On View

Natalie Frank has never been confined to the white cube. That’s particularly true now for the 43-year-old artist who, in addition to opening a new exhibition of works at Miles McEnery Gallery, just saw the release of two books and a big-budget tv show featuring her fantastical drawings.  
On view at Miles McEnery is “The Raven and The Lion Tamer,” Frank’s first solo show in New York in over a decade. It comprises examples from two recent, related bodies of work.  
The first is a suite of expressionistic mixed-media pictures of women with lions. Most subvert the dynamic you might expect: in Frank’s world, the cats are docile and the women are wild. In one canvas, a lioness licks the red-bottomed sole of a masked woman whose arms are tied behind her head. Whether the restraints are for safety or performance, is unclear; either way, the scene is charged with a frisson of danger. 
Natalie Frank, Raven III (2022). Courtesy of Miles McEnery Gallery.
Rounding out the show at Miles McEnery are seven gouache and pastel chalk drawings Frank created for a new book on the collected writings of Edgar Allan Poe. The artist draws inspiration from Poe’s best-known poem for the series, called The Raven, but she departs from typical depictions of the tale.  
Instead, Frank focuses on Lenore, the narrator’s lost lover. In some cases, she’s shown as a bird or a goddess; in others, her form is harder to pin down: Is she a vision? A dream? A memory? 
“The Raven and Lion Tamers series explore the possibilities of losing and commanding control,” wrote Jonathan Rider, Director of FLAG Art Foundation, in an essay for the show. “Operating within tense psychological spaces—a mourner’s chamber or a ring at the center of a circus—Frank’s fantastical images both complicate and exaggerate already heightened emotional states and circumstances. 
“What Frank brings to light through these bodies of work,” Rider continued, “is the glory and tumult, the messiness and complex vulnerability of attempting to maintain the illusion of control.” 
Natalie Frank, Raven I (2022). Courtesy of Miles McEnery Gallery.
The book for which Frank painted those and other illustrations is Poe’s Phantasia, published earlier this year by Arion Press. The artist also illustrated a collection of another horror writer’s work: The Wounded Storyteller: The Traumatic Tales of E.T.A. Hoffmann, which was released by Yale Books in May. 
Eagled-eyed viewers can also spot Frank’s drawings and notebooks in The Crowded Room, a new Apple+ miniseries. Tom Holland, the show’s star, plays a New York artist in 1979 who is arrested for a shocking crime—one he swears he didn’t commit.  
See more images from “The Raven and The Lion Tamer” below: 
Natalie Frank, Raven VI (2022). Courtesy of Miles McEnery Gallery.
Natalie Frank, The Lion Tamer II (2022). Courtesy of Miles McEnery Gallery.
Natalie Frank, Raven V (2022). Courtesy of Miles McEnery Gallery.
Natalie Frank, The Lion Tamer IV (2022). Courtesy of Miles McEnery Gallery.
Natalie Frank, The Lion Tamer III (2022). Courtesy of Miles McEnery Gallery.
Natalie Frank, Raven II (2022). Courtesy of Miles McEnery Gallery.
“Natalie Frank: The Raven and The Lion Tamer” is on view now through July 22 at Miles McEnery Gallery in New York.  

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Absurdity takes centre stage in a new retrospective of sculptural works by the playful Austrian artist Erwin Wurm at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park in northern England. Over decades, Wurm has become know for works that interrupt our everyday perception of the world, distorting or anthropomorphizing familiar objects and poking fun at rigid societal norms.
“Trap of the Truth” is named for the philosophical interrogations of René Descartes, emphasizing the inevitable subjectivity of our interactions with the world. Among the highlights are Wurm’s famed “One Minute Sculptures,” like Idiot (2010) and Ship of Fools (2017), performative works in which a human fails to use an everyday object in the proper way and ends up trapped in a ridiculous position.
Several new, unseen sculptures include Big Step (2022), which lampoons society’s obsession with conspicuous consumption by inflating a Hermès Birkin bag and allowing it to take on a life of its own atop long, slender legs.
Visitors to the exhibition will note that there is hardly a subject or medium that Wurm has shied away from. “At some point I came to realise that everything surrounding me can be material for an artistic work, absolutely everything,” Wurm said in a press statement. “To begin with, because I had no money and worked relatively quickly, I used scraps of wood and cans. Then I used old clothing, which did not cost anything, before ultimately realizing that I could actually use anything around me. That was the decisive step, as then anything was possible.”
The mega survey includes more than 100 works, pairing 55 sculptures indoors and 19 outside with paintings, drawings and photographs that give wider context to Wurm’s ideas.
Check out some of the works for the exhibition, on view through April 28, 2024, below.
Erwin Wurm, Truck II (2011). Photo: Rafal Sosin, © Studio Erwin Wurm.
Erwin Wurm, Big Kastenmann (2012). Photo: © Studio Erwin Wurm.
Erwin Wurm, Crash Long (2022). Photo: Ulrich-Ghezzi, © Studio Erwin Wurm.
Erwin Wurm, The Idiot II (2003). Photo: © Studio Erwin Wurm.
Erwin Wurm, Big Step (2022). Photo: © Studio Wurm.
Erwin Wurm, Eames (2021). Photo: Markus Gradwohl, © Studio Erwin Wurm.
Erwin Wurm, Modesty (2021). Photo: © Ulrich Ghezzi, courtesy Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac.

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A major new retrospective at the Southhampton Arts Center is giving due recognition to the Scottish photojournalist Harry Benson, who has spent over seven decades capturing some of pop culture’s most legendary figures. Featuring musicians, models, actors, and athletes, “A Moment in Time: Iconic Images by Harry Benson” runs until July 15.
Born in Glasgow in 1929, Benson started out as a tabloid photographer before landing a job at LIFE magazine. His work has also been published in TIME, French Vogue, Newsweek, People, Architectural Digest, Town & Country, and Vanity Fair, and his subjects have included the Kennedys, Dolly Parton, Michael Jackson, Barbara Streisand, and Queen Elizabeth II. Making best use of this unique access to high profile subjects, Benson has a knack for producing images that feel natural and carefree.
Henry Benson visiting the exhibition at Southampton Arts Center. Photo: Rob Rich.
“Having started my career on London’s Fleet Street, I work very quickly and try not to influence the person I am photographing,” he told Artnet News. “I photograph what I see and what I see should inform.”
Now aged 93, he is still snapping away and has shared a behind-the-scenes glimpse at his most exciting jobs in a new Magnolia Pictures’ documentary Harry Benson: Shoot First.
One of Benson’s best known images is an action shot of The Beatles having a pillow fight at the George V Hotel in Paris in 1964. The band’s high spirits must have been buoyed that night by the news that I Want to Hold Your Hand had topped the American charts and they were invited to appear on The Ed Sullivan Show. Benson traveled with them on their American tour and never returned to the U.K.
Two decades later, in 1992, he visited Truman Capote near his summer home in Wainscott, Long Island and immortalized the writer’s carefree excitement as he paced over the dunes towards the beach. “Truman was a tough man who was always ready to oblige for a photograph; he is truly missed,” said Benson in a press statement.
Truman Capote in the sand near his summer home in Long Island in 1982. Photo: © Harry Benson.
One day in 1971, Benson was walking home from the offices of Life magazine when he saw Francis Coppola in conversation with Al Pacino and Diane Keaton outside Radio City Music Hall. Instinctually, he grabbed his camera and within moments had secured a behind-the-scenes shot of the filming of The Godfather, which remains one of the most celebrated movies of all time.
Al Pacino and Diane Keaton speaking to Francis Ford Coppola on the set of The Godfather in 1971. Photo: © Harry Benson.
In one 1978 snap, New York’s breathtaking skyline, which frames the twin towers, is as much the artist’s subject as are actress and singer Liza Minnelli and her friend, the acclaimed fashion designer Roy Halston Frowick, known mostly as simply Halston. The pair are seen sharing a moment of laughter at his atelier on the 21st floor of the Olympic Tower.
Actress and singer Liza Minnelli with her friend, the fashion designer Halston, in New York City in 1978. Photo: © Harry Benson.
Among the many musicians and rock stars who have posed before Benson’s camera is The Rolling Stones singer Mick Jagger, who was performing at Madison Square Gardens in 1969. Memorably, Tina Turner and Janis Joplin also took to the stage as opening acts.
Portrait of Mick Jagger in 1969. Photo: © Harry Benson.
Benson also turned his lens back on the magazine world, authoring a portrait of one of its greatest titans, Diana Vreeland. The Paris-born fashion writer was editor-in-chief of American Vogue from 1963 to 1971 and later a special consultant to the Costume Institute as the Met.
Portrait of former Vogue editor-in-chief Diana Vreeland. Photo: © Harry Benson.
The rapturous whoops and cheers of students at Harrow School in London take centre stage of a photograph documenting Sir Winston Churchill’s visit to his alma mater in 1960. The boys greeted their former prime minister with an updated rendition of their school song, adding the line “and Churchill’s name shall win acclaim through each new generation.”
Sir Winston Churchill visits his alma mater Harrow school in 1960. Photo: © Harry Benson.
“A Moment in Time: Iconic Images by Harry Benson” is on view until July 15 at the Southampton Arts Center.
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A new online exhibition of artworks by Black artists from Africa and its Diaspora explores the misrepresentations of Black identity by A.I., which they say offers “a fragmentary, perhaps even violent, picture.”
As is now well understood, data, and consequently A.I., reproduces the same human biases that are ever-present in our everyday real lives. In response, “In/Visible” on the digital art platform Feral File brings together work that is “defiantly visible” by Black artists who are using A.I. to tell stories despite its inevitable shortcomings.
“Black artists using A.I. today have to work harder than their white counterparts to get results that they feel accurately represent them,” Senegalese curator Linda Dounia told Artnet News. “They achieved this with persistence and stubbornness, endlessly re-prompting, correcting distortions, and editing out stereotypes. While Black artists should be celebrated for the incredible persistence they show using a tool that barely understands them, it really shouldn’t be this hard for them to participate in the emergence of new technologies.”
Classic examples of A.I. bias in Dounia’s experience include face and body distortions, lack of detail or definition of features like hair and inability to understand cultural references like types of braid or attire. “A prompt about a ‘building in Dakar’ will likely return a deserted field with a dilapidated building while Dakar is a vibrant city with a rich architectural history,” she also noted of A.I.’s replication of common stereotypes.
“For a technology that was developed in our times, it feels like A.I. has missed an opportunity to learn from the fraught legacies that older industries are struggling to untangle themselves from,” she added. “‘In/Visible’ is a way for Black artists to feel less lonely in their experience of A.I., to have their challenges expressed in a way that resonates materially and emotionally, to reject the normalization of their exclusion in emerging technologies.”
In her curatorial statement, Dounia further elucidated the ways in which data fail to adequately capture ambiguity, while also failing to offer an “objective” reflection of our reality. “Logical measurements of the mysteries of the universe and instruments capable of pulverizing elusiveness to its most objective bits,” is how she described data. “Yet, what we measure, and where and how we measure it, are affected by who we are and our positionality relative to others.”
“In/Visible” is currently on view on Feral File. Preview works from the exhibition below.
Adaeze Okaro, Planet Hibiscus, #33. Images courtesy of Feral File.
Minne Atairu, Blonde Braids Study II. Images courtesy of Feral File.
Linda Dounia, Chez Jo. Images courtesy of Feral File.
Zoe Osborne, Summer Edition. Images courtesy of Feral File.
Nygilia, Confetti. Images courtesy of Feral File.
Serwah Attafuah, PERCEIVED. Images courtesy of Feral File.
AFROSCOPE, Proof of Spirit – Act II. Images courtesy of Feral File.
Arclight, UNTITLED. Images courtesy of Feral File.
Rayan Elnayal, Cities and spaceships. Images courtesy of Feral File.
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More than 20 years ago, Hugh Nini and his partner Neal Treadwell were browsing in an antique shop in Dallas, Texas, when they came across a 1920s photo of a young male couple in which they were sure they saw clandestine love. Struck by the risk the pictured couple had taken by showing themselves intertwined physically, in everyday clothing in an American suburb, Nini and Treadwell saw themselves. 
Their collection of images of men in love now encompasses more than 4,000 photographs from about 1850 to 1950, spanning events like the Civil War, two World Wars, and the Great Depression, and coming from all across the world. A selection was published in a book, Loving: A Photographic History of Men in Love, 1850s-1950s, in 2020. Reviewing it in Rolling Stone, Jerry Portwood said it was “gorgeous” and called it “a promise we keep to these forgotten men, acknowledging their devotion, who loved despite all the odds.”
Portwood also hoped the book would become a museum show, and at Geneva’s Rath Museum (the temporary exhibition space of the Musée d’Art et d’Histoire), he now has his wish with the exhibition, “Loving: the Hugh Nini and Neal Treadwell Collection.” Zurich-based artist Walter Pfeiffer helped to curate the show from a selection offered by Nini and Treadwell. The show came as a result of museum director Marc-Olivier Wahler meeting the book’s publishers in 2019.
Photograph, undated, with a note: “Edward and his chum.” Courtesy of the Nini-Treadwell collection © Loving by 5 Continents Editions
The photos and the subjects are anonymous, and the men pose as straight couples might: in bed, on board a ship, in a photo booth, or even simulating a wedding. They include workers, businessmen, students, and servicemen. 
And they’ve mostly stayed anonymous despite the exposure in the book, which was published in various languages around the world simultaneously.
“Surprisingly, we have had no one reach out to say that they are related to anyone in our book,” said the collectors in an interview with the museum. “However, people who have our book have sent us photos of their relatives that they believe could be a part of our next book.”
There is one couple which has been identified, according to the collectors. 
“A professor from Vienna, and others, have reached out to us saying that the couple on pages 210/211 are in fact Rupert Brook, a famous poet, and Duncan Grant, a famous artist, both from the U.K.,” they said. “If you look at photos of these two men from the early 1900s, they are more than similar. They are a match.”
“One enduring philosophical question is: ‘If a tree falls in a forest, and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound?’” the collectors asked in their book. “The correct answer is yes—or no. If these couples loved each other and memorialized their love with a photo, but no one else saw it, did their love exist or matter? This book is filled with fallen trees whose sound, though delayed, is now being heard for the first time.”
See more photos from the show below.
Photograph, 1951, with a note: “1951”, “Davis & J.C.” Courtesy of the Nini-Treadwell collection © Loving by 5 Continents Editions
Photograph, United States, undated. Courtesy of the Nini-Treadwell collection © Loving by 5 Continents Editions.
Photograph (n.d.). Courtesy of the Nini-Treadwell collection. © Loving Continents Editions.
Photograph, United States, undated. Courtesy of the Nini-Treadwell collection © Loving by 5 Continents Editions.
“Loving: the Hugh Nini and Neal Treadwell Collection” is on view at the Rath Museum, Rue Charles-Galland 2, 1206 Geneva, through September 24.
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When the Museum of the City of New York decided to mark its centennial with a massive show exploring what the city has meant to artists, let’s just say it did not lack for exhibits.  
More than 400 objects have been assembled for “This Is New York: 100 Years of the City in Art and Pop Culture,” all capturing how the city has served as muse, setting, and subject for visual artists, filmmakers, writers, fashion designers, and musicians over the past century. The stories they have told in and about New York City have been as abundant as they are diverse. 
“Nobody feels neutral about New York,” Sarah M. Henry, the museum’s chief curator and interim director, told Artnet News. “The warts-and-all quality to this observation and the ways in which artists have drawn attention to the flaws of New York is as much part of the story as the odes to the things that we love about the city.”
Installation view of “This Is New York: 100 Years of the City in Art and Pop Culture” at the Museum of the City of New York. Photo: Brad Farwell for Museum of the City of New York.
The show is divided into distinct segments.

Tempo of the City surveys visual representations of the city streets evoking both joy (as in Sex and the City) and stress (Taxi Driver); Destination NYC spotlights New York’s most iconic spaces, from its beaches to its rooftops; At Home in New York explores how artists have depicted the comforts and challenges of living in the city.  

Interactive exhibits dot the show, including a sound installation loaded with 100 songs inspired by the city’s five boroughs and a digital bookshelf, masterminded by design studio Dome Collective, where visitors can listen to books read by the likes of Matthew Broderick, Ronnie Chieng, and Tessa Thompson.  
A highlight, though, is You Are Here, an installation that immerses viewers in more than 400 film scenes shot of and about New York. Do the Right Thing and Ghostbusters are represented, as are clips from Working Girl to Breakfast at Tiffany’s to Midnight Cowboy, all cleverly and thematically stitched together by production company RadicalMedia.  
Installation view of “This Is New York: 100 Years of the City in Art and Pop Culture” at the Museum of the City of New York. Photo: Brad Farwell for Museum of the City of New York.
A vast project, MCNY planned and pulled the exhibition together over five years, a period that overlapped with 2020’s lockdowns. According to Henry, it was a moment that surfaced for the museum team how New York’s distinct qualities could also make it most vulnerable to a pandemic. That discrepant view, as the show points out, is just the tip of the complexity of inhabiting—let’s face it—the greatest city in the world. 
“We’re not the visitor center and New York doesn’t need it either,” said Henry. “What the exhibition is about is these conflicting perspectives, experiences, and emotions that a place as complicated and challenging as New York City can evoke.” 
Here are eight unmissable highlights from the exhibition.

Edward Hopper, New York Movie (1939) 
Edward Hopper, New York Movie (1939) at “This Is New York: 100 Years of the City in Art and Pop Culture.” Photo: Min Chen.
One of Hopper’s lesser-seen works, on loan from MoMA, this painting depicts an usher, pensive against the backdrop of an opulent movie theater. The painter’s signatures are in full bloom here—from the visual sumptuousness of the New York setting to the haunted atmosphere of urban alienation. 

The robe and gloves Robert De Niro wore in Raging Bull (1980) 
Robe, trunks, and boxing gloves from Raging Bull at “This Is New York: 100 Years of the City in Art and Pop Culture.” Photo: Min Chen.
One of the most striking costume choices in Martin Scorsese’s Oscar-sweeping film, this ensemble, designed by John Boxer and Richard Bruno, was most prominently seen in scenes recreating boxer Jake LaMotta’s bouts at Madison Square Garden. It will only be on view for three months. 

Alice Neel, 108th and Madison (1945) 
“I love you Harlem,” artist Alice Neel wrote in her journal in the early 1940s, “for the rich deep vein of human feeling buried under your fire engines.” That affection for her neighborhood, Neel would also paint into her street scenes that immortalized El Barrio, she wrote, for “your poverty and your loves.” This particular oil depicts the city’s sanitation workers going about their job not far from the MCNY itself. 

Elinor Carucci, Emma in Her Room, Shelter-in-Place Time, Corona Days (2020) 
Elinor Carucci, Emma in Her Room, Shelter-in-Place Time, Corona Days (2020). Courtesy Edwynn Houk Gallery.
Over lockdown, photographer Elinor Carucci turned her camera onto her own family in isolation, capturing her husband and teenage twins, Eden and Emma (seen here), sheltering in place in their 950-square-foot apartment. Her series would illustrate not just an individual, but a shared reality—further mirrored in Kadir Nelson’s Homecoming (2021), a painting, included in the show, that depicts the bliss of a post-vax reunion.  

The pendant from Uncut Gems (2019) 
Pendant from Uncut Gems, with the Carrie Bradshaw tutu ensemble from Sex and the City. Photo: Brad Farwell for Museum of the City of New York.
You know that highly meme-ed scene from Uncut Gems where Adam Sandler, playing a jeweler, holds up this diamond-encrusted Furby pendant and declares, “I started this shit”? Well, that object is here, the work of designer Catherine Miller who oversaw the molding, casting, and setting by hand of the 14-carat gems on the instantly iconic medallion.  

Jimi Hendrix’s handwritten lyrics for “My Friend” (1968) 
Jimi Hendrix’s handwritten lyrics. Photo: Min Chen.
Hendrix lived in New York City for four years starting in 1966, during which he left his mark on studios like Electric Lady and apartments in Greenwich Village and the Upper East Side. The city, too, left its mark on the musician, who, in his song “My Friend” transformed Harlem into a fantastical setting for an encounter with “a stagecoach full of feathers and footprints.” 

The T-shirt Chloë Sevigny wore in Kids (1995) 
T-shirt from Kids. Photo: Brad Farwell for Museum of the City of New York.
Straight from Sevigny’s own collection, this T-shirt saw her character Jennie through one life-changing day of hard partying, drug use, sex, and skateboarding in Larry Clark’s seminal film Kids. Sevigny calls the item one of her “most treasured possessions.” 

Faith Ringgold, Tar Beach (1988) 
Faith Ringgold, Tar Beach (1988) at “This Is New York: 100 Years of the City in Art and Pop Culture.” Photo: Min Chen.
Ringgold’s story quilt, which narrates the creative reveries of the artist’s eight-year-old heroine Cassie Louise Lightfoot, is included here for its framing of a Harlem rooftop as a site for socializing, dreaming—and flight. “My women are actually flying,” Ringgold said of her “Women on a Bridge” series, of which this quilt forms a part. “They are just free, totally.” 
“This Is New York: 100 Years of the City in Art and Pop Culture” is on view at the Museum of the City of New York, 1220 5th Ave, New York, through June 21, 2024. 
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In Gwen John’s hazily beautiful La Chambre sur la Cour (1907-8) we see a solitary, contemplative woman seated in a small room, a cat curled on a wicker chair opposite her. Interior scenes were all the vogue at the time, with French artists like Édouard Vuillard and Pierre Bonnard among the leading practitioners. But John did something wholly unique with the genre, making it about a woman’s experience and needs rather than a depiction of the domesticity in which contemporary society would like to see her confined.
John was a woman who consistently refused to conform to the norms expected of her. Brave and bohemian, she moved between London and Paris where she immersed herself in the art and thinking of her time.  Yet because of her sex and later conversion to Catholicism, her subject matter has been used to define her as a timid, insular woman, too pious or afraid to engage with the world around her.
“It’s quite a seductive image, the archetypal artist in a garret,” says art historian Alicia Foster, author of a new biography of John and curator of an accompanying exhibition at the Pallant House Gallery in Chichester, England, which both aim to challenge the myths that have built up around her.  However, as Foster laughingly points out, “if you want to be a recluse, there are better places to go than London in the 1890s or Paris in 1904.”
Gwen John, La Chambre Sur la Cour (c.1907–08), oil on canvas. Photo: © Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.
Spending most of her early life in Pembrokeshire, Wales, John followed her celebrated brother Augustus to London to study at the Slade School of Art in 1895. A lack of funds meant that she had to eke out her existence in a series of cheaply rented rooms, but she relished her newfound independence, embracing life as one of the “New Women” who were then challenging societal norms. She excelled at the Slade, winning two prizes, and in 1898 she made her first sojourn to Paris. While there, she studied under American painter James Abbott Whistler, and reveled in the heady sense of freedom the city gave her.
In the years immediately afterwards, John painted her first great works, both self-portraits (neither unfortunately could be lent for the Pallant House show). In the first, painted around 1899, John stands with her hand on her hip, haughtily meeting the viewer’s gaze, an uncompromising take on the Grand Manner style. The second, painted around 1902, sees her portraying herself with the intensity of an Ibsen heroine. “The fact that she was so assured and playing with these ideas of who she was so early on is fascinating,” Foster says. “I think they’re statements of presence, and intent.”
That intent was always to be a great artist, and to that end John knew she had to move to Paris, settling there in 1904. It was here that she began to focus on the interiors with which she would become so closely associated. While her male peers painted rooms as part of the domestic sphere, for John they were always “a woman’s space for work and thought,” Foster says.
Gwen John, A Corner of the Artist’s Room in Paris (c.1907–09), oil on canvas. Photo: © Sheffield Museums Trust.
Money was as always short, and to make ends meet John worked as an artist’s model, a career choice which would have been unthinkable in London, and one which—even in Paris—took significant courage. Yet John ended up working for the most famous sculptor of the era, Rodin, becoming not only a favored model, but also his lover.
The massive power differential has often seen John cast as a victim when the affair ended, but Foster doesn’t think she ever yearned for a conventional domestic set up. “A relationship with someone magnificent at one remove was what she wanted,” she says. “And it’s no coincidence I think that when the relationship with Rodin ended, there was God.”
John converted to Catholicism in 1913, but rather than signaling an end to her career, it was the spur for another creative leap. In France, there was a move to establish a Modern art movement that was also religious, one in which the techniques and methods were as important as the subject matter. Taking her cue from Cézanne, “she extends her painterly practice in a quite risky manner. She pares down her palette and paints in blocks, leaving brushes of paint that are visible,” Foster explains. The results can be seen in the cool serenity of a work such as The Nun (c. 1915–21).
Gwen John, Autoportrait à la Lettre, (Self-portrait with a letter) (c.1907–09), pencil and watercolour. Photo: © Musée Rodin
The patronage of the wealthy American John Quinn had already resulted in John’s work being shown in the 1913 Armory Show in New York, and following World War I, her simple yet radiant style was perfectly in tune with the times. Works such as the “Convalescent” series, which Foster believes alludes to the post-war recovery of France, led to significant success in the Paris salons.
Yet in 1925 she abruptly stopped exhibiting. For someone so sure of their talent it seems an inexplicable decision, but it was perhaps a fit of pique at having been nominated as a Salon Associate only to be disqualified later when it was discovered that she wasn’t French.
Despite that disappointment, the following year John had a solo show at the New Chenil Galleries in London. It was a great success, yet it was here that the myths around her began. The art historian and curator Mary Chamot described her as an “elusive personality” who has to be “besought for years before she will consent to show anything.” It was a somewhat mystifying comment given her success in America and France, yet the idea persisted. When her work appeared in a 1952 Tate exhibition, a catalog entry described her as “by nature a recluse, devoid of ambition.”
Gwen John, Young Woman Holding a Black Cat (c.1920–25), oil on canvas. Photo: © Tate: Purchased 1946.
Whether playing into misogynistic myths, or a canny attempt to manipulate the art market, the idea of John as reclusive and unambitious simply doesn’t hold water. “For a woman to have built such a sustained career at that time is very rare, it’s an enormous achievement,” Foster says. John herself was always aware of the value of her work.  In 1910, she wrote to her friend Ursula Tyrwhitt: “I cannot imagine why my work will have some value in the world – and yet I know it will.”
Visitors to the Pallant House show are likely to concur. “The work has a radiance to it that is quite shocking when you see it face to face, it can’t be reproduced,” Foster says. And how should we now think of John herself? “Intensely brave, self-assured to the point of ruthless, driven, and profoundly gifted,” she concludes.
 
“Gwen John: Art and Life in London and Paris,” Pallant House Gallery, 8-9 North Pallant, Chichester, U.K., through October 8, 2023.
Gwen John: Art and Life in London and Paris by Alicia Foster is published by Thames & Hudson. It will be released in the U.S. on July 25.
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The major shifts that took shape in the 1960s—from the civil rights movement and rock and roll to the rise of mass consumerism and the sexual revolution—still echo in contemporary society and throughout the art world. A new show at France’s Pinault Collection explores not just the era’s creative upheaval, but what it represents to us today.
“Forever Sixties: The Spirit of the Sixties in the Pinault Collection,” which marks the third edition of the annual arts and culture Exporama in Rennes, explores the decade’s resounding shifts in art history and beyond through 80 emblematic artworks—many of which have never been on public display. “What did the 1960s represent?” their release reads, citing “tension between conservatism and democratization, dominant culture and alternative countercultures, commercial conformism and dreams of escape.”
The 13-room show spans paintings, photos, and sculptures by names including Barbara Kruger, Martial Raysse, Richard Prince, Sturtevant, and Richard Avedon. Some artists, like Michelangelo Pistoletto, are still actively at work today.
An entire room has been dedicated to an Edward Kienholz installation, while another has been filled with a series of culturally significant album covers, accompanied by a soundtrack of 100 songs selected by French singer Etienne Daho.
The exhibition further coincides with another show at the Pinault Collection on the London-based, Turner Prize-winning contemporary artist Jeremy Deller. His three-venue presentation demonstrates parallel fascinations with contemporary politics, attitudes, and pop culture—against which “Forever Sixties” offers particular historic context.
See more images from the show below.
Duane Hanson, Housepainter I (1984–88). Collection Pinault © Adagp, Paris, 2023.
Richard Prince, Untitled (Fashion) (1982–84). Collection Pinault. © Richard Prince.
Niki de Saint Phalle, Nana noire (1965). Collection Pinault © Niki Charitable Art Foundation / Adagp, Paris, 2023.
Kiki Kogelnik, Outer Space (1964). Collection Pinault. © Kiki Kogelnik.
Martial Raysse, Bien sûr le petit bateau (1963). Collection Pinault. © Adagp, Paris, 2023
Martial Raysse, Belle des nuages (1965). Collection Pinault. © Adagp, Paris, 2023.
Tim Noble and Sue Webster, Forever (2001). Collection Pinault. © Adagp, Paris, 2023
“Forever Sixties: The Spirit of the Sixties in the Pinault Collection” is on view at the Pinault Collection, 2 Rue de Viarmes, 75001 Paris, France, through September 10.
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