Art & Exhibitions

They may be nearly 6,000 miles apart and they may focus on material separated by thousands of years, but the Archaeological Park of Pompeii and the Aspen Art Museum are coming together on a show. Curated by London-based artist Allison Katz, “In the House of the Trembling Eye” will take over the entire 17,500-square-foot exhibition space at the Colorado institution’s Shigeru Ban-designed building, which opened a decade ago.
The art of today will hang alongside ancient painting: the show includes a group of fragments of frescoes from Pompeii, which are making a rare trip to the United States. There’s also an A-list roster, including figures like Lynda Benglis, Maurizio Cattelan, Marlene Dumas, Lucio Fontana, Eva Hesse, Damien Hirst, Jeffrey Gibson, Rashid Johnson, Bharti Kher, Yayoi Kusama, Kerry James Marshall, Alice Neel, Ed Ruscha, Rirkrit Tiravanija, and Lynette Yiadom-Boakye. 
Allison Katz, Eruption (2024). Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth. Photo: Eva Herzog.
According to the museum, it’s the first time contemporary art has come together with these ancient artifacts, which were preserved when Pompeii was buried after nearby Mount Vesuvius erupted in the year 79 C.E., resulting in one of the world’s most enduringly fascinating archaeological sites, where Katz conducted research for the exhibition while there on a fellowship. 
“Painting is for me a call and response, a question posed across time, techniques, and traditions to see who and what answers,” Katz said, “because at its core, painting is a conversation.” The conversation instigated with this particular exhibition will involve more than 100 artworks and objects by some 50 artists, drawn from personal art collections in and around Aspen. 
Jana Euler, Close Rotation (Left) (2019). Courtesy the artist; Artists Space, New York; Cabinet, London; dépendance, Brussels; Valerie Neu, Berlin; and Greene Naftali, New York. Photo: Elisabeth Bernstein.
Katz is exploring the boundaries—as well as the crossover—between different kinds of spaces; she sees ancient Pompeiian rooms as having been precursors to the modern museum. That concept forms the inspiration for the display architecture in Aspen, which echoes that of ancient Pompeiian environments: it will be designed by Katz with architect Caitlin Tobias Kenessey of Islington-based firm Bureau de Change. Departing from the standard white cube, Katz’s display will include raised floors, partitions, curtains, and other features to guide museum visitors’ movements and orchestrate their views. 
The artist’s ideas will be further explored in a catalog with contributions from Katz as well as author Nuar Alsadir, curator Stella Bottai, curator and writer Saim Demircan, writer Hannah Johnston, and poet and playwright Ariana Reines. 
René Daniëls, Untitled (1982). Photo: Robert Glowacki. Courtesy: the artist, Modern Art, London and The René Daniëls Foundation, Eindhoven.
Katz, known for paintings that include mouths and various animals and sometimes include various plays on her own name, joined international powerhouse gallery Hauser & Wirth in 2022 after being included in “The Milk of Dreams,” the main exhibition at that year’s Venice Biennale, curated by Cecilia Allemani. She’s notched solo shows since 2009 at top-shelf venues from New York gallery Rachel Uffner to Shanghai’s Antenna Space and Germany’s Kunstverein Freiburg, as well as appearing in group shows at equally renowned forums, from Paris’s Palais de Tokyo to New York’s Lisson Gallery and the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw.
She’s also proven alluring to critics. Artforum’s Andrew Hunt called her 2021 show “Artery,” at London’s Camden Art Centre, “an art critic’s dream,” saying that it asked questions about reflexivity “in a witty, sophisticated manner,” before finally asking, “did my brain actually get reorganized by this experience?” Writing for 4 Columns about the same show, Emily LaBarge called Katz’s subjects “vivid and energetic, unruly yet precise, as is her style and technique.”
The Aspen Art Museum, which is celebrating its 45th anniversary, is not afraid of unconventional displays. A few years ago, the institution invited artist Jonathan Berger to reimagine its gift shop; the museum has also had a fruitful collaboration with Italian luxury fashion house Bottega Veneta.
“In the House of the Trembling Eye” will be on view at the Aspen Art Museum, 637 E Hyman Ave, Aspen, Colorado, May 30–September 29, 2024.
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Just in time for New York’s design week, the SoHo gallery Raisonné has unveiled a sweeping five-decade survey of the late revolutionary Italian architect and designer, Ettore Sottsass. A maestro of brash, vivid color, no one quite saw the world like him, nor the possibilities of material and shape.

An Ettore Sottsass glasswork sits atop a custom desk. Photo: Jeffrey Graetsch, courtesy of Raisonné.

Sottsass’s (1917–2007) vision was often playful, sometimes garish, but never boring. “I design without rhyme or reason,” Sottsass said in a 1993 interview with Azure. “I don’t even know why I design. I design because I have this disease of the pencil. Because it comes to me. I do it because it’s my destiny.” His range is fully on display here. “Shapes, Colors, and Symbols” runs through June 29.
An iconic Ettore Sottsass piece. Photo: Jeffrey Graetsch, courtesy of Raisonné.
“We are both obsessed with him and thought he was undervalued and under-appreciated,” said Debbie August, Raisonné co-founder. “He has such a depth of character, whether it’s architecture or furniture or glassware or ceramics.”
Sottsass was a founder of the Memphis Group (and even coined its sobriquet)—a collective that came to be known for its bright, unorthodox designs—but he was so ahead-of-his time that some of his most quintessentially 1980s pieces were, in fact, from the 1950s.
An installation view of “Shapes, Colors, and Symbols.” Photo: Zach Pontz, courtesy of Raisonné.

August and her partner in the gallery Jeffrey Graetsch have been working for over a year to assemble a broad swath of Sottsass’s oeuvre, mainly from Italy. “Every time we unbox something it’s exciting,” August said.

More than 100 pieces are on display, and more is on the way. “We’re still overwhelmed and digesting it!” said Graetsch. “It’s unreal. These are things that you just don’t get a chance to see. And hopefully no one will knock them over.”
An installation view of “Shapes, Colors, and Symbols.” Photo: Zach Pontz, courtesy of Raisonné.

Included in the show are functional objects, like an Olivetti typewriter (he designed the first portable one, the “Valentine”) and one-of-a-kind tables, as well a series of fascinating glass totems inspired Native American katsina dolls. To Sottsass, they symbolized “the unknown in our existence in the universe.”
Valentine typewriter for Olivetti by designers Italian Ettore Sottsass and British Perry A King, 1969. Photo: Indianapolis Museum of Art/Getty Images.
“When I was young, all we ever heard about was func­tion­al­ism, func­tion­al­ism, func­tion­al­ism,” he once said. “It’s not enough. Design should also be sensual and exciting.”

“Shapes, Colors, and Symbols” is on view at Raisonné 16 Crosby Street, New York, through June 29.
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“Louis M. Glackens: Pure Imagination” at the NSU Art Museum in Florida’s Fort Lauderdale, revisits the life and work of an influential but largely forgotten cartoonist, illustrator, and animator from the early 20th century whose often whimsical penmanship, according to the museum, paved the way for legends such as Walt Disney.
Glackens was born in 1866 in Philadelphia and started drawing at an early age alongside his younger brother, William. While the latter went on to become a successful painter and prominent member of the Ashcan School, which focused on realistic portrayals of everyday urban life, Louis leaned towards the fantastical and cartoonish, pursuing a career in illustration.
Louis M. Glackens, Here, Puss, Puss! (1908). Published in Puck, v. 64, no. 1640 (1908 August 4), cover. Puck © 1912 by Keppler & Schwarzmann. NSU Art Museum Fort Lauderdale.
For 20 years he worked as a staff artist for Puck, one of the first widely distributed political humor magazines in the U.S., where his confident lines brushed up against a sparkly wit as much as mordant cynicism. A selection of Glackens’s illustrations for Puck have been collected by the Library of Congress.
When Puck changed ownership in 1915, Glackens found work in the up-and-coming animation industry. Although he chiefly worked for a company called Bray Studios, his (uncredited) drawings can also be found in films and shows produced by Pathé and Sullivan Studios, two other early animation heavyweights.
Louis Glackens, Hurry up Girls – Here comes the customers. Photo courtesy NSU Art Museum Fort Lauderdale, William Glackens Collection.
His work ranged from the kind of satire he developed for Puck, like the “Haddem Baad” series—in which primitive cavemen serve as stand-ins for their modern counterparts—to romantic fairytale adaptations such as Jack the Giant Killer, the sort of things Walt Disney would go on to make.
Louis M. Glackens, Who are you? (1909). Published in Puck, v. 66, no. 1691 (1909 July 28), cover. © 1909 by Keppler & Schwarzmann. NSU Art Museum Fort Lauderdale.
Glackens’s animated work was met with mixed reception. Although films often credited him as “Famous Cartoonist,” John Randolph Bray, founder of Bray Studios, later told animation historian Mark Langer that Glackens was “no good” and didn’t last “too long” in the field. Perhaps this conflict was linked to Glacken’s unique artistic tastes, which, according to the museum, tended toward the avant-garde.
The cartoonist would also find work in the commercial field, illustrating books including The Log of the Water Wagon (1905) and Monsieur and Madame (1924). Glackens died in 1933; his brief obituary in the New York Times described him as “one of the first artists to do animated cartoons for motion pictures.” His legacy in the following decades, however, would quietly be forgotten.
Louis M. Glackens, The flowers that bloom in the spring, tra-la! (1911). Published in Puck, v. 71, no. 1834 (1912 April 24), cover. Puck © 1912 by Keppler & Schwarzmann. NSU Art Museum Fort Lauderdale.
This is where “Louis M. Glackens: Pure Imagination” comes in. The exhibition shines a spotlight on several prints and drawings donated by the Sansom Foundation, centered by some of the political cartoons Glackens produced for Puck, which would be right at home in a present-day issue of The New Yorker.
A particularly famous one shows former U.S. President William Howard Taft, dressed as a matronly, mustachioed housewife, pouring a watering can labeled with the word “patronage” over a bed of flowers labeled “delegates: hardy quadrennial.” The caption read: “The flowers that bloom in spring, tra-la!” It is a commentary on Taft’s ill-fated bid for re-election against his successor, William Harding.
“Louis M. Glackens: Pure Imagination” is at the NSY Museum, Fort Lauderdale, Florida, April 15, 2024–March 30, 2025.
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Deep in the bowels of Penn Station, there’s a small sign that reads “Penn RR Trains,” its red arrow forever pointing passengers towards trains that no longer run for a station that once was. It’s a prosaic leftover of New York’s most notorious demolition, that glorious Beaux-Arts masterpiece that made travelers commuting through it feel “like a god,” as the historian Vincent Scully put it. The disappearance of such landmarks is the theme of the New-York Historical Society’s latest exhibition “Lost New York.”
The show, which is set to run through September 29, is a reminder that to live in New York is to constantly feel the hands of change—new towers block beloved views, favorite restaurants close, familiar neighborhoods morph unrecognizably.
Jules Crow, Pennsylvania Station Interior (1906). Photo: New-York Historical Society.
Roving haphazardly across 300-odd years of the city’s history, “Lost New York” makes the point that these places do not really vanish, but endure in maps, photographs, paintings, ephemera and—sometimes most powerfully—through the anecdotes of residents.
From the start, in fact, the show presents the New York experience as a thing in constant flux. A painting at the entrance shows the Knickerbocker Omnibus, a horse-pulled 12-seater carriage, the likes of which ran designated routes in lower Manhattan beginning in the late 1820s. Soon, steel tracks were laid for streetcars, offering passengers a smoother and faster ride.
William Seaman, Knickerbocker Stage Line Omnibus (ca. 1850). Photo: New-York Historical Society.
Though affordable and efficient, the cars added to the city’s sanitation quagmire, a problem Dr. Rufus Henry Gilbert addressed with his patented elevated railway that became a reality in 1878. There’s a wood and metal model of the Sixth Avenue line alongside Going Home, a painting by Lionel Reiss that captures the colorful bustle of New Yorkers climbing the stairs to the train.
Nearby, there’s a memento from the city’s train system a century on: a Bowery station sign marked with Keith Haring’s crawling child and barking dog.
It’s a gap of a century and a half that is starkly presented in a pair of paintings by Richard Haas. Both look south from 42nd Street. In 1855, the view from the Latting Observatory (then the country’s tallest structure at 315 feet) is bucolic—buildings are of brick, sail ships traverse the East River, and farmland stretches to a visible horizon. By 1994, the view is entirely obscured by silver and brown towers, the only green belonging to the stained gargoyles hunched at the window ledge. One constant? Pigeons and their detritus.
Unidentified photographer, Manhattan: the Hippodrome, Sixth Avenue between 43rd Street and 44th Street (1905). Photo: New-York Historical Society.
The museum picked through its archive to present some of the city’s colossal buildings lost during this time and beyond. There’s Crystal Palace, a marvel of glass and steel described by Walt Whitman as “loftier, fairer, ampler than any yet.” A Francois Courtin lithograph shows it abuzz as it hosts an exhibition on global industry. It burned to the ground in 1858.
The Croton Reservoir stood nearby, a 50-foot-tall engineering feat that would make firefighting, sewage, and street-cleaning possible. It too was demolished and in 1900, with the New York Public Library in Bryant Park rising on its stone foundation.
François Courtin, New York Crystal Palace for the Exhibition of the Industry of All Nations (1853–54). Image: New-York Historical Society.
The list of such disappearances in “Lost New York” runs on and on—the old Yankee Stadium (the House that Ruth Built), the New York Hippodrome in which Harry Houdini once disappeared a 10,000-pound elephant, the old Federal Hall which sat the first Confederation Congress in 1784. There’s also a fragment of the giant gilded statue of Britain’s King George III that stood in Bowling Green before it was torn down and turned into bullets during the Revolutionary War.
Another sculpture to have been destroyed is “Lift Every Voice and Sing” by Augusta Savage. It depicted bodies arranged like strings in a harp and was the only work of a Black woman commissioned for the World’s Fair in 1939. There’s a miniature on display in this show and a promise that the initiative to reconstruct the monument is underway.
“Lost New York” is on view at New-York Historical Society, 170 Central Park W, New York, through September 29.
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Have you ever wondered why Chinese visual culture is full of images of dragons, phoenixes and other mythical creatures? Archaeologists certainly have. For centuries, they searched in vain for their origins in the country’s vast but fractured archeological record.
Relatively recent discoveries of artifacts from the Zhou dynasty, an ancient state that predates the Qin dynasty that unified China, provided answers, and now they will be going on display at an exhibition at the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco titled “Phoenix Kingdoms: The Last Splendor of China’s Bronze Age.”
Double-walled square jian-fou from Zhang, Warring States period (ca. 433 B.C.E.) Photo: Hubei Provincial Museum and Asian Art Museum.
The show is the first of its kind in the United States, and features jade and bronze ritual vessels, ceremonial lacquerware, weapons and musical instruments. The objects, more than 150 in total, come from five different Chinese museums that specialize in Bronze Age archaeology, including the Hubei Provincial Museum, the Jingzhou Museum, and the Suizhou Museum.
Lei wine vessel with dragon from Zhang in Western Zhou ca. 1050-771 B.C.E. Photo: Suizhou Municipal Museum and Asian Art Museum.
Among the collection are a jade mask dated to 2,200 B.C.E. adorned with two raptors; a bronze drum decorated with 16 snakelike dragons recovered from the tomb of the Marquis Yi of Zeng, built around 433 B.C.E.; and a bronze double-walled wine cooler or jian-fou. Also recovered from the tomb, archeologists believe it was used as a kind of metal refrigerator to preserve millet and ale during hot summers.
Lidded dou food vessel from Warring States period (475-221 BCE), approx. 433 BC. Photo: Suizhou Municipal Museum and Asian Art Museum.
The majority of the objects come from Zeng and Chu, two mysterious vassal states of the Zhou dynasty in northwestern China. Little is known of their cultures and histories, which were erased when the territory was conquered by the Qin, the founders of imperial China, in 229 B.C.E. Up until that point, the Zhou had been in power for 789 years, making their rule the longest in all of Chinese history.
The tomb of Marquis Yi, discovered in 1978, was a tipping point in Chinese archaeology, described by historian and Asian Art Museum curator Jeremy Zhang as “akin to [the discovery of] Tutankhamun’s tomb, Pompeii, or Knossos.”
Body armor and helmet from the Warring States period (ca. 300 B.C.E) made of leather, lacquer, and fabric. Photo: Hubei Provincial Museum and Asian Art Museum.
“We are living in what is truly a Golden Age of archaeology—Chinese archaeology that is,” Jay Xu, the Barbara Bass Bakar Director and current CEO of the Asian Art Museum, said in a statement. “There were always obvious gaps in the record that never made sense. We knew which states the Qin conquered—their historians were delighted to write that down—but what we were missing was the artistic evidence connecting the beliefs of older kingdoms with images that proliferated in later dynasties.”
Base of a bronze drum stand, excavated from the tomb of Marquis Yi of Zeng in Suizhou from the Warring States period (ca.433 B.C.E.) Photo: Hubei Provincial Museum and Asian Art Museum.
“Many of the extravagant artworks in ‘Phoenix Kingdoms’ are considered national treasures due to their rarity and their beauty,” added Zhang, who organized the show. “Our original exhibition highlights the importance of the Yangzi River region in forming a recognizably southern style that would influence centuries of Chinese art and religion. We could not be more excited to update our understanding of this historical epoch by inviting our audiences to unlock the glorious mystery of China at the dawn of the first empire.”
“Phoenix Kingdoms: The Last Splendor of China’s Bronze Age” is on view at the Asian Art Museum, 200 Larkin St, San Francisco, California, through July 22.
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British royals typically get all the attention, but an unprecedented new show at Kensington Palace highlights the staff that kept their palaces running. “Untold Lives” shares relics including an ice saw and an early toilet to piece together the oft-overlooked livelihoods of wet nurses, rat catchers, and even a wild cat keeper who worked for Britain’s monarchs between 1660 and 1830.
A baby bonnet for George IV, an envelope containing hair from Prince Edward (Duke of Kent), a paper tape measure used to measure the heights of the children of King George III and Queen Charlotte, the childhood pink sash of Prince Frederick (Duke of York), and the blue sash of King George III. © Historic Royal Palaces.
“We have had a number of exhibitions which have touched on the lives of those living in the historic royal palaces, but we felt the time was right to explore their story from ‘the bottom up’ and focus on those who worked behind the throne,” co-curator Sebastian Edwards said. Research for the show shed light on extraordinary professionals like a female Keeper of Ice and Snow, who cut ice from frozen ponds to chill drinks, and a 96-year-old washroom attendant called a Necessary Woman.
A toilet, probably made for William III at Hampton Court ca. 1699. © Royal Collection Trust / His Majesty King Charles III 2024.
Such untold lives unfold across thematic rooms. The one dubbed “Care and Intimacy,” for instance, displays a white linen apron worn by Queen Charlotte’s wardrobe maid Ann Elizabeth Thielcke in 1786.
Installation view of “Untold Lives,” Origins and Identities room. © Historic Royal Palaces
Meanwhile, “Skills and Expertise” offers the only surviving dress from Queen Charlotte, on loan from the Fashion Museum in Bath.
That same room honors the critical security that staff provided, evidenced by a mid-19th-century fire bucket. “On three separate occasions, servants and staff saved Kensington Palace from fire,” the exhibition overview explains.
Installation view of “Untold Lives,” Skills and Expertise room. © Historic Royal Palaces
“Untold Lives” also recounts the labor force’s growing multiculturalism amid Britain’s conquests and early globalization. “This exhibition brings together three extraordinary portraits probably for the first time since they were painted in Britain over 300 years ago,” Edwards said. Sir Godfrey Kneller created all three. One depicts Keeper of the Privy Purse Mehmet von Königstreu, who was taken prisoner in the Ottoman Empire and transported to Britain, where he was ennobled in 1716. Another portrait immortalizes von Königstreu’s German wife, Marie Wedekind. Together, they were the first interracial couple to live among royals, at the German court of King George I.
Sir Godfrey Kneller, Portrait of Mehmet von Könsigstreu. © Klosterkammer Hannover, Gina Grond.
Turkish valet Ernst August Mustapha von Misitri appears alongside them in the Origins and Identities room. “Mustapha’s portrait was only recently discovered in Germany and bought by a collector in the UK, who has loaned it to the exhibition,” Edwards said.
Sir Godfrey Kneller, portrait of Ernst August Mustapha von Misitri. Courtesy of the Ömer Koç collection
In the show’s press release, co-curator Mishka Sinha notes, “With so little remaining of their presence, we often find that the legacy left behind of those who worked in the royal palaces 300 years ago is simply invisibility.” The curators recruited contemporary artists to fill in those gaps.
Matt Smith, plates devoted to the story of Gustavus Guydickens, for “Untold Lives.” © Historic Royal Palaces, Matt Smith
Matt Smith crafted ceramic plates to share the story of disgraced Gentleman Usher Gustavus “Gusty” Guydickens, who served Queen Charlotte from 1777 to 1792—when, sources say, “he was caught in Hyde Park in ‘an unnatural situation’ with an 18-year-old lawyers’ clerk.”
Peter Brathwaite, commission for “Untold Lives.” © Historic Royal Palaces, Peter Brathwaite, courtesy of Autograph, London.
“Untold Lives” also commissioned a photograph from Peter Brathwaite that expands upon Black identity in Kensington Palace’s King’s Staircase. Elsewhere, Robert Taylor bridges this show with the present in photographs that document staff overseeing the Palace’s State Apartments and grounds today.
Installation view of “Untold Lives,” Legacies room. © Historic Royal Palaces.
“Untold Lives” is on view at Kensington Palace, London, through October 27, 2024.
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Several major exhibitions in France and abroad are adding to a nuanced moment as the world celebrates the Impressionism movement turning 150 this year. In an unprecedented move, the Musée d’Orsay has loaned 178 artworks to museums in about 30 French towns, and there are a cornucopia of differently angled shows exploring new and overlooked facets to the artistic movement. There’s a VR element at the Musée d’Orsay—which has received mixed reviews—and even an ice-skating rink-turned-digital artwork by Miguel Chevalier in Rouen’s Edith-Ballester skating rink.
Here are nine shows not to miss around France, beyond the Musée d’Orsay’s blockbuster “Paris 1874: Inventing Impressionism,” which we’ve covered separately and highly recommend.

“1863 Paris 1874,” at the Wallraf-Richartz-Museum & Fondation Corboud
Frédéric Bazille, Fisherman with a Net, 1868, oil on canvas, Arp Museum Rolandseck Station / Rau Collection for UNICEF, © Photo: Arp Museum Rolandseck Station / Rau Collection for UNICEF, inv. No. GR 1.653 (Photographer: Mick Vincenz, Essen)

The unofficial prequel to the Orsay show is on view in Cologne, Germany until July 28, 2024. It offers a fascinating new look at what led up to the first Impressionist show, beginning with the “Salon of the Rejected” artists, who were, per the title, rejected from the Salon. That event paved the way for a pioneering French avant-garde and new, modern ways of exhibiting. The show’s curator, Barbara Schaefer, says that the exhibition demonstrates how the Impressionists developed, noting that many of their painterly techniques can be detected earlier than may be commonly thought in works also shown in the Salon, effectively backing a key argument made by the Orsay/NGA show. “The ‘new’ painters were in fact fed by a long academic tradition,” said Schaefer, and the decade’s cultural influence on these artists was “not that well-known by the public—something we would like to change.”

“Van Gogh et les Etoiles” (Van Gogh and the Stars) at the Fondation Vincent Van Gogh
Vincent van Gogh Starry Night Over the Rhône (1888). Oil on canvas, 73 x 92 cm. © Musée d’Orsay, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais/Patrice Schmidt.
Elsewhere, in Arles, France, a new exhibition (on view June 1 through September 8, 2024) will center on the artist’s rarely loaned La Nuit étoilée (1888) (Starry Night), which he painted in Arles. The show looks at the mystical and cosmological interests of painters around the late 19th and early 20th century, as creators responded to new scientific discoveries. Works depict night skies and range over a broad period, from a 1904-1905 painting by Mikalojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis to Georgia O’Keeffe’s Starlight Night, Lake George (1922).
Nearby, LUMA Arles has also invited the Dutch artists DRIFT to create an installation and performance in dialogue with the Van Gogh exhibit, starting May 31.

Berthe Morisot at the Musée des Beaux-Arts Jules Chéret More

For a limited time, experience the innovation and imagination of artists working at the height of the Spanish Netherlands, through more than 100 drawings. The “Bruegel to Rubens” exhibition is at the Ashmolean Museum in the U.K. The University of Oxford institution partnered with the Museum Plantin-Moretus in Antwerp to present this unparalleled survey of delicate sketches by the great Flemish masters.
Maerten de Vos, Cadmus and Hermione: Design for the Decorations of the City of Antwerp on the Occasion of the Joyous Entry of Archduke Ernest of Austria in Antwerp (ca.1594). Museum Plantin-Moretus, Antwerp.
The concept was devised shortly after CODART announced their publicly informed “canon” of the most important Flemish artworks made before 1750. The Museum Plantin-Moretus found themselves in possession of numerous works on the group’s list. Thus, they approached the Ashmolean, presenting these pieces alongside works from private collections and additional institutions, which include not only Pieter Bruegel the Elder and Peter Paul Rubens, but other famed artists of the day, including Anthony van Dyck and Jacques Jordaens.
Peter Paul Rubens, Belvedere Torso (ca.1601–02). Rubenshuis, Antwerp.
“‘This will be the first time these magnificent drawings from Antwerp are brought together with those from the Ashmolean,” exhibition curator An Van Camp remarked in the show’s press release, “including some which have only recently been discovered and acquired.”
Anthony van Dyck, Study of a Man with his Hands Crossed (c. 1618–20). Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford.
It is rare that pieces like these get a big public outing, since they’re so precious and fragile, and the show has deliberately used low lighting to assure adequate protections.
Cornelis de Vos, Study of a Young Girl Wearing a Cap (ca.1620–35). Phoebus Foundation, Antwerp.
“Bruegel to Rubens” sprawls across three thematic rooms: drawings as studies, functional preparatory sketches, and drawings that were eventual final artworks of their own. This layout demonstrates the different ways that Flemish masters approached the medium, while also illustrating how it connected these artists. This is evidenced by two artworks exchanged in a friendly act of gift giving, between the painter Joris Hoefnagel and the cartographer Abraham Ortelius, which includes a gilded, scientific still-life by the former and an arresting, illustrated map by the latter.
Hans Bol, Distant View of Antwerp (ca. 1575–80). Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford.
These “friendship sheets” are the ultimate form of independent drawing, according to Van Camp. As she told the Guardian, “[They were] made selflessly. They allow you to unravel all the artistic networks and friendships.”
Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Temptation of St Anthony (ca. 1556). Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford.
Where appropriate, the exhibition also situates these many treasured drawings alongside their eventual evolutions. For instance, Van Camp located and acquired a first-edition print of Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s allegorical Temptation of St Anthony (ca. 1556). It is on view at the  alongside the drawing that came before it, perhaps for the first time ever.
Peter Paul Rubens (after Hans Holbein), The Abbot and Death (ca. 1590). Museum Plantin-Moretus, Antwerp.
The standout work from the show’s second namesake is a page from a book of drawings by Peter Paul Rubens, which he copied from a Hans Holbein print series. Here, humanity’s good tangles with evil, too.
Jan Brueghel I, Hilly Landscape (ca. 1615–18). Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford.
The exhibition honors the inherent versatility of drawing. Subject matters in the show range from densely populated mythical scenes to more placid studies centering on vast landscapes and carefree creatures. Unlike painting or sculpting, drawing offered an opportunity for these artists to dash off spirited recordings of human behavior, like the “gossip aunts” in a scene that painter Jacques Jordean surreptitiously captured from a window above. The widespread excitement surrounding the exhibition is a testament to the rarity of the items on display, as well as celebrating the archetypal role that drawings plays in human behavior to this day.
Joannes Fijt, Study of a Dog (ca. 1630–61). Museum Plantin-Moretus, Antwerp.
“Bruegel to Rubens” is on view at the Ashmolean Museum, Beaumont Street, Oxford, through June 23
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