Art & Exhibitions

Around 1224 C.E., while recovering from an illness, St. Francis of Assisi penned one of the most celebrated hymns in the Christian faith. In “Canticle of the Creatures,” the founder of the Franciscan Order gave praise to all of god’s creation in a lyrical form that would go on to inspire composers Franz Liszt and Howard Blake, who wrote settings for it, and poet Robert Lax who wrote a tribute to it. Today, the famed hymn represents one of the oldest works of the Italian literary canon with a known author.
Some eight centuries after St. Francis composed “Creatures,” the manuscript of the beloved canticle is making its first appearance in Rome at the exhibition “Laudato Sie! Nature and Science. The Cultural Legacy of Brother Francis.” Hosted by the Museum of Rome, the show centers on the canticle, which will be on view alongside more than 90 other books and manuscripts from the Sacred Convent’s Ancient Collection of the Municipal Library of Assisi, located in the Umbrian city where Francis was born.
Giovanni Paolo Gallucci – Theatrum mundi et temporis Venice 1588. Photo: Museo di Roma.
“Centuries later and in a profoundly changed cultural context, it is still possible to draw lessons from the experience of Francis and his followers, which indeed resonates in a particularly significant way in an era in which the issues of the environment and sustainability have forcefully returned to the center of public debate,” said the city’s mayor Roberto Gualtieri in a statement. “Recovering that sense of empathic admiration for a world that we too often take for granted is now more necessary than ever, and in this the exhibition represents an opportunity from which we hope each of us can find fertile inspiration.”
One of the most important saints in the Roman Catholic faith and indeed Christianity in general, St. Francis was born Giovanni di Pietro di Bernardone around 1181 C.E. Stories of his life follow a familiar hagiographic format. Born into a rich family, he abandoned his inherited wealth and power after experiencing a spiritual awakening and began life anew as a beggar, friar, and, following his canonization by Pope Gregory IX in 1228, saint.
Giotto di Bondone, Saint Francis of Assisi (San Francesco) preaching to the birds, detail of the predella of St Francis of Assisi receiving the Stigmata. Photo by Leemage/Corbis via Getty Images.
Like countless other Christian icons, Francis welcomed poverty and suffering— qualities that not just allowed him to directly identify with the persecuted and downtrodden figure of Christ, but also compelled him to treat others with kindness and respect, uncorrupted by the influence of material possessions. His love-centered interpretation of Christianity sharply contrasted with the dogmatism of the church, foreshadowing everything from the Protestant Reformation to the theological writings of Russian author Leo Tolstoy.
Manuscript showing St. Francis of Assisi’s “Canticle of the Creatures.” Photo: Museo di Roma.
This way of thinking is prominently displayed in St. Francis’ hymn “Canticle of the Creatures,” which was written in his native Umbrian dialect before being translated into other languages such as Latin. The hymn reiterates values its author demonstrated through his saintly lifestyle, notably his appreciation for all living and non-living things. “Praised be You, my Lord,” one of its verses reads, “with all Your creatures, especially Sir Brother Sun, Who is the day and through whom You give us light.”
Fittingly, perhaps, the hymn was sung to Francis as he lay on his deathbed.
The Franciscans and Encyclopedic Knowledge – Isador of Seville Etymologiarum opus Venice 1483. Photo: Museo di Roma.
Those visiting  “Laudato Sie!” will be able to admire the oldest known copy of “Canticle of the Creatures,” as well as an immersive space that brings to life the hymn’s religious sentiment and vision of nature. Another immersive experience, which bookends the exhibition, puts viewers in touch with more projections of flora and fauna, described by the museum as “an ‘integral’ vision of the world.”
In between those rooms, the show offers views of relics including the Universal Sacred-Profane Library, an incomplete encyclopedia from the early 18th century compiled by the Franciscan friar Vincenzo Maria Coronelli, and “De Sphaera mundi” or “On the Sphere of the World,” a treatise on pre-Copernican astronomy written by the monk Johannes de Sacrobosco around 1230 C.E.
“Laudato Sie! Nature and Science. The Cultural Legacy of Brother Francis” is on view at the Museum of Rome, Piazza San Pantaleo, 10, Piazza Navona, 2, Rome More

Pablo Picasso’s first permanent address in Paris was a Montmartre squat. Nicknamed the Washhouse Boat because the tenement building swayed and groaned in foul weather, it was inhabited by a rabble of poor artists, and its surroundings cast Picasso among society’s downtrodden. This was the time of Picasso’s “Blue Period,” defined by its forlorn monochromatic paintings, but there’s an etching that captures the spirit equally well.
A Frugal Meal (1904) makes a mockery of the Impressionist’s bountiful café, its couple is gaunt and melancholy, their demeanor of resignation offered with such empathy that one infers the artist drew on personal experience. Made with a salvaged zinc plate, it was Picasso’s first proper attempt at printmaking, a medium that would shadow and sometimes inform his broader practice for the next seven decades.
Pablo Picasso, The frugal meal (1904). © Succession Picasso, DACS, London 2024.
Picasso would go onto produce nearly 2,500 prints across the course of his career. This may come as a surprise to those more familiar with his paintings and sculptures, though perhaps it shouldn’t, given the artist’s omnivorous and prolific habits. An expansive exhibition at the British Museum is arriving to fill in any such blanks in the public’s imagination. Simply named “Picasso: Printmaker,” it gathers around 100 etchings, lithographs, aquatints, and linocuts that evidence how Picasso explored the medium of print despite limited formal training.
Pablo Picasso, Leaping bulls (1950). © Succession Picasso, DACS, London 2024.
The show is the culmination of two decades of targeted and attritional collecting and offers the British Museum as an institution keen to go beyond its reputation for staging narrative exhibitions around historic artifacts. When the museum acquired 19 largely abstract prints in 2016, it declared that it had filled “the last important gap” in Picasso’s oeuvre of prints. In the run up to the exhibition, the museum’s director, Nicholas Cullinan, lays claim to showing Picasso’s “UK’s most extensive collection of prints”. With well over 500 prints, this hardly seems like hyperbole.
Pablo Picasso, Faun uncovering a woman(1936). © Succession Picasso, DACS, London 2024.
Picasso’s explorations of print were intense sporadic affairs, and his two most celebrated episodes are on full display here, full of lust and curves and trickery. The first belongs to his Vollard Suite, named for the art dealer who commissioned 100 Neoclassical etchings from the Spaniard in 1930 (though it took him seven years to complete). Though not drawn from a single source, they allude not only to classical mythology, but art history’s earlier masters of print. Faun Uncovering a Woman (1936), for instance, plays with Rembrandt’s depiction of Jupiter and Antiope loosening lines and veering into abstraction.
Pablo Picasso, Picasso, his work and his audience (1968) © Succession Picasso, DACS, London 2024.
The second of Picasso’s vaunted forays into printmaking is his “347 Suite,” named for the number prints he executed in a seven-month blitz in 1968. The British Museum boasts the full set, but given the works riff and repeat—he would sometimes make up to eight prints per day—only 28 are on display. They are erotic and fantastical works filled with beasts, breasts, and bands of blackness. In its best-known work, Picasso, His Work and His Audience (1968), the octogenarian quite bluntly confronts himself and his viewer.
Pablo Picasso, Pike II 1959 © Succession Picasso, DACS, London 2024.
“[Picasso’s prints] demonstrated a deep understanding of the medium and eagerness to experiment and innovate,” said Catherine Daunt, the curator of modern and contemporary prints. “Printmaking became, for Picasso, the art form through which he could tell stories and follow a thought or idea, few artists contributed more to the medium in the 20th century.”
“Picasso: Printmaker” runs from November 7 to March 30, 2025. More

The Albertina Museum in Vienna has opened a major retrospective of Marc Chagall (1887–1985), commemorating 40 years since the artist’s death. Running until February 9, 2025, the show brings together over 100 works made over the course of his life. Born in the shtetl of Vitebsk, Chagall’s childhood memories, themes of nostalgia, longing, and Jewish identity recur throughout his oeuvre.
While Chagall’s works are often filled with harmonious colors, from celestial blues to vibrant reds, the paintings seem joyous and ethereal at first glance, but there are also many darker themes that permeate the work. Displacement was a central theme to his life and work: having lived through pogroms, two world wars, and the persecution of Jews during the Nazi regime, Chagall was forced into exile multiple times. Yet, even in exile, he never lost his connection to his homeland and memories of Vitebsk, a small town in what is now Belarus, then part of the Russian Empire. He migrated from Russia to Paris to study at the Ecole de Paris, before moving to New York, and eventually back to France.
Marc Chagall, Rabbi in Black and White (The Praying Jew) (1914-22). Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezia, Galleria Internazionale d′Arte Moderna di Ca’ Pesaro © Bildrecht, Vienna 2024.
The exhibition at the Albertina allows visitors to experience Chagall’s use of symbolism. His paintings are filled with floating lovers, violin-playing rabbis, roosters, cows, headless figures and biblical motifs, often with a heightened perspective, drawing the viewer’s into the visually stimulating scenes. These recurring motifs, often fantastical, mirror his own life experiences, blending happiness and joy with suffering, displacement and a deep connection to his Jewish heritage. He was deeply inspired by the Bible, considering it “the greatest source of poetry of all time.” He produced many artworks based on Biblical stories, including a famous series of Bible illustrations and stained glass windows for churches, synagogues, windows for the Hadassah Hospital in Jerusalem, the UN building in New York, and the Notre Dame Cathedral in Reims, France.
Marc Chagall, Birthday [detail] (1923). AOKI Holdings© Bildrecht, Vienna 2024 / Photo: AOKI Holdings.One stand-out work in the exhibition is titled The Birthday (1915), depicting Chagall and his wife Bella Rosenfeld in a loving embrace, defying gravity and floating in the air. The dreamlike quality of the figures floating above the ground symbolises their love and the mysteriousness of human emotion. The Birthday exemplifies Chagall’s ability to use color, composition and form to evoke the magical with the mundane. His wife was often his muse, reappearing in paintings throughout the retrospective. Her death in 1944 had a significant impact on him. Another notable work is titled The Lovers (1913-14), an earlier and larger version of his Les Amoureux (1928) painting, that sold at Christies New York for a record $28.5 million in 2017.
Marc Chagall, The Blue Circus (1950–1952). Centre Pompidou, Paris, Musée national d’art moderne – Centre de création industrielle, dation en 1988, en dépôt au Musée national Marc Chagall, Nice © Bildrecht, Vienna 2024.
The Albertina’s retrospective celebrates Chagall’s artistic achievements and reflects his impact on modern art. Refusing to conform to the avant-garde movements of his time, Chagall developed a deeply personal style that was rooted in his cultural and spiritual background. His contemporaries spanned different movements—from Symbolism, Surrealism, Expressionism, and the broader avant-garde. He developed his style in conversation with but often apart from, many artists including Picasso, Modigliani and Kandinsky. His ability to unite opposites—joy and sorrow, memory and imagination—gave his work a quality that continues to inspire generations of artists, musicians, writers and poets.
Marc Chagall, To Russia, Asses and Others (1911). Centre Pompidou, Paris, Musée national d’art moderne– Centre de création industrielle, don de l’artiste en 1953. © Bildrecht, Vienna 2024.
As the final exhibition under Klaus Albrecht Schröder’s leadership, the Chagall retrospective closes an important chapter for the Albertina Museum. In collaboration with the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen in Düsseldorf, the exhibition offers a comprehensive retrospective on Chagall’s artistic legacy.
Marc Chagall, The Great Circus (1970). The ALBERTINA Museum, Vienna – The Batliner Collection. © Bildrecht, Vienna 2024.
Visitors will leave with a deeply comprehensive understanding of his work and a renewed appreciation for how he captured the complexities of human life and emotion—joy, sorrow, love, and loss—through a visual language that continues to move many audiences across the world. More

What does it take to build a museum? Whose labor and livelihood bring these high-minded visions to life?
Right now, Magazzino Italian Art is giving visitors a behind-the-scenes look at the process—and people—who made post-war and contemporary Italian art institution a reality.
Curated by Paola Mura, “Building Magazzino 2014–2024” presents 50 large-scale photographs by Italian-born, New York-based photographer Marco Anelli (on view through through October 28). The museum commissioned Anelli to chronicle the museum’s transformation from a conceptual vision to its current form.
“My frequent presence at the site is crucial not to miss any important progress,” said Anelli. “To carry out such long projects, I follow the flow and rhythm of the works.”
Robert Onick Pavilion, Magazzino Italian Art, Cold Spring, NY. Photo by Marco Anelli. Courtesy Magazzino Italian Art
Located in Cold Spring, New York, about an hour north of New York City, the museum opened to the public in 2017 with its main building, a 20,000-square-foot space by Spanish architect Miguel Quismondo, who retrofitted an existing structure previously used as a milk pasteurization facility. The museum’s second pavilion was completed in 2023, adding 13,000 feet to the institution, including exhibition and auditorium spaces and a cafe and gift shop.
With his camera, Anelli captured these transformations from planning to the 2015 groundbreaking through to its current state. “The first phase is often the most chaotic,” said Anelli of the project. “The excavation has just started, soil and mud are all over the place, which makes the shooting challenging at times. After that initial phase, the foundation is built, and from an underground level made of rubbles, things slowly move to a more tidy view that starts to show the form of the future building.”
But the power of his photography lies beyond the scenic grounds and modernist structures, in his captivating portraits of the construction workers and craftspeople who came to work and, hour by hour, day by day, built Magazzino from the ground up. For the photographer, the presence of different workers forms a timeline.
“The evolution of a building site is noticeable even by looking at the workers that are present and active at the building site over the different phases of the works,” said Anelli. “Carpenters, plumbers, electricians, painters and so on are the human side of the construction process and one of the crucial elements that tells its story.”
To document the workers, Anelli would discreetly ask the workers for a few minutes of their time, being sure not to cause too much disruption to the work and tasks that can be complex and even dangerous.
Marco Anelli, Edgar, Masonry, from “Building Magazzino.”
“They are highly skilled and committed to their job and aren’t used to the presence of a photographer asking for pictures,” said Anell “They would often joke after the shoot, pretending to be movie stars thus creating a spirit of camaraderie among them.”
The photographer would give the workers some time to get used to the camera. “In photography though, smiling may be a sort of mask. So I let them smile, move, joke, and laugh for a few minutes until they relaxed and started to show their true personality. At that point they would often stop smiling and take intense and genuine expressions,” he said. “That was the best moment to take their portrait.”
The portraits bear the same natural grace as Anelli’s documentation of the building’s construction. For Anelli, the workers, the structure, and the landscape are all part of a single storyline. The Magazzino project is the latest in Anelli’s practice of documenting major museum moments.
Perhaps most famously, in 2010, Anelli was on-site capturing portraits of 1,545 participants in Marina Abramović’s now iconic performance “The Artist is Present” at MoMA. He also documented the construction of the new Whitney Museum of American Art in his 2015 A Simple Story.
For Anelli, the ground-up creation of an institution is an ever-fruitful place of inspiration. “Shooting a building site is for me one of the most interesting and surprising types of photo projects I can carry out,” he said “What was once just a field, is today a museum that through this show tells the phases of its birth and its evolution through the faces and stories of the protagonists.” More

Between the rise of artificial intelligence and the proliferation of “fake news,” living in the 21st-century can sometimes feel a bit surreal. That is why there is perhaps no better time to revisit the 20th century’s Surrealism movement, never mind that 2024 marks 100 years since the publication of André Breton’s pivotal Manifesto of Surrealism in which the French writer and poet called for a new kind of art that is guided by the unconscious and “free from any control by reason.”
To celebrate the centenary of what became a huge cultural movement that still influences artists today, the Centre Pompidou in Paris has mounted a sprawling multidisciplinary exhibition that not only showcases the French roots of Surrealism, but its global reach. Curated by Didier Ottinger and Marie Sarré, the show features over 500 artworks and objects, ranging from paintings, drawings to sculptures, and poems to  manuscripts.
René Magritte, Les valeurs personnelles, (1952). San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, purchase through a gift of Phyllis C. Wattis © San Francisco Museum of Modern Art/Photograph Katherine Du Tiel © Adagp, Paris, 2024.
Inspired by the labyrinthine structure of Surrealist exhibitions in the past, visitors follow the exhibition through a spiral layout. On special loan from the Bibliothèque nationale de France, the original manuscript of Breton’s Manifeste du surréalisme is the starting point to the exhibition, with a surrounding audiovisual installation that explores the origins and significance of the manifesto, setting the dreamlike tone for the rest of the show.
Breton was influenced by the works of Sigmund Freud, particularly the ideas surrounding the unconscious mind, dreams, and free association. He sought to create a new art movement that explored these ideas, stating, “I believe in the future resolution of these two states, dream and reality, which are seemingly so contradictory, into a kind of absolute reality, a surreality.”
Installation view of “Surrealism” at Centre Pompidou. © CG Pompidou, J. Rodriguez-Garcia.
The exhibition layout is divided into 13 thematic sections, each exploring different facets of Surrealism. These range from the literary influences that shaped the movement, such as the works of Lautréamont and Lewis Carroll, to the mythical and fantastical elements that became central to Surrealist imagery—dreams, the philosopher’s stone, and forests, amongst many more. Reality and fantasy have been blurred within these exhibition walls, creating a space where the ordinary merges into the extraordinary.
In true Surrealist fashion, the exhibition features a wide range of media, including paintings, drawings, films, photographs, and literary documents. Many iconic works are on display, loaned from international collections. These include Salvador Dalí’s The Great Masturbator from Madrid’s Museo Reina Sofía, René Magritte’s Personal Values from the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Max Ernst’s The Large Forest from the Kunstmuseum in Basel, and Joan Miró’s Dog Barking at the Moon from the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The works provide a comprehensive overview of the movement’s diversity, in styles and themes.
Salvador Dali, Visage du grand masturbateur, (1929). Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid Legado Salvador Dalí, 1990 © Photographic Archives Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía © Salvador Dalí, Fundació Gala-Salvador Dali / Adagp, Paris 2024.
In addition to showcasing well-known male artists, the exhibition spotlights the long-overlooked contributions of women to Surrealism, mirroring a wider trend both in museums and the art market. To wit: Just this spring, Leonora Carrington’s Les Distractions de Dagobert (1945) set an auction record for the Surrealist painter when it sold for $ 28.5 million at Sotheby’s, obliterating the artist’s previous record of $3.3 million set just two years ago.
At the Pompidou, Carrington’s Green Tea (1942), a landscape painting featuring strange, mythological creatures and floating figures set against a verdant green pasture, among other works, is featured alongside works by contemporaries Remedios Varo, Dora Maar, Ithell Colquhoun, and Dorothea Tanning, illustrating the critical role women played in shaping the movement.
Remedios Varo, Papilla estelar (1958). Colección FEMSA © FEMSA Collection © Adagp, Paris, 2024.
According to curator Marie Sarré, the show is meant to show “Surrealism in all of its diversity.” That also includes highlighting the global scope of the movement. When the Centre Pompidou last held a major exhibition on Surrealism, in 2002, it was positioned as an essentially European movement. The current show charts its expansion beyond Europe to the Americas, Asia, and Africa, and documents how artists from around the world engage with Surrealist ideas. Works by Tatsuo Ikeda from Japan, Helen Lundeberg from the United States, Rufino Tamayo from Mexico, and Wilhelm Freddie from Denmark demonstrate how Surrealism’s core principles—challenging rationality, embracing the unconscious, and exploring alternative realities—resonated with artists from vastly different cultural backgrounds.
Installation shot of “Surrealism” at Centre Pompidou. © CG Pompidou, J. Rodriguez-Garcia.
The exhibition also examines the political dimensions of Surrealism. From its early days, the movement was deeply engaged with the political struggles of its time, opposing colonialism and totalitarianism. This activist spirit is reflected in many of the works on display, underscoring the Surrealists’ commitment to both artistic and social revolution.
The exhibition will also travel internationally after its run in Paris to the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium in Brussels, the Fundación MAPFRE in Madrid, the Kunsthalle in Hamburg, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Each venue will offer its own interpretation of the movement, tailored to local cultural and historical contexts.
“Surrealism” is on view until January 13, 2025, at the Centre Pompidou, Paris. More

The paintings would sometimes still be wet when Berthe Weill rushed to show them at her little Parisian gallery. Why wait, she thought, hanging the fresh artworks from a clothesline with pins. Weill was famously fast and furious during the four decades she ran the Galerie B. Weill, showing only emerging modernist artists (often when they were complete nobodies). It’s no small irony, then, that it’s taken a full decade to retrace Weill’s swift steps and arrange a show about her and the iconic (and long-since dried) canvases that graced her walls.
Jules Pascin, Portrait of Madame Pascin (Hermine David) (1915–1916). Philadelphia Museum of Art.
“There’s never been an exhibition on Berthe,” says Lynn Gumpert, director of New York University’s Grey Art Museum, about the exhibition that hopes to set the record straight on Weill’s crucial role in early 20th-century modernism. The show’s title, “Make Way for Berthe Weill” is a play on the phrase she printed on her business cards—“Place aux Jeunes,” which means ‘make way for the young.’ After showing in New York it will travel to its institutional partners, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts and the Musée de l’Orangerie in Weill’s Parisian hometown.
Marc Chagall, Bella à Mourillon (Bella in Mourillon) (1926). Private collection.
The exhibition reassembles some of the many artworks that passed through her gallery—110 paintings, sculptures, drawings, and prints by artists such as Marc Chagall, Pablo Picasso, André Derain, Diego Rivera, Henri Matisse, Aristide Maillol, Fernand Léger, Raoul Dufy, Émilie Charmy, Suzanne Valadon, and others. It also includes materials such as her correspondence, exhibition catalogues, photographs, and journals.
Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller, The Wretched (1901). Maryhill Museum of Art, Goldendale, Washington.
One notable work in the exhibition is The Wretched (1901), a bronze sculpture by Harlem Renaissance artist Meta Vaux Warrick that Weill exhibited at her gallery’s 1901 inaugural show. A rare example of Warrick’s early work (much of which was destroyed), it’s also a testament to Weill’s efforts to platform women—of the 149 solo shows at Galerie B. Weill, 29 were dedicated to women.
Weill’s track record of giving early opportunities to the artists that now define modernist art history is unparalleled. In 1902 she showed works by Picasso and Matisse, selling Picasso’s first works in Paris and making Matisse’s first sale through a dealer. She showed Francis Picabia in 1904, around the time that she exhibited all the Fauves (before they were even nicknamed Fauves, in 1905). Weill held a debut exhibition for Suzanne Valadon in 1913, the only solo exhibition for Diego Rivera during the decade he lived in Paris, as well as the only lifetime solo show for Amedeo Modigliani.
Louis Cattiaux, La Vierge attentive (The Attentive Virgin), also known as La Vierge à l’étoile (Virgin with star) (1939). Collection Guieu, Jouques, France
In hindsight, the quality of Weill’s taste is obvious. But when she was taking endless risks on artists no one had ever heard of, nothing was clear. At the end of Weill’s autobiography, originally published in 1933 and released in English translation in 2022, she wrote that her book was a response to those who said, “‘Ah, Mademoiselle Weill, you must be rich, seeing all the things that have passed through your hands.’ Those are the same people who never dared take a chance on works by unknown artists; who pitied me for my perseverance; who sniggered at the sight of works they didn’t understand then and still don’t understand today.” (In addition to having nerve and an impeccable eye, Weill notoriously didn’t mince words.)
Kees van Dongen, La Femme au canapé (Woman on a sofa) (c. 1920). Montreal Museum of Fine Arts.
Weill faced the challenge of her choices being misunderstood, along with misogyny and antisemitism. Beyond being one of few women art dealers in her day, she opened her gallery in the middle of the Dreyfus Affair and was forced to shutter it during the Nazi occupation of France.
The importance of this dealer you’ve probably never heard of can also be determined by the artworks that aren’t in the exhibition. Several paintings that no one wanted to show when Weill did, are now too costly to borrow for an exhibition about her. Picasso’s Moulin de la Galette (ca. 1900) at New York’s Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, for example, isn’t far from the Grey Art Museum but the insurance to loan this now prized painting is too prohibitive. (Weill sold it, right after it was painted, to collector and newspaper publisher Arthur Huc for 250 francs.) In fact, many of the canvases that hung from clothespins or on the walls of Weill’s little shop have ended up in illustrious institutional collections.
Henri Matisse, Liseuse en robe violette (Reading woman in a violet dress) (1898). Musée des Beaux-Arts, Reims, France.
“A legitimate question then arises,” writes French scholar and founder of the Berthe Weill Archive, Marianne Le Morvan, in the scholarly exhibition catalog accompanying the exhibition. “What would have become of all these artists without Berthe Weill’s support?”
Many of the artists she supported did famously well, moving on to more established dealers and cementing their importance in museum collections and books. Weill, on the other hand, died in poverty and obscurity, and with no heirs to care for her legacy was soon forgotten. This exhibition hopes to help change that.
“I don’t want anyone pitying my fate because, as I’ve said before, I chose this line of conduct myself,” Weill wrote in her memoir, titled Pow! Right in the Eye! “So I only have myself to blame … except that I don’t regret anything!” More

Visitors to the Natural History Museum of L.A. County’s newly reopened diorama hall might have cause to pause in their tracks. Amid realistic bays of kangaroos and snow leopards are three unlikely exhibits. In one, a pair of antelopes is positioned next to an unnatural lake of glass and graffitied boulders. Another depicts eagles against a time-lapse projection of the Los Angeles River. And yet one more is an otherworldly UV-lit scene populated with psychedelic snakes and turtles. They are, in short, not your grandma’s dioramas.
These scenes have been created by artists as part of the institution’s “Reframing Dioramas: The Art of Preserving Wilderness,” an exhibition marking the centennial of its diorama halls, while offering new ways of seeing these staple displays in natural history museums. The point, said NHMLAC’s exhibition developer Matt Davis, is less to revisit the past than to bring the diorama into the present.
“We look at these displays as old-fashioned, but when you actually survey visitors, they love dioramas,” Davis told me over the phone. “It’s maybe not the dioramas that need to change. It’s just the way we talk about them, or we need to help people read them better.”
Diorama at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County. Photo courtesy of NHMLAC.
When the NHMLAC opened its diorama halls in the 1920s, they were a revelation. Gone were the glass cases haphazardly stacked with animal bones and hides; in their place were realistic, three-dimensional displays recreating specific habitats with lifelike models. These early dioramas included bays of bison and beavers, mountain goats and sea lions; they wowed visitors, some 50,000 of whom arrived to view the museum’s hall of African mammals, the first in the country.
These showcases were collaborative outings—exhibits that called on the collective expertise of researchers, painters, and taxidermists. Scenes had to be composed, ecosystems accurately represented, animals modeled, and backgrounds painted. In the words of the museum’s then-senior curator Melville Lincoln, “Science furnishes the material, art the finished picture.”
George Adams working on elephant miniature model, 1965. © Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County.
Then again, the museum’s dioramas have never really been “finished.” Uniquely, its bays were enclosed with glass that could be raised, unlike the hermetic seal of most dioramas. It has allowed artists and conservators to refresh the displays over the decades, whether that is to update a taxidermy model or to revise the biodiversity in the foregrounds—or, in the case of the artists participating in “Reframing Dioramas,” to entirely reimagine these tableaux.
Dioramas at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County. Photo courtesy of NHMLAC.
“Reframing Dioramas” takes place in a hall that had been closed since the 1980s due to water damage. Following a refurbishment of its woodwork and lighting (“the dioramas are just glowing because they’ve been in darkness for almost 40 years,” per Davis), the space has reopened in time to participate in the Getty’s PST Art: Art and Science Collide initiative. Ahead of the exhibition, a diorama incubator was launched, alongside an open call for artist proposals for new natural history displays. From the deluge of submissions, three were selected.
Among them is Washington-based artist Saul Becker‘s A Peculiar Garden, a post-apocalyptic landscape populated with electroplated plants and a mound of desiccated twigs, his animals gazing Narcissus-like into a mirrored surface. The scene, Becker told me at the show’s preview, offered him the perfect opportunity to blend his nature-based sculpture and painting practices, while illustrating humanity’s indelible footprint on the environment.
Saul Becker, A Peculiar Garden (2024) at the Natural History Museum of L.A. County. Photo: Min Chen.
“I wanted to highlight the strange, disorienting relationship that we have with nature,” he said. “I didn’t want to create a diorama or an image that was too pastoral; I wanted something sublime, something beautiful, but a little unnourished. Nature really shines a mirror back on humanity.”
In that same vein, L.A. artist Lauren Schoth has used projection mapping in The Ever Changing Flow to illustrate how ecological and manmade change over the ages have reshaped the course of a river that flows through the city. Its twin birds, poised over the ever-morphing vista, remain tellingly static.
Lauren Schoth, The Ever Changing Flow (2024) at the Natural History Museum of L.A. County. Photo: Min Chen.
Meanwhile, a collective composed of artists Yesenia Prieto, Joel Fernando, and Jason Chang has presented the hall’s most eye-catching display in Special Species: A Delicate Moment in Time. The composition features handcrafted Mexican folk art sculptures of endangered animals, on which projections and lights shift and dance—a representation of the spiritual realm that undergirds California’s natural habitats.
However outré these dioramas, Davis noted, they are all scientifically accurate. The artists worked in close consultation with the museum’s taxidermist Tim Bovard and curatorial team, who provided guidance on everything from species lineups to aesthetic perspectives. Davis pointed out how the Special Species group, in hoping to highlight the region’s endangered species, endeavored to hew closely to California’s list of animals of special concern. “We really care about this,” they told him.
Sierra Nevada Big Horn Sheep created for Special Species: A Delicate Moment in Time (2024) by RFX1 (Jason Chang), Joel Fernando, and Yesenia Prieto. Diorama installation. Photo courtesy of the artist and NHMLAC.
That care, in fact, is what has surprised Davis the most about the artists’ responses to the open call.
“A lot of the artists’ submissions weren’t really trying to destroy the diorama. They really liked the diorama and they wanted to just make their own diorama in their own style,” he said. “It wasn’t necessarily like, ‘Here’s a critique of the diorama or an explosion of it,’ but ‘Let me try to make a diorama the way I think it could be made.’”
Mule Deer diorama at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County. Photo: Mario de Lopez, 2014 © Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County.
Maybe the mold didn’t need to be broken. There is, after all, something to be said about the NHMLAC reopening a hall of dioramas at a time when high-tech, interactive exhibits are the dominant attractions in museums.
This fascination with dioramas is further captured in the exhibition’s accompanying publication, Reframing Wilderness, edited by Davis, which details the institution’s century-long diorama project (including the work of artists Duncan Spencer, Hanson Duvall Puthuff, and Frank J. MacKenzie, among others), as well as the roles of these displays in education and conservation. It’s a loving tribute to an analog art and craft, which, Davis noted, has its enduring charm.
“It’s literally the frame that you put around the diorama. It said ‘these are special,’” he explained. “Maybe not everyone gets that on a conscious level, but when you go into a big hall like ours and you sit down, you’re getting this on a very spiritual level. You know this is something to be in awe of, to look on with wonder.”
“Reframing Dioramas: The Art of Preserving Wilderness” is on view at the Natural History Museum of L.A. County, 900 Exposition Blvd., Los Angeles, California, through September 15, 2025. More

This December, famed Spanish artist Diego Velázquez’s Queen Mariana of Austria (1652–53) will be on view at the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena, California for the first time in over 30 years. This will mark the painting’s West Coast debut and it will be a focal point of the exhibition titled “Mariana: Velázquez’s Portrait of a Queen from the Museo Nacional del Prado.”
Prior to coming to the Norton Simon, the masterpiece has only been on view once before in the U.S. during a 1989 retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. The painting is part of a larger exhibition, organized by the museum’s chief curator Emily Talbot and associate curator Maggie Bell, which will feature other artists who were also collected by the Habsburg court. Additional works by Jusepe de Ribera, Bartolomé-Esteban Murillo and Francisco de Zurbarán, Guido Reni, and Peter Paul Rubens, among others, will also be on display, giving viewers a deeper understanding of 17th-century Spanish painting. 
“We were delighted when our colleagues at the Museo del Prado suggested Queen Mariana of Austria as the first loan from the Spanish national collection to the Norton Simon Museum. We have great paintings by 17th-century Spanish artists in our collection, but there are no works by Velázquez at the Norton Simon Museum or at any institution on the West Coast,” said Talbot.  “Our display contextualizes Velázquez’s extraordinary career by presenting him in the company of artists that he knew and admired, while highlighting the role that Mariana herself played in her own visual representation.”
The painting itself, which is nearly life-sized, depicts an 18-year-old Queen Mariana following the birth of her son with King Philip IV. Within it, the young queen can be seen in typical Spanish style of that era wearing an exquisite black and silver dress complimented by a guardainfante—an underskirt made up of hoops that expanded the width of a skirt and left the back flat, a common trend in 17th- and 18th-century women’s fashion. The work features rich hues of black and reds and ornate details such as the embroidery on the young queen’s dress and her ornate jewelry. 
Portrait of Diego Rodriguez de Sila y Velázquez (ca. 1640). Photo: Hulton Archive/Getty Images.
Velázquez is one of the most famous painters to emerge from Spain during the 17th century. In fact, by 1623, at the age of 24, he had already established himself as the court painter to Philip IV in Madrid. As a result, he would go on to spend the next 40 years creating works centered on royal family—most notably Las Meninas (ca. 1656), starring Philip’s only child, Margarita. 
Completed in the summer of 1651, Queen Mariana of Austria, is considered to be one of Velázquez’s most important works of art. Following an extended period abroad in Rome and upon his return to Madrid, this was his first major commission of that time, and this subject in particular would come to mark a new period in Velázquez’s work. Following the completion of this work, Velázquez would go on to depict female subjects and children in the last half of his artistic career. 
Signed works by Velázquez are increasingly rare, and today only a handful of them exist within U.S. museums. The Prado’s collection, on the other hand, comprises 48 paintings by Velázquez—an astonishing 40 percent of the artist’s total body of work. Queen Mariana is on loan to the Norton Simon as part of an ongoing exchange between the museums, which began earlier this year when Francisco de Zurbarán’s Still Life with Lemons, Oranges and a Rose (1633) traveled to Madrid.
“Mariana: Velázquez’s Portrait of a Queen from the Museo Nacional del Prado” will be on view at the Norton Simon Museum, 411 W. Colorado Blvd. at Orange Grove Boulevard, Pasadena, California, December 13, 2024–March 24, 2025. More