans paintings, photos, and sculptures by names including Barbara Kruger, Martial Raysse, Richard Prince, Sturtevant, and Richard Avedon. Some artists, like Michelangelo Pistoletto, are still actively at work today.
An entire room has been dedicated to an Edward Kienholz installation, while another has been filled with a series of culturally significant album covers, accompanied by a soundtrack of 100 songs selected by French singer Etienne Daho.
The exhibition further coincides with another show at the Pinault Collection on the London-based, Turner Prize-winning contemporary artist Jeremy Deller. His three-venue presentation demonstrates parallel fascinations with contemporary politics, attitudes, and pop culture—against which “Forever Sixties” offers particular historic context.
See more images from the show below.
Duane Hanson, Housepainter I (1984–88). Collection Pinault © Adagp, Paris, 2023.
Richard Prince, Untitled (Fashion) (1982–84). Collection Pinault. © Richard Prince.
Niki de Saint Phalle, Nana noire (1965). Collection Pinault © Niki Charitable Art Foundation / Adagp, Paris, 2023.
Kiki Kogelnik, Outer Space (1964). Collection Pinault. © Kiki Kogelnik.
Martial Raysse, Bien sûr le petit bateau (1963). Collection Pinault. © Adagp, Paris, 2023
Martial Raysse, Belle des nuages (1965). Collection Pinault. © Adagp, Paris, 2023.
Tim Noble and Sue Webster, Forever (2001). Collection Pinault. © Adagp, Paris, 2023
“Forever Sixties: The Spirit of the Sixties in the Pinault Collection” is on view at the Pinault Collection, 2 Rue de Viarmes, 75001 Paris, France, through September 10.
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“Me saying hi to you is me welcoming you into the space and saying I see you, I see you,” said Mark Bradford to those gathered at the opening of his new exhibition “You Don’t Have to Tell Me Twice” at Hauser & Wirth’s 22nd Street gallery (on view through July 28). Bradford’s warmth hearkens back to his early days as a hairstylist, when he’d wave to every new customer to walk through the door. 
Expressive and down to earth, the 61-year-old Bradford is known for such genuine moments of connection, even as his work has become canonical. In 2017, he represented the United States at the Venice Biennale, and in 2018, his painting Helter Skelter set a world record for the highest purchase price ever paid for a single work by a living African American artist, when it sold at auction for $12 million with fees. Now, the new “landscapes” unveiled at Hauser & Wirth underscore Bradford’s ongoing sense of experimentation, often offering a sense of revelation.
Installation view, “Mark Bradford. You Don’t Have to Tell Me Twice”; Hauser & Wirth New York 22nd Street, 13 April – 28 July 2023 © Mark Bradford; Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth; Photo: Thomas Barratt
The exhibition at Hauser and Wirth is Bradford’s first solo exhibition in New York since 2015 and brings together works spanning from Bradford’s youth to his most recent creations and marks an important touchstone in his career.  With that in mind, we’ve chosen what we consider to be 4 essential artworks in the exhibition that unlock insights into his larger practice, whether you’re familiar with Bradford’s work or you’re new to his practice. Read on to find out more.
Johnny the Jaguar (2023)
Mark Bradford, Johnny the Jaguar (2023). Courtesy of the artist and Hauser and Wirth. Photograph by Joshua White.
Just the Facts: The first floor of “You Don’t Have to Tell Me Twice” features a series of works that, according to Hauser & Wirth, are “informed by the history of European tapestry and their socio-political significance, as symbols of the greatest opulence of European aristocracy, and, by extension, their relationship to power.” Originally premiered at the Fundação de Serralves in Porto in late 2021, these works accompany more recent tapestry-like “landscapes” depicting flora and fauna indigenous to Blackdom–“an early-20th Century African American homesteader settlement in New Mexico.” Central to these tableaux is a “symbol of historical predation,” a large cat figure Bradford has fondly nicknamed, Johnny the Jaguar.Insights: Bradford’s Johnny is very clearly a depiction of a Panthera Onca, the jaguar species indigenous to the Chihuahuan Desert of northern Mexico and the southern-western U.S., and as such is apt for its multiplicity of shifting significances: it might not only serve as a symbol for historical predation–recalling structures of power and race in America and Western colonialism more broadly–but as a symbol of the Aztec Empire’s elite jaguar warriors. And yet, even more intriguing, Panthera Onca is also today, in point of fact, an endangered species, perhaps pointing to a vision of oppression’s diminishment, if not end. 
Fire Fire (2021) 
Mark Bradford, Fire Fire (2021). Photograph by Sarah Muehlbauer. Courtesy of the artist and Hauser and Wirth.
Just the Facts: The works featured at Hauser & Wirth New York mark a shift in Bradford’s work from his bird’s-eye views of cityscapes to eye-level allegories of “survival, violence, and desire.” The figure, according to Hauser & Wirth, was “the starting point of [Bradford’s] abstraction.” Reflecting on these works, the artist himself points out: “I really wanted to create these kinds of playful landscapes. … Maybe because there was so much pressure happening throughout Covid and through questioning who we are culturally and racially that I had to create sights within my own imagination to give myself permission to play and to move things around. I always have to create a sight to give myself permission to kinda f— things up.”
Insights: An immense work Fire Fire (2021) presents us with a drab and scabbed upper layer seemingly peeled away to reveal vibrant, colorful figures and shapes beneath., “I’m always thinking about how I can layer meaning, how I can create a visual metaphor, how I can be provocative in some way,” the artist said. In this case, it seems like the thrust of this layering is to reveal the new life hidden beneath the scars of catastrophe. “I’m interested in the kind of beauty that comes out of difficulty,” he explained “…I want my work to be a catalyst for conversations about social justice and equality.”
Several vibrantly colorful figures emerge from what seems the charred and blackened ashes of a vast and impersonally abstract conflagration: alongside deep teal, salmon, and cobalt blooms emerges the stylized depiction of a human arm gripping an upside-down jaguar by its tail. In the context of other works in the exhibition such as Jungle Jungle and Johnny the Jaguar, Fire Fire seems to betoken the hopefulness of deliverance from life’s spirited chaos and our resulting fears. And yet, it also brings with it terrors of its own, for it is a pale arm that grips the jaguar’s tale, implying that there may be more to fear than natural predation.
 
Death Drop 1973
Mark Bradford, Death Drop 1973. Courtesy of the artist and Hauser and Wirth. Photograph by Sarah Muehlbauer.
Just the Facts: Central to the second floor of the show is a projector screen looping a Super 8 film Bradford directed at age 12. In it, Bradford’s adolescent self falls backward into a chain-link fence as he pretends to be struck by a bullet.
Insights: Bradford’s reflection on the film today is both inspiring and timely: “What’s important for me is that the kid wiggles back up. The falling is one side of it, but the fact he wiggled back up–that’s the journey.”

Death Drop 2023
Mark Bradford, Death Drop 2023. Courtesy of the artist and Hauser and Wirth. Photograph by Sarah Muehlbauer.
Just the Facts: “For me, art is about creating connections and building bridges between people,” Bradford has said. He also insinuates a connection between his younger self and his present person. A sculptural installation on the fifth floor titled, Death Drop 2023 in many ways references his childhood film Death Drop, 1973, in terms of considerations of violence and mortality.
Insights: The artist also connects his art and the exhibit to a wider context through the sculpture’s pose and title, a “death drop” being a popular pose in gay ballroom culture. Thus, pointing to the intersection of persecution and performance, the installation becomes both personal self-reflection and social commentary. This is to be expected from Bradford.”My work is always a response to what’s happening in the world. It’s always about the here and now,” he said.
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In Sally Cook’s 1975 canvas Self Portrait Five Images, the painter and poet depicts herself in different decades of her life—one in the then-present, and two each in the past and future. The youngest version of the artist is the only one not shown standing inside her mother’s parlor; she is, instead, framed through a window: literally on the outside looking in. 
“She’s the artist,” Cook, now 91, recently said of her younger painted self. “She’ll never get in.”  
For a long time, that’s how Cook viewed herself in relationship to the art world: an outsider. She felt that way in the 1950s, as a woman trying to carve out a place for herself in New York’s male-dominated 10th Street scene, and again after moving back to her hometown of Buffalo, New York in the 1960s, when the city’s insular arts institutions disregarded her charming, domestic figuration as craft.  
“I was treated like a non-person,” she said, chip still on her shoulder.   
Self Portrait Five Images is one of several standouts in “Where Fantasy Has Bloomed, Painting and Poetry since the 1960s,” an excellent survey of Cook’s work on now through July 8 at Eric Firestone Gallery in New York. Included is work from three decades of her career—a time period that saw her switch styles, cities, and priorities. It expands on an exhibition that opened at the University of Buffalo Art Galleries in mid-March of 2020, only to be shuttered by the COVID-19 pandemic days later.  
For Cook, who has not been the beneficiary of many breaks, the abrupt closure of the 2020 exhibition must have arrived like a devastating quietus to her career. But now, thanks to independent curator Julie Reiter Greene, who organized the current show, Cook finally got the victory lap she long deserved. “I hope it helps cement her legacy,” Greene said.
Sally Cook, Self Portrait Five Images (1975). Courtesy of the artist and Eric Firestone Gallery.
The last time Cook showed in New York, she was living there, renting a room on the Bowery and frequenting the Cedar Tavern and The Club, where art stars like Franz Kline and Willem de Kooning held court. Cook shared these artists’ interest in pushing the limits of abstraction, but not their egos or ambitions.  
“I was interested in abstract expressionism as an idea, but the thing is, nobody wanted to talk about it! They just wanted to move as quickly as possible from 10th Street to 57th Street,” she said, referring to the group of old-guard, commercial galleries that gathered uptown. 
After a pair of group shows, Cook had her first solo exhibition at Phoenix Gallery on 10th Street in 1959, then a second one there in 1961. Two abstract canvases from the latter exhibition are on view now at Eric Firestone: Opalescence and Liver of the Roses, both completed in 1960. They recall the floral palette and emotive gesturalism of Joan Mitchell, albeit with a density of composition that Mitchell didn’t embrace until later in her career. Cook, for her part, never left an inch of canvas unfilled. 
Sally Cook, Opalescence (1960). Courtesy of the artist and Eric Firestone Gallery.
That wasn’t always a popular choice. She said it was these same stylistic flourishes that, back in the 1950s and 60s, irked her contemporaries—particularly those indoctrinated by the de rigueur formalism of Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg. “Why do you paint to the edge of the canvas? Why do you use so much color?” she recalled contemporaries asking of her work, her voice inflected with an imitative paternalism. 
“Sally felt that there were rules in place—very dogmatic rules—that she had to follow, and that there wasn’t room for discussion on how to push those boundaries,” Greene explained, noting that Cook has “always been somebody who questions limitations and boundaries.” 
After a third solo effort at Camino Gallery—another 10th Street fixture—Cook decamped from Manhattan to Buffalo. “I learned a lot,” she said of her New York experience, “enough to know that I wanted to leave.” 
Sally Cook, The Bird Who Died From Sleeping Too Much (1967). Courtesy of the artist and Eric Firestone Gallery.
Back home, the artist’s work grew cleaner and tighter, evolving into hard-edged geometric abstractions. Graphic blocks of color filled her canvases, but even then you could see her fondness for figuration starting to peak through. Take The Bird Who Died From Sleeping Too Much (1967), also included in “Where Fantasy Has Bloomed.”
Based on a recurring dream related by a friend, the painting features stacked gray triangles at its top—a blackbird deconstructed into shapes. Below it is a band of red paint—a “thin line of rage,” Cook called it. The painting is, in both color and tone, one of the artist’s darker works. 
By the early 1970s, figuration fully entered Cook’s practice; so did a newfound sense of humor and intimacy. She began painting pets and friends and members of the Buffalo art scene, often situating her subjects in funky clothes amidst a rich tableau of personal effects: favorite furniture, books, rugs, art. Much like the theatrical paintings of Florine Stettheimer (who was also a poet), Cook’s portraits double as studies of class codes and social etiquette
Cook also embraced her own avowed struggles with perspective, flattening her scenes to emphasize their uncanniness. In a commissioned 1970 portrait of collector Charles Penney, founder of Buffalo’s Burchfield Penney Art Center, the subject towers over his prized possessions, including Josef Albers, Alexander Calder, and Robert Goodnough. (Here again, Cook paints herself standing outside, framed through a window in Penney’s house.) 
“The flatness is, for me, like a wolf in sheep’s clothing,” said Greene. “There’s an intentional deception and cheekiness. It’s tied to her play between surface and depth. You think you see everything about her work on the surface… and yet, there are so many layers and references and this absurdity and uncanniness to the way in which she’s capturing human experience.” 
Sally Cook, Gypsy At The Carnival of Life (1976). Courtesy of the artist and Eric Firestone Gallery.
Cook’s efforts from this period seemingly shared little in common with her geometric experiments of the preceding years, let alone the all-over abstractions from her time in New York. Whereas those earlier artworks had only a distant, symbolic relationship to the world, her representational paintings felt almost defiantly idiosyncratic, the work of an artist whose search for meaning led her through the looking glass—and the gatekept enclaves of the capital A art world—back to her own life.  
She began to center herself in the frame—often literally, in the form of self-portraits, but sometimes slyly too, through symbols encoded with personal meaning. Occasionally, she even included depictions of older paintings in new ones. That’s the case with her 1983 painting God Gave a Crow a Piece of Cheese; He Turned Around and Gave Me These. Named after a Chekhov story, it features Cook surrounded by examples of past work, many painted from memory. 
“I stuffed into my painting as many of my works as I could recall,” Cook said in a story recounted by Greene. “While their colors and shapes jostle and create a community, I am alone. No one has ever given me any cheese. A bit of cheese can no doubt satisfy a crow, but this crow knows better than to depend on it.” 
Sally Cook, God Gave a Crow a Piece of Cheese; He Turned Around and Gave Me These (1983). Courtesy of the artist and Eric Firestone Gallery.
“Sometimes she’ll depict herself, sometimes she’ll depict her paintings, but it’s all her,” explained Greene. “I think it was about legacy and the canon and wondering if her work would end up in museums, or if she would just need to keep presenting her own work, keep painting it back in to say, ‘Look at what I’ve been producing.’” 
Cook pulled the same trick with Self Portrait Five Images, where early her abstractions Blue Green Forever (1960) and A Flag for Delores IV (1965) are shown hanging on the Pepto Bismol-pink walls next to the various versions of herself. (Those same paintings flank Five Images at Eric Firestone too—a clever installation trick from Greene.) 
Though Cook may sympathize with the younger image of herself in that painting, it’s the oldest one she most resembles now—and not just because of age. With her hands at her sides and eyes fixed on the viewer, the elder figure is firmly—finally—on the inside.  
When asked if she feels that way now, with a survey of her life’s work on view in the city where it started, Cook simply said, “Yes,” then paused. “Thank God I lived long enough to see it!” she added, only half joking. 
“Sally Cook: Where Fantasy Has Bloomed, Painting and Poetry since the 1960s” is on view now through July 8 at Eric Firestone Gallery in New York. 

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