Art & Exhibitions

In Jane Austen’s 1814 coming-of-age novel Mansfield Park, Fanny Price, a young woman who learns to navigate high society when she moves into the estate of her aunt and uncle, receives an amber cross from her brother William, a navy officer who just returned from Sicily.
This detail, like many others in Austen’s work, is directly inspired by the author’s own life. Her brother Charles was a sailor, too, and would often bring back trinkets from his travels. Some of these trinkets—including a pair of topaz crosses gave to Austen and her sister Cassandra—are now on display at Jane Austen’s House, her onetime residence in Chawton, the U.K.
The museum’s newest exhibition, “Jane Austen and the Art of Writing,” opened on October 9. Included with general admission to the House, it explores the relationship between Austen’s writing—which aside from Mansfield Park includes such timeless novels as Emma, Pride and Prejudice, and Sense and Sensibility—and the domestic setting in which she wrote.
Jane Austen’s House in Chawton. Photo: Jane Austen’s House.
Aside from those aforementioned crosses, the exhibition features rarely seen first-edition copies of Austen’s novels, two of which belonged to her brothers Frank and Edward. Also featured are several of Austen’s letters, which, while not as famous as her full-fledged novels, display her skill as a writer and offer insight into her private life.
Being Jane Austen’s former residence, the museum also houses some of her favorite pieces of furniture, including a custom-made, 12-sided display case and a 12-sided writing table, the latter of which is now located in the building’s dining room. (According to the memoirs of Austen’s nephew James Edward Austen-Leigh, her desk used to be located in the sitting room, because its creaking door warned the author of approaching footsteps.)
Jane Austen’s historic kitchen. Photo: Jane Austen’s House.
Items from the John Murray Archive at the National Library of Scotland shed light on Austen’s relationship with her publishers, John Murray and Thomas Egerton. A check made out to “Miss Jane Austin” [sic], taken from Murray’s account book, show that Austen, unlike female authors from previous centuries, did not write under a male or gender-neutral pen name.
“This exhibition is a deep dive into Jane Austen’s creative process,” Sophie Reynolds, the House’s head of collections, interpretations and events, said in a press release. “We hope that it will unlock a new way for our visitors to understand Jane Austen as a dedicated, driven and professional writer, and to explore how her life and living arrangements affected her writing in the very house in which she lived and wrote.”
Jane Austen’s writing table. Photo: Luke Shears / Jane Austen’s House.
The show will lead the museum into the 250th anniversary of the legendary author’s birth. Throughout the incoming year, Jane Austen’s House will organize a variety of exhibitions, events, and festivals, starting with the annual Pride and Prejudice Day on January 28, which will include a public reading of the novel, and ending with musical performances, readings, and tours on December 16.
“Jane Austen and the Art of Writing” is on view at Jane Austen’s House, Winchester Rd, Chawton, Alton, U.K. More

The Middle Ages were not the ‘dark’ and somber antithesis to the Enlightenment that clichés may have us believe. It was also a time of fantasy and certainly playful humor. Now, a comedic character ubiquitous to medieval culture—the fool—is taking center stage as the subject of a Louvre exhibit in Paris titled, “Figures of the Fool,” from October 16 to February 3, 2025.
From witty jesters to lascivious buffoons, men gone mad and subversive artists who live on the margins of society, the show takes a fresh look at how this figure was regularly depicted from the 13th to the 16th century, and then again during the Romantic era. In the imaginations of those who painted, carved, and wove these figures of folly on everything from tableaux to, literally, bells and whistles, these subjects served as a canvas for exploring a world turned on its head. A mirror to the absurdity and contradictions of life that were hard to face, but important to express and attempt to understand. In the form of the fool, this was most often voiced through humor—possibly the ultimate, and only real salve to the weight of life’s troubles.
After Hyeronimus Bosch, Concert in the Egg Former Netherlands, mid XVIth century.© RMN-Grand Palais (Palais des Beaux-Arts, Lille). Stéphane Maréchalle
If this all sounds like it could as easily apply to contemporary life, it’s no coincidence. The jester —inspiration for the playing card, the Joker, more on that below—has continued to capture our imaginations for many of the same reasons. The Louvre exhibit, featuring over 300 artworks from Northern Europe, sheds new light on why that may be.
Who or what exactly is the fool, as it originated in the Middle Ages? A common depiction comes from the characters described in Sebastian Brant’s Ship of Fools (1494), a hugely popular and influential, German satirical allegory. There, the fool, “plays a key role, because he is an outlet during a time of crisis in the church, and amid the mutations of a society in full upheaval, notably with the emergence of capitalism,” said Elisabeth Antoine-König, senior curator in the Department of Decorative Arts in an e-mail written in French. “The fool allows for a figurative representation of questions troubling society,” she added. Later, during the Romantic period, the fool—usually a male figure—is identified with the artist, and their struggle with inner thoughts and emotions.
The fool is “one thing and its opposite, he is the rejected marginalized figure, and the one who unites us, and bears the ridicule and anger of others,” added Antoine-König, who compares these ambivalent traits with the supervillain Joker, of DC Comics.
Marx Reichlich, A Jester. Tyrol (ca. 1519-1520). © Yale University Art Gallery.
By coincidence, Todd Philipps’s new film, Joker: Folie a Deux has come out at about the same time as the Louvre’s exhibit, though the latter was apparently in the making for over ten years. Far be it from the world’s largest museum to pass up a golden opportunity. The Louvre partnered with Warner Bros Pictures on a short clip promoting both endeavors. Lady Gaga, who stars in the Joker film, can be seen in the clip wandering through the Louvre halls at night, and painting a red lipstick smile over the glass protecting the Mona Lisa. From the right angle, it transforms La Joconde’s modest, soft smile, into a wide, cartoonish grin. Plus, La Joconde, as she is called in French, sounds a lot like Joker, points out the museum in a statement. Touché.
Aquamanile : Aristotle and Phyllis. South Netherlandish, (ca. 1380). © The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Yet as captivating and troublesome a figure as the fool still is, Antoine-König wonders whether there is still much we can learn from the fool of yesteryear, when it played a much more prominent role in social life. “I feel that the figure of the fool, as it existed in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance is lacking today, in helping us face the crises we are experiencing… During that period [13th to 16th centuries], most subjects could be interpreted in a variety of ways. Today, we reflect little on the exercise of seeing things from different angles.”
Jan Matejko, Stanczyk during a ball at the court of Queen Bona in the face of the loss of Smolensk. Krakow, (1862). © Varsovie, Muzeum Narodowe w Warszawie / Piotr Ligier
Antoine-König, who co-curated the Louvre exhibit with Pierre-Yves Le Pogam, also compares our current, fraught experience with digital technology and social media to the radical transformations brought by the invention of the printer. “But who is helping us manage this turning point?” She asks. “In the artworks we are exhibiting, the artists, and through them, the people of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, allowed themselves to laugh about a lot of particularly difficult things.” More

Amid a bustling week in Paris, as the art market continues to clamor for bits of real estate and attention in the city of lights, the French capital’s institutions continue to shine with major art exhibitions. Here are five shows that you must not miss on your next visit.

“Barbara Chase-Riboud: Everytime A Knot is Undone, A God is Released”
Several Locations
September 17, 2024—January 13, 2025
Barbara Chase-Riboud, Mao’s Organ (2007). 2024 Musée Guimet © Barbara Chase-Riboud.
In a never-before-seen synchronized collaboration, eight major museums in Paris—including the Musée d’Orsay, Louvre Museum, Centre Pompidou, and the Palais de Tokyo—are concurrently showing work by a living artist. “Everytime A Knot is Undone, A God is Released” is named after Barbara Chase-Riboud’s poetry collection released in 2014, and celebrates the artist’s seven-decade career. Sculptures by Chase-Riboud, made from a variety of materials from bronze to wool, act like markers of Chase-Riboud’s life in the city where she has lived since 1961, spread across the city over the course of four months. “Everytime A Knot is Undone, A God is Released” is the first multi-museum exhibition of a solo artist ever in the French capital, let alone the first to unite eight of the country’s most important galleries and museums.

“Arte Povera”
The Pinault Collection
October 9, 2024–January 20, 2025
Michelangelo Pistoletto, Venus of Rags (1967). © Pinault Collection, 2024.
The Arte Povera movement, born in Northern Italy in the 1960s, was not so much “Povera” as in “poor,” but as in “humble.” Artists created artwork from non-traditional materials and brought their unusual sculptures into the formal gallery space. Curated by Arte Povera specialist Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, the major show at the Pinault Collection includes historically significant works from the collection as well as new commissions and loans from international collections.
Including Michelangelo Pistoletto’s Venus of Rags (1967), Alighiero Boetti’s Castasta (1967), and one of Mario Merz’ igloos among over 250 artworks made by or in response to the Arte Povera group, the show at Paris’ Pinault Collection is sure to be a comprehensive guide through one of Italy’s most influential conceptual art movements.

“Jackson Pollock: The Early Years (1934 – 1947)”
Musée Picasso
October 15, 2024–January 19, 2025
Jackson Pollock, The Key (1946). © Pollock-Krasner Foundation / ADAGP, Paris 2024.
His first exhibition in France for over 15 years, “Jackson Pollock: The Early Years (1934–1947)” is a comprehensive showcase of the Abstract Expressionist icon’s early career. Evidencing Pollock’s interest in Native American art, contemporary avant-garde artwork from Europe, and the work of the Mexican Muralists, in The Early Years we see how Pollock moved towards the development of his signature “drip” action paintings begun in 1947.  These earlier works, which include figurative Expressionist-inspired paintings, drawings—some of which the artist may have brought with him to Jungian therapy sessions he undertook in the 1930s to address his alcohol issues—as well as sculptures, have not often been exhibited in their own right.

“Elmgreen & Dragset: L’Addition”
Musée d’Orsay
October 15, 2024–February 2, 2025
Elmgreen et Dragset © Musée d’Orsay Sophie Crépy
Nestling a new series of figurative artworks into the museum’s sculpture nave in a site-specific curation that straddles sculpture and performance, L’Addition is a never-before-seen architectural installation at the Musée d’Orsay. Such innovation comes as no surprise to fans of Elmgreen & Dragset, the Scandinavian duo who have built their reputation on subversive artworks and humorous installations. Exploring notions of masculinity in dialogue with works in the permanent collection of the Musée d’Orsay, “L’Addition” is guaranteed to highlight both subtler themes in and surprising similarities between both collections.

“Martine Syms: Total”
Lafayette Anticipations, Fondation Galeries Lafayette
October 16, 2024–February 9, 2025
Martine Syms, This Is A Studio / Aunty (35) (2022-23). © Martine Syms. Courtesy of the artist, Sprüth Magers.
Syms’ first retrospective in France, “Total” is the American artist’s attempt to entirely envelop the Lafayette in a total work of art. Including pieces from all stages of Syms’ career from 2007 onwards, this show tackles and breaks down the boundaries between public exhibition space, private artist studio, and gift shop by asking conceptual questions about the intersections between images and identities.
These intersections are referred to in the show’s promotional materials as the “theatre of the everyday.” A selection of works and motifs from the show have been produced in editions for purchase, continuing the show’s dialogue about consumption and ownership. Offering visitors a colorful, multi-media experience, “Total” delves into what it means to live life in public spaces in a surveillance-heavy era.

“Pop Forever, Tom Wesselmann &…”
The Fondation Louis Vuitton
October 17, 2024–February 24, 2025
Tom Wesselmann, Mouth #14 (Marilyn) (1967). © Adagp, Paris, 2024, Jeffrey Sturges.
Taking over all floors of the Fondation Louis Vuitton, “Pop Forever, Tom Wesselmann &” is putting over 200 works by Pop Art legends on display in Paris. Alongside 150 works by Wesselmann are pieces by Ai Weiwei, Andy Warhol, Marisol, Claes Oldenburg, Yayoi Kusama, Jeff Koons, and Roy Lichtenstein. This exhibition is a celebration of all-things Pop Art, in all of its manifestations from the Surrealist and Dada-inspired beginnings to artists today influenced by Pop’s pioneers of the 1950s and 1960s. Key works on display will include Wesselmann’s early collages made in the 1950s as well as his later landscapes made shortly before his death in 2004, as well as Warhol’s Shot Sage Blue Marilyn (1964), and Jeff Koons’ Three Ball 50/50 Tank (1985). More

In April 1874, 150 years ago, the Impressionists held their first exhibition together in the studio of Felix Nadar on the Boulevard des Capucines in Paris. It was a less-than-complimentary review by the critic Louis Leroy of this show that would give the burgeoning art group their name: Leroy describing how Monet’s Impression, Sunrise was less finished that “wallpaper in its embryonic state” and “Impressionism” being reclaimed.
Now, Amsterdam’s Van Gogh Museum is the site of the new exhibition “Vive l’impressionnisme! Masterpieces from Dutch Collections,” marking the revolutionary art movement’s 150th anniversary.
Paintings, sculptures, drawings, prints, and decorative plates by major Impressionists are being brought together for the exhibition, including work by Claude Monet, Edgar Degas, Berthe Morisot, Mary Cassatt, Auguste Rodin, Camille Pissarro, and Pierre-August Renoir. Artworks on display have been loaned from collections across the country, including from some of the Netherland’s most significant arts institutions including the Rijksmuseum, Stedelijk Museum, Kröller-Müller Museum, and the Kunstmuseum the Hague as well as numerous Dutch private collections. 150 Years of Impressionism – The Netherlands Sees the Light, an accompanying publication to the exhibition, includes texts by 13 Impressionist curators and scholars.
Claude Monet, Poppy Field (Champs de coquelicots) (1881) © Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen.
The exhibition homes in on how Impressionism was received in the Netherlands, and looks at the role that key Dutch collectors like Theo van Gogh played in the movement’s spread outside of France. The catalogue accompanying “Vive l’impressionnisme!” explores the questions the exhibition attempts to tackle, including “when did interest in Impressionist art arise in the Netherlands; who exhibited these works; who purchased them for their own collections; and which works were not appreciated or acquired in time?”
The art dealer Theo van Gogh is best-known for financially supporting his brother, Vincent van Gogh, acting as his dealer, financier, and confidant throughout his life. After Vincent’s death in 1890 and Theo’s in 1891, Theo’s widow Johanna van Gogh-Bonger collated and published a collection of some of the hundreds of letters that the brothers had sent back and forth to each other over many years. This published collection helped to cement Vincent’s legacy after being famously under-appreciated during his lifetime.
Pierre-Auguste Renoir, In the Café (Au café) (c. 1877) © Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo.
The Van Gogh Museum opened in Amsterdam’s Museum Square in June 1973, 83 years after the artist’s death, displaying—among other major artworks—previously unsold work by van Gogh. These unsold works had passed from Johanna to her son, also named Vincent, and were subsequently loaned to the Stedelijk Museum for many years before the Dutch government commissioned a permanent museum dedicated to the artist in 1963.
While the Van Gogh brothers did have their own collection which included several Impressionist works, the Van Gogh Museum has been on a mission since the 1990s to expand their collection of Impressionist art. Recently the Museum has been focused on acquiring work by female Impressionists, most recently collecting pieces by Marie Bracquemond, Berthe Morisot, and Mary Cassatt: Impressionism’s “Trois Grandes Dames”. Part of the exhibition, a virtual installation called the Gallery of Lost Opportunities will highlight masterpieces which were once held in Dutch collections but were sold to collections abroad.
Berthe Morisot, Walk in the Woods (Au bois) (1876) © Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam.
Other 150th anniversary celebrations have been held around the world, including an auction at Christie’s New York, an exhibition at the Musee d’Orsay, Paris, and a festival in Normandy.
Fleur Roos Rosa de Carvalho, the curator of the show, told Artnet News: “I am thrilled to finally share this exhibition with the world. It presents a broad picture of the Impressionist movement, celebrating artists who refused to stick to a singular medium—they moved fluidly between different art forms, ignoring all of the age-old hierarchies that ranked painting at the top. Here colorful watercolors and pastels are shown with experimental sculptures and prints, which we hope will challenge the prevailing image of the Impressionists as mere painters of light and color.”
Mary Cassatt, Woman Bathing (1890–91) © Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam.
“I’m also really honored to bring these Dutch collections together under one roof for the first time. It’s my hope that the show will inspire other museums and private collectors to continue to work together on an ambitious collecting policy for Impressionist art that transcends national boundaries.”
“Vive l’impressionnisme! Masterpieces from Dutch Collections” will be on display at the Van Gogh Museum from October 11 2024 to 26 January 2025. More

“Dalí Alive,” a multimedia exhibition at the Lume at Indianapolis’s Newfields, has redirected attention to a mysterious case of a missing watercolor by the famed Surrealist whose designs the show is devoted to.
The exhibition, spread across 30,000 square feet, sees Salvador Dalí artworks enlarged and projected onto the walls and floors, promising an immersive experience. “Dalí Alive” follows on from the Lume’s first two immersive shows devoted to reliable crowd-pleasers, one each to Impressionism and to Vincent van Gogh.
The display includes four Dalí watercolors (remember that number!) from the collection of the Indianapolis Museum of Art, part of the Newfields complex.
Salvador Dalí, Tragedy and Comedy (1961). © 2023 Salvador Dalí, Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí, Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY.
The Spaniard created the watercolors as part of his commission to design sets and costumes for the 1961–62 production of Baroque composer Alessandro Scarlatti’s 1714 opera The Spanish Lady and the Roman Cavalier, produced by Lorenzo Alvary. A Hungarian-American operatic bass, Alvary created his own company in order to put on the opera, in which he played the male lead.
Dalí was in some ways a sensible choice: he had already some experience as a designer for theatrical productions, including several ballets throughout the 1940s.
The opera follows a love story between a Roman centurion and a Catalan woman following the fall of the Roman Empire. The production traveled to Venice, Brussels, and Paris, a tour apparently so physically grueling that a principal ballerina (who had been performing without an understudy for seven months) collapsed on stage during a Paris performance.
Salvador Dalí, The Elephants (1961). © 2023 Salvador Dalí, Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí, Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY.
Decca Records released a 1962 record of the opera that featured an interview with Dalí. The album cover features one of the watercolors, Apotheosis (1961), emblazoned with a large signature; other Dalí works are included on the reverse and inside of the record sleeve, including Tragedy and Comedy.
In addition to Apotheosis, which features Dalí’s trademark melting clocks among other Surrealist details, and Tragedy and Comedy, Lume is also displaying Musicians and The Elephants, which which Dalí created for the opera and which stars long-legged pachyderms that are also seen in Dalí’s 1948 The Elephants.
Dalí had extravagant plans for The Spanish Lady. Actors blew bubbles filled with Guerlain perfume (though they failed to achieve the square bubbles that Dalí wanted). A Time magazine review of the show gives a long list of things that went awry during a performance at Venice’s La Fenice theatre. These oddities included Dalí himself throwing paint onto a canvas (and onto some audience members) while dressed as a Venetian gondolier, and several “visual distractions” like a walking violin, a blind man seated in front of a TV, some uncomfortably erotic dancing, and liquid carbon dioxide “milk” flowing onto the stage from underneath the rafters.
Salvador Dalí, Musicians (1961). © 2023 Salvador Dalí, Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí, Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY.
The collaboration between artist and producer was not a peaceful one. Dalí took Alvary to court when he claimed that he was not staying true to his creative vision. (The case was dismissed.) Plans to take the show to London and New York were duly scrapped.
“Dalí Alive” is the first time the watercolor set designs from The Spanish Lady have been on public display for over 45 years. Alvary and his wife Hallie, who owned the paintings, donated them to the Indianapolis Museum of Art in 1973; their agreement with Dalí stipulated that they would not be allowed to sell them.
But here’s the mystery: there were five watercolors, not just the four on view in Indianapolis. The location of the final watercolor is unknown, and it was not donated to the IMA.
Also missing are the costume designs. Their whereabouts are entirely unknown.
“Dalí Alive” is on view at the Lume Indianapolis at Newfields, 4000 N Michigan Rd, Indianapolis, through December 29.  More

As Art Basel returns to Paris at the Grand Palais, the city’s vibrant scene of art dealers are presenting new exhibitions timed with the influx of collectors and global attention.
From renowned international contemporary figures like Dana Schutz to art history stalwarts like Sturtevant, here are eight must-see shows.

“Maison Ancart”
Gagosian
October 13—December 20, 2024
Le Grand Parc (2024) © Harold Ancart. Photo: JSP Art Photography. Courtesy the artist and Gagosian
From twinkling nightscapes of groves, to kissing trees with bright red crowns painted like plump lips, New York-based Belgian artist Harold Ancart opens a window into nature with his upcoming solo exhibit “Maison Ancart” at Gagosian. Trees are the central figures of this show’s paintings, which were “conceived in conversation with the spirit of radical freedom,” according to a statement from the gallery. Fields, mountains, and trees are recurring motifs throughout the artist’s body of work. His art has previously been featured at other behemoth galleries like David Zwirner, and on the concrete walls of handball courts in New York City. Ancart’s imagined landscapes, created using oil sticks, are a delight that you won’t want to miss.

Sylvia Snowden
White CubeOctober 15—November 16, 2024
Sylvia Snowden Sandra Billups (1982) © the artist. Photo © White Cube (Frankie Tyska)
France’s first solo exhibition of works by acclaimed American painter Sylvia Snowden (b. 1942) will be presented by White Cube. The show will feature the artist’s powerful “M Street” series. Created between 1978 and 1997, the collection of emotionally charged paintings captures the lives of the residents of M Street in Washington, DC, where Snowden has lived and worked for more than 45 years. Snowden’s practice digs deep into the African American experience, with a palpable intensity on every canvas built through her raw, impasto brushstrokes and kaleidoscopic whorls of limbs. This Paris exhibition coincides with her first European museum show at the Hepworth Wakefield in the UK and marks her full-circle return to the city, where she first studied at the prestigious Académie de la Grande Chaumièr in 1962. The exhibition is part of the gallery’s “Inside the White Cube” series, a curated exhibition series featuring accomplished, non-represented artists from around the world.

Rashid Johnson’s “Anima”
Hauser & Wirth
October 14—December 21, 2024
Rashid Johnson Untitled Standing Soul (2024). Photo: Walla Walla Foundry © Rashid Johnson. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth
Animism is the belief that all things, even inanimate objects, have souls. It’s why Marie Kondo suggests you thank your timeworn shoes for your time together before donating them to your local thrift store. American artist Rashid Johnson compels you to contemplate body and soul as he explores animism in his new exhibition “Anima,” opening at Hauser & Wirth Paris this month.
“Interiority has always been essential in my project … There’s a sense of soul searching, a sense of intimacy that is necessary for me to explore,” the artist explained in a statement from the gallery. The exhibition will showcase “Soul Paintings” and “God Paintings,” two series of works Johnson has been developing over the past several years. Several bronze sculptures by the artist will also be on display. Their wispy metal twists to form skeletal masks that could have been summoned into 3D from one of his paintings.
Jean-Marie Appriou’s “Exonaut Horizon”
Perrotin
October 12—November 16, 2024
Jean-Marie Appriou. ©Jean-Marie Appriou / ADAGP Paris, 2024. Courtesy of the artist and Perrotin.
French artist Jean-Marie Appriou is an elementalist, wielding marble, glass, bronze, and even lava, to create his mythological sculptures. His work has been displayed across France from the Louvre to the Fondation Louis Vuitton; now, Perrotin gallery promises to transform its space into an immersive stage where visitors can explore the inner workings of Appriou’s cosmic universe.
The show will feature sheer silk robes like kimonos, engraved to depict floating bronze jellyfish or stout little penguins. One of Appriou’s particularly captivating artifacts is a molten glass orb with plaster fractal faces embedded within it, like a comet that has fallen to the earth carrying evidence of humanoid alien life.
Kader Attia’s “Pluvialité”
Mor Charpentier
October 5th – November 16th, 2024
Untitled, Kader Attia, 2024. Photo by Laurent Lecat. Courtesy of Galerie Mor Charpentier
In celebration of the opening of its new Parisian location at 18 rue des Quatre-Fils, Galerie Mor Charpentier has announced “Pluvialité,” an exhibition featuring Algerian-French artist Kader Attia’s work. The gallery is known for its support of artists from the global south whose work tackles socio-political issues. Attia’s practice explores themes of identity, memory, and the concept of repair through different mediums. The exhibition, Attia’s first show in Paris in a decade, will feature works on canvas, repaired objects, and a dynamic installation. The installation is a study of time and nature, comprised of a battery of rain sticks supported by unipods, arranged like wind turbines, spinning at different tempos.
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“Zip Zap!”
Thaddaeus Ropac
October 12—December 21, 2024
A member of Sotheby’s staff poses with artwork entitled ‘Warhol’s Marilyn Monroe’ 1967, by US artist Elaine Sturtevant. Photo by BEN STANSALL / AFP)
Thaddaeus Ropac Gallery is celebrating the 100 -year anniversary of the birth of groundbreaking American conceptual artist Sturtevant, promising a “sexy funky show that goes through time and thought.” Sturtevant is best known for her pioneering work in appropriation art in the 1960s, where she created near-exact replicas of works by other famous artists. She began her practice long before the concept of “appropriation” was widely understood in the art world. Sturtevant most famously replicated Andy Warhol’s silkscreen works, including his famous Flowers series and portraits of Marilyn Monroe. Warhol himself once remarked, “I don’t know why people are so upset. I only do what Sturtevant does.” He was highlighting the blurred lines between original and copy that Sturtevant sought to explore.

Dana Schutz’s “The Sea and All Its Subjects”
David Zwirner
October 14—November 16, 2024
Dana Schutz, Mountain Group, (2018). © Dana Schutz. Photo: Jeff McLane.
Dana Schutz’s surreal paintings are as comical as they are revolting. A number of the paintings in her upcoming show at Zwirner’s Paris location, called “The Sea and All its Subjects,” are of figures trapped in sisyphean tasks. One of the paintings, The Optometrists (2024), depicts an anthropomorphic cyclops in a knitted sweater crawling through a pit of loose eyeballs and other spherical objects, seemingly picking out his favorite. The New York-based artist is known for her visual storytelling, constructing complex narratives of subjects involved in their own realities. “The Sea and All its Subjects” will be Schutz’s second solo show with the gallery, following her major institution presentation “Dana Schutz: Le monde visible” (The Visible World) at the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris that ended earlier this year.

Bracha Ettinger’s “Trust After the End of Trust”
High Art Paris
October 14—December 1, 2024
Bracha L. Ettinger Untitled (2013-2023). Courtesy the artist and High Art
For artist, writer, and psychoanalyst Bracha L. Ettinger, painting is a medium for tending to historical wounds with compassion. Her feminist psychoanalytic background might explain the rorschach quality of the inky, spectral figures in her abstract artwork. Her paintings are deeply emotional, sometimes haunted by regret, other times imbued with gentle wonder. A statement from High Art Paris describes her work as “a monumental architecture of female sign language.” For Ettinger, who lives between Tel Aviv and Paris, “Trust after the End of Trust” is an artistic and theoretical concept that extends her broader exploration of trauma and subjectivity.  More

Live horses tethered to the walls of an art gallery; a knitted circle of nylon threads left to disintegrate in ocean waves; a motorcycle with cattle horns for handlebars riding perpendicular to the ground; and a compass embedded in a slab of granite. These are just some of the so-called “poor art” works made by the provocateurs behind Arte Povera.
Even decades after the term was coined and promoted by the late art historian Germano Celant in 1967, uniting a loose gaggle of postwar Italian artists around their use of humble materials (though this was not always true), art world figures still talk about how their lives were forever transformed by the movement’s radical ideals.
The esteemed Italian-American curator Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev is one such person. She said in an interview that when she worked as a young, independent freelancer, she sat in the kitchens of several Arte Povera artists, sharing meals and chatting. They taught her that nothing was static, that art objects could change in response to their environments, temperatures, or the light. Arte Povera “says the artwork is not in its materiality, but in its constant, vital transformation of energy,” she added. “And that is really important. That marked my life.”
View of the forecourt of the Bourse de Commerce — Pinault Collection, Paris 2024 Giuseppe Penone, Idee di Pietra, 2010 Mario Merz, Fibonacci Sequence, 1984 © Pinault Collection/ ADAGP, Paris, 2024. Photo: Romain Laprade
And though it was always relevant to art history, suddenly, Arte Povera is front and center this fall. Christov-Bakargiev is curating a major Arte Povera exhibition opening this month (through January 20, 2025). All three floors of the Bourse de Commerce, Pinault Collection in Paris are devoted to it, with separate spaces individually focused on thirteen artists, showcasing some of their best and most historically significant works. This is lightly interspersed with later practices influenced or resonating with Arte Povera, as well as the wider context of postwar avant garde movements, including Japan’s Gutaï. At Art Basel Paris, many dealers are presenting works by artists tied to the art movement.
And yet, that very act of presenting, and consequently, collecting Arte Povera, comes with its own challenges. “It’s not easy to show Arte Povera,” said Christov-Bakargiev at a preview of the Bourse de Commerce exhibition. “How do you show fire? Something burning in a museum?” She pointed to Gilberto Zorio’s Arco voltaico [Voltaic Arc] (1968), of an electric current periodically jumping in an arc made by two charged copper rods that nearly touch. “Look, look,” she urged reporters, interrupting herself on another subject. “We have lightning in the Bourse de Commerce!”
Alighiero Boetti, Autoritratto (Self-portrait), 1993-1994, cast bronze, fountain system, and electric heating element, 200 × 88.4 × 49.5 cm. Pinault Collection. © Adagp, Paris, 2024.
Hard to contain, or even define—these inherent contradictions have inadvertently contributed to limiting Arte Povera’s broader reach outside of Italy, but for the very same reason, have made it a source of endless fascination to many artists and a curious public alike. That interest now appears to be swelling, given a boost by the Bourse de Commerce’s rain-making platform, and perhaps also thanks to a latent yearning for alternative breaks from our digitally hypnotized lives. As Christov-Bakargiev has said, Arte Povera plays upon our physically real presence, urging a closer look, and ultimately experience, of the here and now.
The Bourse exhibit offers this on many occasions, though it takes a good amount of time to absorb fully, and an open mind. There are moments, like under the museum’s vast, central dome, when the artworks can feel like banal, scattered objects with little relation to each other. They do better, taking on a life of their own, in the galleries winding through the building, which are dedicated to a single artist’s vision and world.
One example is the must-see, large, downstairs space featuring Zorio’s practice. Behind a glass window, hangs his glowing-red, thin wire line stretched across the rounded, dark auditorium. In the center, small letters spell out the word “confine.” Made of a chrome-nickel wire that is charged with an electrical current, it is a thing of poetry, both delicate and dangerous. It would immediately burn through flesh if touched. Little explanation is needed here.
Marisa Merz, No Title , 1979, wood, copper, 25 × 40 × 30 cm. Collection du Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, (Rivoli-Turin). Photo : Paolo Pellion. © Adagp, Paris, 2024.
A Surge in Interest
While the current Paris show’s blockbuster appeal marks a major step in wider recognition, Celant’s recent passing, as well as that of artist Giovanni Anselmo, are among the factors that have contributed to an uptick in attention on the group.
The list of institutional shows on the subject feels nearly endless. A traveling exhibition about Anselmo is currently on view at MAXXI, Rome, having debuted at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao in February. A rare retrospective of works by Pino Pascali recently closed at the Fondazione Prada, Milan curated by Mark Godfrey. The Guggenheim Museum in New York puts Arte Povera works at the center of its show, “By Way of: Material and Motion in the Guggenheim Collection,” on view until January 12, 2025.
Arte Povera artists were responding to postwar Italy, and the ensuing, hyper-rapid rise of industrialization and consumerism that butted against Italy’s still largely rural communities. Its stars, Giovanni Anselmo, Jannis Kounellis, Mario and Marisa Merz, Pino Pascali, Giuseppe Penone, and Michelangelo Pistoletto, to name a few, were too free-spirited to adhere to a formal manifesto, and some scholars refuse to call them a single “movement.” They were interested in juxtaposing ephemeral, natural, and organic materials with industrial and found ones and, later, they were reacting to the dominant Minimalism of the 1970s and ’80s.
Michelangelo Pistoletto, Venere degli stracci, 1967, reproduction de Vénus en ciment recouvert de mica et de chiffons, 150 × 280 × 100 cm (installation). Courtesy du Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea (Rivoli-Turin). Prêt de la Fondazione per l’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea CRT. Photo : Paolo Pellion.
All told, the movement was brief—its heyday, strictly speaking, is considered to have spanned 1967 through 1972. That is one reason there are but a few existing Arte Povera “master works” on the market, or readily available for viewing, explains Mariolina Bassetti, Global Chairman of Post-War and Contemporary Art at Christie’s in an interview. Still, she notes market interest has grown for the category, with a 2001 auction of about 17 Arte Povera lots selling for a total of about $5 million, versus about $32 million total in 2017 for 30 lots.
New Views on the Movement
Now historians are delving further into the role of women in postwar Italian art, both broadly and in direct relation to Arte Povera. To this day, only one woman, the stellar Marisa Merz (1926-2019), is considered a full-fledged Arte Povera artist, according to criteria such as having no fixed frame formally containing the work within its boundaries and working within the concept of an installation. Yet even Merz, in a too familiar trope, was belatedly recognized internationally, thanks to a groundbreaking 2017 retrospective at the Hammer Museum in L.A. and the Met in N.Y.
Teresa Kittler, a lecturer in Modern and Contemporary Art at University of York, and Sharon Hecker, an art historian and curator specializing in modern and contemporary Italian art, co-edited an upcoming anthology on the roles of female partners, critics, assistants, collaborators, and others in Arte Povera circles and beyond, titled “Art and Intimacy in Modern Italy.”
Portrait of Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev. Courtesy of the Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Rivoli-Turin. Photo: Sebastiano Pellion.
Hecker explained Celant has been criticized for depicting a reductively unified vision of Arte Povera, which also marginalized its political dimension. He also over-emphasized the use of “poor” materials, she noted, when some artists from the group employed more noble mediums. Luciano Fabro, for one, had an affinity for precious marble and Murano glass.
She said in an interview that Arte Povera’s male-dominant narrative has turned some of her students away from focusing on the movement. But both Kittler and Hecker are optimistic. “A generation of scholars have done a lot to transform the landscape of postwar Italian arts beyond Arte Povera, which affects how Arte Povera is read, because it puts it in dialog with other things that are going on at the same time, and other artists, making it feel richer and more expansive,” Kittler said. This research has also opened a vast, unchartered area of unrecognized women as well as male artists doing work in postwar Italy, who didn’t quite fit the Arte Povera label. “If you start to scratch the surface,” she added, and “even within Arte Povera, there are figures that come out of the shadows.”
Mario Merz, Igloo Objet cache-toi, 1977, aluminum, C-clamp, grillage, glass, neon and transformer, 185 × 365 cm. Pinault Collection. Photo : Christie’s images LTD. © Adagp, Paris, 2024.
Art in Space
Ideas put forward by Arte Povera thinkers may be striking a particularly resonant chord in today’s digitized world. The movement that was always skeptical of over-theorizing, is focused on confronting the viewer directly with forces of nature, and everyday, simple, crafted materials, so that one can grasp, almost without thinking, the thing in front of them for what it is. It “helps you connect to your body in space, and your physical transformations. To become aware that we live, for example, on a globe that spins, and has gravity,” said Christov-Bakargiev. It can connect the dots in an endless processing of what is real, and what it means to experience something—life—in the flesh.
Pier Paolo Calzolari, Il mio letto così come deve essere (My bed as it should be), 1968, copper, brass, foam, banana leaves, bronze letters, 35 × 175 × 150 cm. Collection Fondo Calzolari. Courtesy of White Cube Gallery (London). Photo: Ben Westoby. © Adagp, Paris, 2024.
Arte Povera artists were groundbreaking on many levels, and invented installation art, according to Christov-Bakargiev, who differentiates this from more closed “environments.” “We are now in a world grappling with this question of tactility and experience. There’s a craving for audiences to see something that feels physical, not just a real work of art, but a work of art that engages your body,” wrote Naomi Beckwith in a recent piece on Artnet. Plus, “there is no way now to show some of the amazing innovations of someone like David Hammons or Mark Bradford without going back to the Arte Povera movement,” she added.
They wanted to break the “nature/culture divide,” noted Christov-Bakargiev in the 2017 Marisa Merz exhibit catalog. Sculptures occupied rooms that changed with them, making the entire thing unfinished, open-ended. “Primary energy and lived experience were important to them. Gravity and electricity—as well as memory, affect, and vital impulses—were put on a par. They did not believe in linear art history, but rather in a spiraling, fluid, subjective sense of overlapping time, both ancient and contemporary.”
These are all ideas that audiences, chained to their smart devices, may find particularly heartening now. More

While wheat fields are a common sight in Montana, this past year a new type of wheat field took root in the city of Bozeman, one that was agricultural—and also an artwork. Though not wholly dissimilar from a standard crop, the stretches of Bobcat (a variety of hard red winter wheat) were part of a new work by conceptual artist Agnes Denes, Wheatfield – An Inspiration (2024).
Presented by Tinworks, a new non-profit art space in Bozeman with a mission centered on bridging the gap between the American West and contemporary art, Wheatfield – An Inspiration reimagines Denes’ most well-known work, Wheatfield – A Confrontation (1982), which saw her plant a two-acre wheat field on Manhattan’s southernmost point. Here, positioned on some of the world’s most prime real estate, the work invited reflection on societal systems of value, priorities, and human needs. Just over 40 years later, Denes continues these lines of inquiry.
Agnes Denes, Wheatfield – An Inspiration. The seed is in the ground (2024). Photo: Blair Speed / Speed Creative. Courtesy of Tinworks, Bozeman, Montana.
The iteration at Tinworks follows another recent reprisal of the original 1982 installation, Honouring Wheatfield – A Confrontation (2024), this time staged in Basel, Switzerland, outside of the Art Basel fair in the city’s Messeplatz. Unlike the present and historic versions, however, in Basel the wheat was planted in moveable Euro pallets, an experiment in avant-garde crop growing (or, as Denes thought of it, “vertical fields”) that may become necessary in the future.
Back in Bozeman, the exhibition of Wheatfield – An Inspiration debuted on June 15, 2024, but the project began in October 2023. For those unfamiliar with the propagation of wheat (as was I at the time of this writing), it typically needs a “dormancy period.” In line with the growth cycle of this specific varietal (which  Denes chose for its close association with the region), the wheat was first seeded in the fall of last year, after which it went through winter dormancy before flourishing this spring and summer.
Agnes Denes, Wheatfield – An Inspiration. The seed is in the ground (2024). Photo: Blair Speed / Speed Creative. Courtesy of Tinworks, Bozeman, Montana.
“Spending time in the Wheatfield was unforgettable. Wheat fields are a common sight in Montana, but few people, aside from farmers, get the chance to experience them up close, to actually wander through such a powerful and iconic presence,” said Tinwork’s inaugural director Jenny Moore.
Coinciding with this period of dormancy, Denes released Questionnaire, a series of questions about issues and concerns around the future of humanity, including A.I., and global warming. Denes welcomed anyone to respond. Harkening back to Wheatfield – A Confrontation, the Questionnaire was first deployed in 1982 and featured thematically similar questions, which have since evolved to reflect our present-day anxieties and hopes.
Packets of wheat seeds offered to the community as part of Agnes Denes, Wheatfield – An Inspiration. The seed is in the ground (2024). Photo: Blair Speed / Speed Creative. Courtesy of Tinworks, Bozeman, Montana.
Coinciding with the first planting, as part of the project, the local community was invited to participate and expand the reach of Wheatfield – An Inspiration by planting provided wheat seeds wherever there was fallow land in the city. Wheat has long played a significant role within the economy of Montana, and though pervasive, planting wheat in otherwise unexpected spaces all over Bozeman made this fact manifest while drawing attention to otherwise abstract ideas around ecology, urban development, and landscape ideals.
Locality and community have remained intrinsic elements to the project’s success, from initial planting to reaping to processing to, ultimately, eating.
“For Agnes, community involvement was vital to this new iteration of Wheatfield,” said Moore. “It began with the selection of Bobcat winter wheat, developed by a neighbor of Tinworks who is a wheat breeder and retired research associate at Montana State University. A local first-generation conservation farmer planted the field. The wheat seeds we distributed to the public to plant in solidarity with the project were donated by a local food and farming organization. Numerous volunteers, visitors, students, and neighbors tended, weeded, and harvested the crop.”
Agnes Denes, Wheatfield – An Inspiration. The seed is in the ground (2024). Photo: Blair Speed / Speed Creative. Courtesy of Tinworks, Bozeman, Montana.
The “public harvest celebration” of Wheatfield – An Inspiration occurred on September 8, a day-long event replete with traditional hand-harvesting demonstrations led by Montana State University Plant Sciences Department students, as well as the various steps associated with processing wheat at a small scale. Following harvest, the wheat was milled, and this month local bakery Wild Crumb is tasked with taking the flour and baking it into bread, which will both be sold as well as distributed to the community in partnership with Gallatin Valley Food Bank.
“Tinworks’ Wheatfield has come full circle in the most beautiful way. It is a living artwork, an inspired place, a community space, and now a food source,” said Moore.
Agnes Denes, Wheatfield – An Inspiration. The seed is in the ground (2024). Photo: Blair Speed / Speed Creative. Courtesy of Tinworks, Bozeman, Montana.
Wheat is one of the oldest cultivated crops, with a history stretching roughly 10 millennia and serving humanity as a source of sustenance and a potent symbol of growth, transformation, and prosperity. Its near universal presence across human history is perhaps the key to understanding how Denes’ recurring deployment of planted wheat in her practice continues to hold profound cultural and societal relevance, even more than four decades after Wheatfield – A Confrontation was grown in New York. The newest evolution of Denes crops in Bozeman, Wheatfield – An Inspiration, continues this legacy and emphasizes the project’s adaptability, continuing an inquiry into the core of our humanity, from mere survival to the highest hopes for the future. More