Art & Exhibitions

Wayne Thiebaud, appropriation artist? That’s the thesis of a forthcoming exhibition at the Legion of Honor, part of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.
“It’s hard for me to think of artists who weren’t influential on me because I’m such an obsessive thief,” Thiebaud told the New York Times back in 1996.
The California artist, who died at 101 in 2021, is of course best known for his still life paintings of cakes and other sugary confections. But he was also a dedicated student of art history, infusing his works with references to masterpieces of the past—both subtle and overt.
“He constantly, continually refers to himself as a thief—and yet no one has completely taken him at his word!” curator Timothy Anglin Burgard told me.
In putting together the show, he found dozens of examples of paintings where Thiebaud was riffing on the composition of works from the past.
Wayne Thiebaud, Tapestry Skirt (1976, reworked 1982, 2003). ©Wayne Thiebaud Foundation/Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
There’s Tapestry Skirt, a 1976 portrait of a woman seated in profile in a colorful skirt that mirrors James McNeill Whistler’s famous portrait of his mother, Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1 (1871). The splayed out figure in Thiebaud’s Supine Woman (1963) recalls The Dead Toreador (1864–65) by Édouard Manet. And an array of tasty-looking parfaits in 1962’s Confections mimics the jars in a 1941 Giorgio Morandi Still Life.
Thiebaud would also look to abstract canvases, spotlighting a composition’s similarities with figurative objects. After visiting his hero Franz Kline in New York early in his career, for instance, Thiebaud returned to U.C. Davis in California and painted the gestural looking Electric Chair (1957). More

The U.K.’s annual Turner Prize exhibition opens at Tate Britain in London on September 25, presenting all four nominated artists to the public before a winner is announced on December 3. If a thematic thread can be woven through the suite of exhibitions by Pio Abad, Jasleen Kaur, Delaine Le Bas, and Claudette Johnson, it must be how each reflects on the ways in which the histories we inherit continue to inform our lives.
Founded in 1984, the Turner Prize once thrived on controversy, stirring up heated debate about the nature of contemporary art while spotlighting future titans like Anish Kapoor, Antony Gormley, Damien Hirst, and Steven McQueen. Now in its 40th year, the award is a more low-key affair but continues to recognize important achievements by artists either born or working in Britain.
The winner will receive £25,000 ($31,000), with a further £10,000 ($12,500) for each runner-up. Last year the award went to Jesse Darling.
Installation view of Claudette Johnson, Protection (2024) and Friends in Green + Red on Yellow (2023) in “Turner Prize 2024” at Tate Britain from September 25, 2024 – February 16, 2025. Photo: Josh Croll, © Tate Photography.
The standout nominee this year is portrait painter Claudette Johnson, who was selected for two exhibitions from 2023: “Presence” at the Courtauld Gallery in London and “Drawn Out” at Ortuzar Projects in New York. The 64 year old artist emerged as part of the BLK Art Group in Wolverhampton in the 1980s but has only recently gained widespread renown after taking a multi-decade break from her practice.
In Friends in Green + Red on Yellow (2023), Johnson captures a charming sense of quiet camaraderie between her two sons. A new work, Protection (2024), is the latest of a series of self-portraits like Figure with Figurine (2019) that reference Picasso’s Les Demoiselles D’Avignon (1907) in their arrangement and use of space. Rather than othering West African sculptures and masks, however, Johnson explores her own relationship to these objects as a Black British woman.
Installation view of Jasleen Kaur’s presentation in “Turner Prize 2024” at Tate Britain from September 25, 2024 – February 16, 2025. Photo: Josh Croll, © Tate Photography.
Nominated for “Alter Altar” at Tramway in Glasgow, Jasleen Kaur’s show layers found material to create an impressively evocative and fondly humorous record of her experiences growing up in Scotland as the daughter of Indian parents. The most literal example is an untitled series of salvaged family photographs that have been encased in resin stained the lurid orange of Irn Bru, the quintessential Scottish soda, and inlaid with torn scraps of chapati bread.
Which other objects store cultural memory? Among the everyday detritus on view is an open packet of soft mints, turmeric-stained fake nails, balls of hair, and old flyers for the Indian Workers Union. An unexpected poignance is introduced by the central installation of a vintage Red Ford Mk3 Escort Cabriolet XR3i which Kaur said represents her “dad’s first car and his migrant desires.” These elements are all viewed within the context of sound work Yearnings, featuring the artist’s own vocals in the style of the Muslim Rababi tradition, the practice of which she sees as an act of political resistance.
Installation view of Pio Abad’s presentation in “Turner Prize 2024” at Tate Britain from September 25, 2024 – February 16, 2025. Photo: Josh Croll, © Tate Photography.
If the gallery dedicated to Pio Abad has the unmistakeable atmosphere of a museum, that’s intentional. Nominated for “To Those Sitting in Darkness” at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, the Filipino-born artist has delved into the legacy of the many cultural artifacts that have been locked away in the store rooms of Western museums or flagrantly mislabelled for decades.
Abad’s meticulously researched artworks take these “icons of loss, of personal grief, of colonial grief,” out of the darkness and revisit long unexamined histories. In one example, a 1692 etching advertises the chance to view Giolo, a Filipino man who bought as a slave and trafficked to England, where he was put on display as a curiosity before he died of smallpox. It is displayed beside Abad’s Giolo’s Lament (2023), a series of laser engravings on pink marble that in sequence depict the man’s arm reaching out.
“Giolo is at once monument an flesh, etching the forgotten man into permanence but also reminding us of his fragile humanity,” said Abad.
Installation view of Delaine Le Bas’s presentation in “Turner Prize 2024” at Tate Britain from September 25, 2024 – February 16, 2025. Photo: Josh Croll, © Tate Photography.
A clear conceptual underpinning for the immersive installation by Delaine Le Bas is more elusive than it is with the other three artists, though the work apparently delves into the artist’s Roma heritage. She was selected by the judges for the show “Incipit Vita Nova. Here Begins The New Life/ A New Life Is Beginning,” at Secession in Vienna. The constructions of loose fabric decorated with colorful swathes of paint and fantastical figures will certainly be fun for attendees to walk through, but on their way out they are met with an ominous maxim scrawled in blood red: “know thyself.”
“Turner Prize 2024” is on view at Tate Britain through February 16, 2025. More

Next fall, visiting the Design Museum in London will be like stepping aboard The Darjeeling Limited, when the institution hosts Wes Anderson’s first museum showcase.
The 55 year old director, who was born in Texas to an archaeologist and an advertising professional, has already staged several shows celebrating his visionary film career, which began with cult classics like Bottle Rocket (1996) and Rushmore (1998) before producing award-winners like The Royal Tenenbaums (2001) and the animated Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009). Anderson himself, however, just won his first Oscar earlier this year, when his adaption of Roald Dahl’s The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar scored a nod for best live-action short film. Now, it seems, Anderson is ready to crack open his archives.
The taut innocence and angst of Anderson’s summer camp tale Moonrise Kingdom (2012) perhaps best embodies his vibrantly repressed twee aesthetic, which has transcended film to become an outright meme around whimsy. Anderson has woven in and out of fine art while honing that aesthetic. During work on The French Dispatch (2021), even he employed actual painters to produce the art of his imprisoned Benicio del Toro, star of the film’s second vignette.
Interior of the Design Museum © Rob Harris for the Design Museum. Courtesy of the Design Museum.
Anderson already has curatorial experience under his belt, too. In 2018, for instance, he and his wife Juman Malouf took over Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum amidst the institution’s ongoing experiment inviting contemporary creatives like Ed Ruscha to reinterpret their collection. Anderson signed off on a presentation of puppets from The Isle of Dogs (2018) that same year, and authorized a pop up show of the delightfully detailed sets from Asteroid City (2023) after its release. Both spectacles took shape on London’s Strand.
For his comprehensive retrospective, though, the auteur is working with American Empirical Pictures, la Cinémathèque française, and the Design Museum to offer props, costumes, and behind-the-scenes ephemera straight from his personal collection.
“Each Wes Anderson picture plunges the viewer into a world with its own codes, motifs, references, and sumptuous and instantly recognizable sets and costumes,” the press materials read. “Visitors have the opportunity to delve into the art of his complete filmography, examining his inspirations, homages, and the meticulous craftsmanship that define his work.”
In addition to the Anderson show, the museum has also announced a glitzy homage to the iconic London club Blitz, as well as a group show of art, architecture, and technology around the “more than human” movement.
In the meantime, the public is awaiting Anderson’s 12th film, The Phoenician Scheme, which will mark Michael Cera’s first outing with Anderson. Filming has wrapped, and the movie should hit theaters within the next two years—perhaps in time to align with “Wes Anderson” at the Design Museum.
“Wes Anderson: The Exhibition” will be on view at the Design Museum, 224–238 Kensington High St, London, the U.K., November 21, 2025–May 4. 2026. More

Leonard Hilton McGurr was a New York City kid, growing up on West 103rd Street and Broadway, when he first picked up a can of spray paint in the early 1970s. He adopted the moniker Futura 2000, and 50 years later, the graffiti writer-turned fine artist has his first museum show in his home city, courtesy of the Bronx Museum.
“It feels like a return,” Futura told me, reminiscing about his youth painting subway cars in the Bronx.
The subway features heavily in the show, with part of the museum made up with replica MTA signs and ticket booth, as if you were about to board the train. It is harkening back to the early years of the artist’s career, when he would tag cars and then sit on “the bench,” as fellow graffiti artists called it, to watch their handiwork go by on the Bronx’s elevated lines.
“Part of the mystique of graffiti at that time was the citywide exploration and the discovery of all these neighborhoods and areas of the city where the subway lines start and end,” Futura said.
Photo of Futura 2000 and his son (1980s). Photo courtesy of Futura 2000.
The train yards in the Bronx (and other boroughs) became hot spots for graffiti writers like Futura as the burgeoning movement grew from kids armed with just magic markers or a can or two of spray paint to full-fledged artists creating increasingly elaborate designs that would cover the full subway car.
“At 15, I was not considering myself an artist,” Futura admitted. “I was simply making my mark.”
Futura 2000 in Barcelona in 1991. Photo by Janette Beckman, courtesy of Futura 2000.
Developing a real artistic style—one that’s been likened to Wassily Kandinsky, an artist Futura had never head of as a young man—didn’t come until years later.
In 1973, Futura and a friend got caught in a fire in a subway tunnel. The friend was badly injured, and the incident prompted Futura to enlist in the military. But when his service was done in ’78, it wasn’t long before the graffiti world came calling.
“I met up with some of my old graffiti friends, and they were like, ‘you won’t believe what’s going on underground right now,’” Futura recalled.
Futura 2000, Colorforms (1991). Collection of Patrick Lerouge.
He was blown away by the work being done by artists like Phase 2, Dondi, Blade, Zephyr, and Lee Quinones, and was inspired to try his hand at painting an entire subway car himself—”kind of the ultimate prize for us at that time.”
The result was BREAK, which remains one of Futura’s most famous works. Instead of sticking to the standard graffiti lettering highlighting the artist’s name, Futura spent about four hours transforming the train into an abstract canvas, a hazy field of reds, pinks, and orange, with a burst of white in the center.
Martha Cooper, photograph of Futura 2000’s BREAK train (1980). Collection of Futura 2000.
The artistic breakthrough—more impressionistic and more abstract than anything the graffiti world had ever seen, and remarkably beautiful— was immortalized by the famed graffiti photographer Martha Cooper. Her image, shot (naturally) in the Bronx, is one of the exhibition’s highlights.
If the The Break Train and his other early graffiti work had made him a legend, collaborations with brands like Nike, Supreme, and even Louis Vuitton have made Futura a sought after figure in the hypebeast crowd.
Futura 2000, El Diablo, (1985). Collection of KAWS.
So it is fitting that the show has several pairs of coveted Nike sneakers—including a pair made for the 2024 Paris Olympics, for which the artist also designed the official uniforms for the U.S., Japanese, and South Korean breaking teams.
Futura has also created a new site-specific mural at the entrance to the museum galleries, an almost floral looking explosion of reds, blues, blacks, oranges, and pinks that reflects his virtuosity in aerosol paint.
Futura 2000 made a site-specific mural for his show at the Bronx Museum. Photo by Argenis Apolinario.
“The release he gets with these abstractions, plus the precision of his lines—it’s amazing how he transforms the material,” Eileen Jeng Lynch, the Bronx Museum’s director of curatorial programs, told me during a tour of the exhibition. “He was being very experimental and through being innovative and evolving he was able to produce an aesthetic and call it his own. [Futura has] his own unique visual language.”
The show debuted last year at the UB Art Galleries at the University at Buffalo, and was curated by director Robert Scalise with Zack Boehler, the public art project coordinator at the Buffalo AKG Art Museum.
Kenny Scharf, Keith Haring, and Futura 2000 in 1981. Photo by Gregg-Smith.
It tells a fascinating story of unlikely artistic success, as Futura went from early graffiti writing to showing with Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring, and Kenny Scharf at Patti Astor’s Fun Gallery, before (temporarily) quitting the game to focus on raising his kids.
For years, Futura made his living as a bike messenger—his license for “Elite Couriers” is on display alongside photos of him at work and a worn messenger bag. But every time Futura stepped away from his art, something seemed to draw him back in.
Futura 2000’s sculpture Pointman (2019) with his paintings Injection (2018) and Fuxing Road (2014) on view at the Bronx Museum. Photo by Argenis Apolinario.
In the early 2000s, Futura credits the rise of street artists such as Banksy and Shepard Fairey with rekindling interest in earlier practitioners of the medium.
Most recently, it was Eric Firestone Gallery that began working with Futura to reintroduce him to the art world proper in 2020. (He is also represented by the creative agency and artist management firm ICNCLST.) What the gallery recognized was that beyond his reputation in the graffiti world, Futura was and is an artist with a decades-long studio practice.
Futura 2000, Garbage Rock (1983). Collection of Patrick Lerouge.
The Bronx Museum has resurfaced some of Futura’s earliest works on canvas, including a painting he made at the studio of hip hop pioneer Fab 5 Freddy.
Other early ephemera include a Futura painting on a refrigerator door and a “black book” of sketches and signatures from other artists who visited his studio back in 1980, each signing each other’s notebooks. Lost for decades, it is on loan to the museum courtesy of collector Beth Rudin DeWoody.
Futura 2000’s long-lost black book from 1980, on loan to the Bronx Museum courtesy of collector Beth Rudin DeWoody. Photo by Argenis Apolinario.
“One day the book just went missing. I was gutted in the moment,” Futura admitted. “I forgot about that book and when it came back to me as a boomerang, I simply couldn’t believe it because I thought it was actually serendipitous.… it’s just wonderful to have that relic…
returned home, in a sense, for this exhibition.”
“Futura 2000: Breaking Out” is on view at the Bronx Museum, 1040 Grand Concourse, Bronx, New York, September 8, 2024–March 30, 2025. More

In retrospect, Nine Inch Nails’s 1994 record The Downward Spiral had elements that all but guaranteed it iconic status, including an intrepid sound that mashed rock and electronic elements together like none before. On its 30th anniversary, the album has received a second wave of critical attention (yes, it holds up), including a review from Reznor himself who dropped a note on Nine Inch Nails’ website reflecting that listening to his 28-year-old self “still excites me and breaks my heart.”
These are feelings likely shared by fans of the concept album. And for those not content to simply listen to posthumous reflections, there’s an exhibition that’s on the road: “Jonathan Rach: Nine Inch Nails, The Downward Spiral,” which has been organized by Behind The Gallery and will take over 2 Hoxton Street in North London next month.
Robin Finck and Trent Reznor onstage. Photo: Photo: courtesy Jonathan Rach.
The global tour that followed the release of The Downward Spiral was photographed by Rach, who captured the band’s raucous live shows as it catapulted industrial into the mainstream. Rach started collaborating with Nine Inch Nails in the early 1990s as a stage designer and wold later direct Closure, a video album that included live recordings and behind-the-scenes footage.
After its first showing in Australia earlier this year, the exhibition brings forward more than 30 previously unseen photographs from the tour. In addition to the release of limited edition prints, Rach will be on hand for an artist talk that looks back on photographing Reznor et al.
Trent Reznor performing in New South Wales, Australia, during the Self Destruct tour. Photo: courtesy Jonathan Rach.
“To be able to show this collection of photography after some 25 years and see how fans connected to them has been such a rewarding and unexpected gift,” Rach said. “I am looking forward some of the new images I’ve recently found and talking about these captured moments in music history as part of the celebration in London.”
While photographs from The Downward Spiral tour are the focus, Rach has also his images from the band’s six-night residency at the Hollywood Palladium in 2018 as well as images from his work with David Bowie and Lou Reed.
“This is an insight into a pivotal moment in the band’s career and Jonathan was there to capture all of it, before the days of social media,” said Stephen Dallimore, the creative director at Behind The Gallery.
“Jonathan Rach: Nine Inch Nails, The Downward Spiral” will be on view at 2 Hoxton Street, London, October 16–20. More

If the African American tradition of quilting has begun to find its place in the contemporary art world, it’s thanks in no small part to Carolyn Mazloomi, a self-taught quilter who has been a champion of the medium for over 55 years.
Since founding the Women of Color Quilters Network in 1985, Mazloomi has worked tirelessly to promote other Black women making quilts, curating exhibitions of their work at no less than 35 museums and publishing 15 books. A strong sense of ethics precluded her from ever including her own quilts—although they’ve been shown over the years in 35 institutions, largely at universities and museums dedicated to textiles, craft, or folk art.
But now, at age 76, Mazloomi is entering a new phase of her career. She just opened her first commercial gallery show, at Claire Oliver Gallery in Harlem.
“When I first got involved in quilt-making, it was as a maker,” the artist told me on a video call, “and I want to end my career as a maker, because quilts are my first love.”
Mazloomi met Claire Oliver about seven years ago, while the dealer was representing Bisa Butler, the African American artist who has become well-known for her vibrantly colorful quilted portraits. When Butler first began quilting, it was Mazloomi who served as a mentor, helping teach her the medium.
Carolyn Mazloomi, Ruby’s Courage. Photo courtesy of Claire Oliver Gallery, New York.
For years, the Oliver and Mazloomi kept their conversations about other artists who the quilting expert would recommend the dealer check out.
“She’s so humble. Carolyn never talked about her own work,” Oliver told me during a walkthrough of the show. “She would always be like, ‘oh, you need to see this artist or that artist.’”
But while the gallerist was helping younger Black women artists specializing in textile-based work like Butler and Gio Swaby become critical and commercial darlings, Mazloomi was continuing the work she been making for decades.
Her quilts are both tools for social justice and celebrations of the African American story, depicting famous figures such as Ruby Bridges, John Lewis, James Baldwin, and Billie Holiday, as well as telling less familiar stories, like that of Harriet Powers, the first documented African American quilter.
Carolyn Mazloomi, Mother of African Quilting. Photo courtesy of Claire Oliver Gallery, New York.
“I think it’s really important now more than ever. At this point in our country, we have over 30 states that have legislated laws restricting the teaching of Black history,” Mazloomi said. “My quilts are visual, historic documents to tell our story, because it’s becoming increasingly difficult [to do so].”
The artist hopes her quilts can help inspire social change, and raise awareness about systemic racism and the role it has played in U.S. history, through to the present day.
“When most people they see quilts, they think about heart and home and warmth and security,” Mazloomi added. “We all as human beings have a relationship with the cloth. It is the first thing we’re swathed in at birth. It’s the last thing that touches our body upon our death. So in telling these stories about civil rights and race relations in this country, the use of quilts is an easy fix. It’s a soft landing. Because people are familiar with cloth, it’s an easy way to tell very difficult stories.”
Carolyn Mazloomi, Strange Fruit #3. Photo courtesy of Claire Oliver Gallery, New York.
Even before the show’s official opening reception, the largely black-and-white quilts were drawing in passersby from the streets of Harlem.
“Everybody just walking down the street, getting a coffee, eating, going to the bus stop, everybody stops and looks in,” Oliver said, noting that she was constantly having to clean the front windows where people were pressing up against the glass to get a better look.
Visitors are so eager to learn the stories behind each quilt that the gallery has put together a guide to the works, offering biographies for the subjects. Those also include civil rights activist and investigative journalist Ida B. Wells, and Henrietta Lacks, a Black woman whose cancer cells became—without her consent—the first immortalized human cell line, used to this day in biomedical research.
Carolyn Mazloomi, The Immortal Legacy of Henrietta Lacks. Photo courtesy of Claire Oliver Gallery, New York.
And collectors are responding too—Oliver told me that she has sold many of the works, priced at $65,000 to $95,000, to museums.
Mazloomi’s bold, graphic designs are based largely on photographs, and are reminiscent of woodblock prints. In the background, she often incorporates more traditional quilting patterns into her narrative scenes.
Before she was a quilter, Mazloomi, who grew up in Baton Rouge, was an aerospace engineer. She was a young mother living in Los Angeles when she caught the quilting bug after seeing a book about narrative art quilts while on a business trip to Dallas. Back home, she bought a how-to book and set about teaching herself.
Carolyn Mazloomi, Ida B. Wells: A Crusader for Justice. Photo courtesy of Claire Oliver Gallery, New York.
Mazloomi still has her very first quilt, made using First Aid cotton when she couldn’t find cotton batting for filling.
“I kept going back to the drug store,” she recalled. “One day I was getting a batch of this cotton and the pharmacist came out and he says, ‘lady, I don’t know who’s sick in your home, but I think you need to get them to the hospital.’”
The first aid supply turned out not to be a good substitute, as the quilt did not survive its first trip through the dryer.
Carolyn Mazloomi, Rainy Day Twins in the Time of Covid. Photo courtesy of Claire Oliver Gallery, New York.
“My sons often tease me about that quilt. They say I have to pay them not to show it to anybody,” Mazloomi admitted. “It looks like a fried egg. The middle of it shrunk in all kinds of weird places.”
Founding the Women of Color Quilters Network was a way to learn more about quilting, and to help build a new quilting community, in the tradition of Gee’s Bend, Alabama, and other historic groups of African American women quilters.
Carolyn Mazloomi, Voting Rights. Photo courtesy of Claire Oliver Gallery, New York.
Today, there are about 500 women in the group, down from 1,700 at its peak.
“That’s because most of them have passed away,” Mazloomi said. “Most of our members are between 76 and 104.”
Faith Ringgold, the great artist known for her narrative quilts, for instance, died in April at 93. Though Ringgold wasn’t a member of the network, Mazloomi was a friend, and the first owner of Ringgold’s famous piece Tar Beach (now at New York’s Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum), the sale of which put the younger artist’s three sons through college.
Carolyn Mazloomi, Hands Up … Dont Shoot #2. Photo courtesy of Claire Oliver Gallery, New York.
Mazloomi wishes the network had been more successful in passing along quilting techniques to the younger generation, but she understands why the labor-intensive practice doesn’t have more adherents.
“When you see how painstaking it is, it’s like birthing a baby. Making a quilt is so time consuming and intense,” she admitted. “But there’s no comparison as to how I feel when I finish making a quilt. I have put so much of myself into the actual making of it, so the making of quilt is a spiritual happening, and the completion of the quilt is an event.”
“Carolyn Mazloomi: Whole Cloth, Narratives in Black and White” is on view at Claire Oliver Gallery, 2288 Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard, New York, New York, September 3–November 16, 2024. More

You don’t have to be an art history buff to recognize the work of Vincent van Gogh. Many of his most-loved motifs have been reproduced so many times that they are instantly recognizable: Who could mistake the swirling sky from The Starry Night or the mass of bedraggled yellow petals in his Sunflowers series?
In the century since they were acquired in 1924, two of van Gogh’s archetypal paintings have been among the crown jewels of the collection at the National Gallery in London—those most famous sunflowers in a vase as well as Van Gogh’s Chair (1888) have attracted visitors from across the globe.
In celebration of its 200th anniversary, the U.K. institution is further expanding our love and understanding of the artist with a significant new exhibition: “Van Gogh: Poets and Lovers,” on view through January 19, 2025. The title refers to the figures that Van Gogh portrayed, but is also inspired by the unique way in which he perceived the world and reimagined it as part of his own artistic universe.
Installation view of “Van Gogh: Poets and Lovers” at the National Gallery in London. Photo: © The National Gallery, London.
Over 50 works have been loaned, including prize pieces from the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam and the Musée d’Orsay in Paris. These canvases will be displayed alongside the artist’s drawings, providing additional insight into his vision and process.
We took a look at some of the show’s highlights.

The Sower (1888)
Vincent Van Gogh, The Sower (1888). Photo: © Kunsthaus Zürich.
An agricultural laborer scattering seeds in the cool light of dusk was a subject that Van Gogh returned to repeatedly, creating over 30 drawings and paintings that featured the sower, a biblical figure. These works tended to be constructed using surreal colors like green or orange skies and purple plots of land that are emotionally evocative rather than closely reflecting reality. This mode of expression may have been influenced by fellow Post-Impressionist painter Paul Gauguin who, in 1888, was also living in the southern French town of Arles.

The Lover (Portrait of Lieutenant Milliet) (1888)
Vincent van Gogh, The Lover (Portrait of Lieutenant Milliet) (1888). Photo: Rik Klein Gotink, © Collection Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo, The Netherlands.
When Van Gogh was living in Arles, France, he enjoyed a friendship with Paul-Eugène Milliet, a second lieutenant of the French army to whom he gave drawing lessons. In a letter to his brother Theo, the artist described how he admired the officer’s way with women, a characteristic also invoked by the portrait’s title. “Milliet’s lucky, he has all the Arlésiennes he wants, but there you are, he can’t paint them, and if he was a painter he wouldn’t have any,” he wrote.

Landscape near the Abbey of Montmajour (1888)
Vincent van Gogh, Landscape near the Abbey of Montmajour (1888). Photo: © Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.
Montmajour Abbey was once a Benedictine monastery built between the 10th and 19th centuries. Van Gogh visited often, repeatedly drawing and painting the ruin amid a rugged landscape. In this example, a protruding rock and surrounding wild grasslands take a position of prominence in the foreground, leaving us to spy the abbey in the distance. Though unusual, this perspective is truthful to the ways in which we encounter the world around us.

The Bedroom (1889)
Vincent van Gogh, The Bedroom (1889). Photo: © The Art Institute of Chicago.
While living in Arles, Van Gogh rented four rooms in a building that he called “the yellow house.” He painted both its exterior and this interior view of his bedroom with green shutters, and framed pictures hanging on the wall. Researchers have recently determined, however, that the blue walls are in fact the result of partial discoloration. Originally, the walls were purple, as also referenced in a letter to Theo, in which Van Gogh described a simple but multi-chromatic composition “à la Seurat.”
“In flat tints, but coarsely brushed in full impasto, the walls pale lilac, the floor in a broken and faded red, the chairs and the bed chrome yellow, the pillows and the sheet very pale lemon green, the bedspread blood-red, the dressing-table orange, the washbasin blue, the window green,” he said. “I had wished to express utter repose with all these very different tones.”
The artist also explained to his brother that his decision to flatten the room rather than apply the principles of perspective was intended to recreate the effect of a Japanese print. He had a sizable collection of these works that he often referred to.

The Poet (Portrait of Eugène Boch) (1888)
Vincent van Gogh, The Poet (Portrait of Eugène Boch) (1888). Photo: © Photo © RMN-Grand Palais (musée d’Orsay) / Adrien Didierjean.
While living in Arles, van Gogh befriended another painter from Belgium, Eugène Boch. He was immediately drawn to “his distinctive face, like a razor blade, and his green eyes” and was inspired to try out a semi-fantastical portrait concept. It would reflect something of the mind of an artist or a poet, “a man who dreams great dreams, who works like the nightingale sings, because it is his nature to do so.”
“Behind his head, instead of painting the ordinary wall of this shabby apartment, I will paint infinity,” van Gogh decided, in a letter to Theo. “Through this simple combination of the bright head against this rich, blue background, I will obtain a mysterious effect, like a star in the depths of an azure sky”. Van Gogh christened the portrait The Poet and hung it on his bedroom wall.
“Van Gogh: Poets and Lovers” is on view at the National Gallery in London until January 19, 2025.  More

Although many women artists gained recognition in their lifetimes, their names have too often fallen into obscurity as art historians privileged the achievements of their male peers. The exhibition “Now You See Us: Women Artists in Britain 1520–1920” at Tate Britain in London brings together paintings by over 100 artists with a connection to the U.K., debunking the widely held assumption that there were very few significant women artists before the 20th century.
Two women artists, Angelica Kauffman and Mary Moser, for example, were among the founding members of the Royal Academy of Arts in London in 1768. In the centuries since, women have continued to work hard to forge impressive careers against the odds.
Examples of rampant sexism are rife throughout the exhibition. In 1770, the Royal Academy banned many mediums typically associated with women artists, including needle-work and shell-work. Then-president Joshua Reynolds spoke dismissively of work in pastel as “just what ladies do when they paint for their own amusement.”
When one artist, Mary Black, asked to be paid for her 1764 portrait of physician Messenger Monsey, he threatened that her expectation of a fee could damage her reputation. He referred to her as a “slut” in a letter to his cousin.
It is also too often assumed that women of the past had only dull and contained existences. From romantic affairs with a U.S. founding father, to brave legal battles, living in a ménage-à-trois, and documenting the Nuremberg trials, these women artists often led unusual lives and had a unique perspective to share with their audiences. Here are six standout artists from the show who lived particularly storied lives.
Maria Cosway (1760–1838)
Maria Cosway, Georgiana as Cynthia from Spenser’s “Faerie Queene” (1781-82). Reproduced by permission of Chatsworth Settlement Trustees.
Born in Florence in 1760 to an English father and an Italian mother, Maria Cosway (née Hadfield) narrowly escaped becoming the fifth victim of her family’s murderous nursemaid, who was later imprisoned. Showing natural artistic talents from a young age, she studied under the artists Violante Cerroti and Johann Zoffany in Florence and Pompeo Batoni in Rome.
Shortly after moving to London in her late teens, Cosway debuted her work at the Royal Academy of Arts in 1781 and, over the following two decades, would exhibit some 30 more paintings. She gained critical acclaim for her inventive mythological scenes like Georgiana as Cynthia from Spenser’s “Faerie Queene,” a portrait of Georgiana Cavendish, Duchess of Devonshire.
Cosway changed her name after marrying the miniaturist Richard Cosway, who initially tried to prevent her from painting professionally. She later speculated that, without this interference to her career, she could have “made a better painter, but left to myself by degrees, instead of improving, I lost what I brought from Italy of my early studies.”
Despite these setbacks, Cosway kept painting and maintained strong connections with the continent. Her friend, the Neo-Classical painter Jacques-Louis David, once said of her engraving The Hours: “One could not create a more ingenious or more natural poetic work.” Later in life, she had a brief affair with founding father and future U.S., president Thomas Jefferson, with whom she bonded over their shared love of the arts.
Florence Claxton (1838–1920)
Florence Claxton, Woman’s Work, A Medley (1861). Photo courtesy of Tate.
Named after the city where she was born in 1838 to English parents, Florence Claxton’s childhood was spent moving between continents. First her family settled in Australia before moving to India, Sri Lanka, and later Egypt. By the time she moved to London, Claxton was around 20 years old. Inevitably, she was something of an outsider to English society and, therefore, able to see it with a keen satirical eye.
Having been trained by her father, an artist, Claxton made a living as an illustrator and started to gain recognition after exhibiting Scenes from the Life of a Female Artist (1858), a series of six humorous ink drawings that would establish her interest in documenting the experiences of women, always with a light, humorous touch. The Choice of Paris: An Idyll (1860) took aim at the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, densely merging together many parodies of specific paintings by male artists to undermine the patriarchal culture of the 19th century art world. In 1870, Claxton wrote and illustrated the comic book The Adventures of a Woman in Search of Her Rights.
The painting Women’s Work: A Medley (1861) is thought to be a rebuttal to Ford Madox Brown’s painting Work, which only focused on examples of men laboring. At the center a young, well-dressed, evidently affluent man lies back on his chair and the golden calf above his head is a symbol that marks him out as a false idol. Around him, some women clamor to win his favor, others engage in dreary domestic tasks, while just a few attempt escape. The work critiques the limited opportunities for professional advancement for Victorian women, forcing them to be reliant on men. Most critics disliked the painting, with one accusing it of “sermonizing on social topics” that were “not within the province of art.”
In 1859, Claxton signed a petition to allow women to join the Royal Academy of Arts and the first woman student, Laura Herford, was admitted a year later. The first woman member of the academy would not be elected until 1922, two years after Claxton died.
Louise Jopling (1843–1933)
Louise Jopling, A Modern Cinderella (1875). Photo courtesy Tate.
One of the most prominent female artists of the Victorian era, Louise Jopling (née Goode) was born in Manchester in 1843. Through her first of three husbands she met the French socialite and painter Baroness de Rothschild, who encouraged her to study art in Paris. She began exhibiting at the Salon in 1868, later showing at the Royal Academy of Arts in London, the Philadelphia Exposition in 1876, and the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893.
Admired for her portraits of notable sitters, Jopling worked out of a studio in London’s Chelsea that is captured in A Modern Cinderella. A model takes of a smart dress at the end of a painting session and Jopling’s easel can be spotted reflected in the mirror.
During her marriage to Joseph Middleton Jopling, an artist for the magazine Vanity Fair, she was the family’s main breadwinner and had to maintain an exhaustingly high output. Jopling could also expect to earn less than her male peers. In 1883, she lost out on a commission for which she hoped to be paid 150 guineas. It went instead to John Everett Millais, who was paid 1,000 guineas for the same gig.
Jopling’s social circle quickly grew to include figures like Oscar Wilde, actress Ellen Terry, and Whistler, who also painted her. As well as becoming a regular at glamorous parties on the London social scene, Jopling was a passionate supporter of the women’s suffrage movement. She set up her own painting school for women where the students were allowed to work directly from live nude models, a radical act at a time when other schools only allowed women to draw partially clothed models.
Edmonia Lewis (1844–1907)
Edmonia Lewis, Bust of Christ (1870). Photo courtesy The Bute Collection at Mount Stuart.
Edmonia Lewis, also known as “Wildfire,” was born in 1844 in New York state to an African American father and a Native American (Ojibwe) mother. She is celebrated as one of the first Black women artists to gain international renown.
Orphaned at a young age, Lewis recalled a “wandering” childhood spent “fishing and swimming… and making moccasins.” When she attended school, she was “declared to be wild–they could do nothing with me.” She later enrolled at Oberlin, one of the first U.S. colleges to accept Black students, though she experienced racism and sexism throughout her time there.
In one case, she was charged with attempting to poison two friends who she had served spiced wine before they fell ill. She was attacked by unknown assailants before standing trial, where she was successfully defended by Ohio’s first Black lawyer John Mercer Langston. Eventually, Lewis dropped out of Oberlin but was posthumously awarded her degree in 2022.
Lewis began her career in Boston sculpting prominent abolitionists. In her early 20s, she moved to Rome where she became part of a vibrant community of artists and expats and would remain for two decades.
“I was practically driven to Rome in order to obtain the opportunities for art culture, and to find a social atmosphere where I was not constantly reminded of my color,” she later recalled. “The land of liberty had no room for a colored sculptor.”
Lewis began sculpting in the Neoclassical style. The marble bust of Jesus Christ on view at Tate Britain was produced for the Scottish aristocrat and antiquarian John Crichton-Stuart, Third Marquess of Bute. In 1877, she made a portrait of ex-U.S. president Ulysses S. Grant. Lewis moved to Paris in around 1896 and then, in 1901, to London, where she spent her final years.
Clare Atwood (1866–1962)
Clare Atwood, Olympia in War Time Royal Army Clothing Depot, 1918. Photo courtesy Imperial War Museum, London.
Born in London in 1866, Clare Atwood is known for painting a great range of subjects that include portraits, still lifes, landscapes, and interior scenes in large, public spaces. During the First World War, she painted war scenes for the Canadian Government and later documented the daily activities of the Women’s Voluntary Service in a group of works commissioned by the Imperial War Museum.
One of these, Olympia in War Time: Royal Army Clothing Depot, 1918, shows a bustle of activity in a disused train station as workers are dwarfed by towering bundles of army uniforms.
Atwood lived openly as a lesbian who sometimes went by the name “Tony.” She lived with two partners, the writer Christabel “Chris” Marshall and the theater producer Edith “Edy” Craig, in Kent, and the trio’s social circle included many artists and writers. Their friend, the sculptor Una Troubridge, who was in a relationship with Marguerite “John” Radclyffe Hall, sometimes referred to them as “Edy and the boys.”
Laura Knight (1877–1970)
Laura Knight, A Dark Pool (1917). All rights reserved 2024 / Bridgeman Images, © Estate of Dame Laura Knight.
Born in England’s Midlands, Laura Knight (née Johnson) grew up in financial precarity after her father deserted her family. By the age of 13, she was enrolled at the Nottingham School of Art where her mother taught, but just two years later was forced to take over her mother’s job when she fell ill with cancer. Orphaned by her late teens, Knight continued to make a living through private tutoring and ended up marrying fellow student Harold Knight. The pair moved to Cornwall and joined an artists’ colony.
In 1913, frustrated by the expectation that women learn to draw from copying casts rather than live nude models, Knight produced Self-portrait with Nude. It was the first time a female artist was depicted painting a nude model. The bold work was well-received by some but rejected for an exhibition at the Royal Academy and labelled “vulgar” by a critic for The Daily Telegraph. The work is now held in the collection of the National Portrait Gallery.
Knight was drawn to subjects that were often overlooked by traditional portrait painters. While living briefly in Baltimore in 1926, she became friends with and depicted the nurse Pearl Johnson who took her to meetings for the emerging Civil Rights movement. During the 1930s, she befriended a group of travelers who she often painted in works like Old Gypsy Women (1938) and Gypsy Splendour (1939).
In 1946, Knight documented the Nuremberg trials for the War Artists’ Advisory Committee, from which her most famous painting contains a semi-fantastical scene in which Nazi war criminals are set against the burning ruins of a destroyed cityscape. Amazingly, Knight was the third woman to be elected as a member of the Royal Academy in 1936 and received their first retrospective for a woman artist in 1965.
“Now You See Us: Women Artists in Britain 1520-1920” is on view until October 13, 2024 at at Tate Britain, London. More