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Organic, sinuous lines, with vines snaking around stylized letters, ethereal women with flowing tresses, and botanical borders characterize the style of Art Nouveau, the enduringly popular movement that to this day adorns drawings, posters, notebook covers, and even tarot card decks. But where does the  style come from and why is it still so enduringly popular today?
The answer can be found In the new exhibition, “Alphonse Mucha: Spirit of Art Nouveau,” on view through September 22 at the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia. Billed as one of the most comprehensive presentations of Mucha’s art to date, the show features more than 200 works from drawings and photography to lithographs, sculptures, and paintings drawn from the Mucha Family Collection through the Mucha Foundation in Prague.
Self-portrait with posters for Sarah Bernhardt at Mucha’s studio in rue du Val-de-Grâce, Paris, c1901 © Mucha Trust 2024
Born in 1860 in Ivančice in South Moravia in today’s Czech Republic, the Czech artist rose to fame at the turn of the 20th century in his adopted home in Paris, where he arrived in 1887 as a student at the Académe Julian. He began working as an illustrator in 1889 for publishers in Paris and Prague, while dapping into designing posters, stage, and costumes.
In 1895, Mucha’s poster for the play Gismonda starring celebrated French actress Sarah Bernhardt brought him instant stardom. Bernhardt reportedly loved the poster and exclaimed: “Monsieur Mucha, you have made me immortal.”
Alphonse Mucha, Gismonda (1894) colour lithograph, 216 x 74.2 cm © Mucha Trust 2024.
The work made Mucha immortal, too. The distinctive drawing style and shape of the work was hailed as the birth of “Style Mucha,” characterized by the tendril-like lines and soft pastel colors. “The purpose of my work was never to destroy but always to create, to construct bridges,” he once said. The invention of a new visual language seen in his Art Nouveau posters, illustrations, and decorative panels, made Mucha a central figure of the art movement.
Throughout his eventful life, Mucha encountered many other key cultural figures at the time. He was friends with Paul Gauguin, with whom he said a studio, and Swedish playwright August Strindberg, with whom he practiced occult ceremonies. He also journeyed to the U.S., taught at the Art Institute of Chicago until 1909 before returning to his home country and started working on his The Slav Epic project.
Alphonse Mucha, The Slav Epic XX: Apotheosis Slavs for Humanity (1926) (detail) egg tempera and oil on canvas, 480 x 405 cm © Mucha Trust 2024
Considered to be the most important work by Mucha, The Slav Epic consists of a series of 20 monumental canvases measured by 19 feet x 26 feet depicting the history and civilization of the Slav people. From conceiving the idea in 1899  to its final completion in 1926, Mucha dedicated his career to the project, which was a symbol of his devotion to the culture and his people. The series was gifted to the nation in 1928 to celebrate the 10th anniversary of Czechoslovakia’s independence from the Austria-Hungary Empire.
In 1939, he was arrested and interrogated by the Gestapo over his alleged Masonic and Slavic nationalist activities when Germany invaded Czechoslovakia. He was released but died shortly afterwards.
More images from the exhibition below.
Installation view of the “Alphonse Mucha: Spirit of Art Nouveau” exhibition at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, 15 June 22 September 2024, photo © Art Gallery of New South Wales, Diana Panuccio
Alphonse Mucha, The Seasons: Summer (1896), color lithograph, 103 x 54 cm © Mucha Trust 2024.
Installation view of the “Alphonse Mucha: Spirit of Art Nouveau” exhibition at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, 15 June 22 September 2024, photo © Art Gallery of New South Wales, Diana Panuccio
Alphonse Mucha, Poster for JOB cigarette papers (1896), colour lithograph, 66.7 x 46.4 cm © Mucha Trust 2024
Installation view of the “Alphonse Mucha: Spirit of Art Nouveau” exhibition at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, 15 June 22 September 2024, photo © Art Gallery of New South Wales, Diana Panuccio
Alphonse Mucha, Reverie (1898), color lithograph, 72.7 x 55.2 cm © Mucha Trust 2024
Alphonse Mucha, Princess Hyacinth (1911), color lithograph 125.5 x 83.5 cm © Mucha Trust 2024
Alphonse Mucha, La Nature’c1900, patinated bronze and malachite, 70 x 27 x 28 cm © Mucha Trust 2024

Alphonse Mucha, Poster for Slavia Mutual Saving Bank, Prague (1907), color lithograph, 54 x 36 cm © Mucha Trust
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When we think of Cubism, a pivotal moment in the birth of modernism when artists began to deconstruct their pictorial compositions, we immediately think of Picasso and his collaborator Georges Braque. The names of renowned Salon Cubists like Juan Gris, Fernand Léger, and Jean Metzinger may also come to mind. You’d be forgiven for assuming that no woman made a meaningful impact on the movement, since this has long been the dominant art historical narrative.
Enter Maria Blanchard. Though she was critically acclaimed in her day, the Spanish artist’s reputation fell into obscurity in the decades after her death in 1932. She is now the subject of an expansive retrospective at the Picasso Museum in his birthplace of Màlaga in southern Spain.
Though Blanchard was born in another Spanish city, Santander, in the same year as Picasso, 1881, rigid gender norms pushed both talented painters down different paths. Yet, against the odds, Blanchard would consistently defy societal expectations.
Maria Blanchard. Photo: © Henri Martinie/Roger-Viollet.
The artist was born with several physical disabilities, including kyphoscoliosis, an abnormal curvature of the spine that caused chronic pain, affected her growth and caused her to limp. As a result, Blanchard was badly bullied at school and her parents encouraged her to pursue a burgeoning interest in art.
By her early twenties, she moved to Madrid to continue her studies at the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando. In 1908, the government of Santander gave Blanchard a grant to continue her education after she won third prize at the National Exhibition of Fine Arts. This backing helped her move to Paris the next year to enroll at the Academie Vitti.
Maria Blanchard, Woman from Brittany (1910). Photo: José A. Gallego Poveda, courtesy of Colección Gobierno de Cantabria.
In her early works, it is easy to see Blanchard’s talents as a painter in the more traditional style and spot the emergence of some early experimentation. Some works seem to suggest she may have been looking at Munch, for example, while others are heavily stylized, a tactic she would deploy throughout her career.
Many of the works in the exhibition are sensitive portrayals of humble figures who look particularly pensive or melancholic. We can only guess at the reason that, shortly after moving to Paris, Blanchard painted The Spanish Woman (1910-13), in which a beautiful woman with classically Spanish features appears emotionally devastated. In 1914, the war meant Blanchard returned to Spain for two years before moving back to Paris in 1916.
Maria Blanchard, Lady with Fan (1913-16). Photo: Belén Pereda.
At this time, Blanchard immersed herself in the city’s avant-garde artistic milieu and absorbed the latest developments in a highly experimental movement known as Cubism. At one time, she shared a studio with Diego Rivera and she also befriended Juan Gris. Upon joining the Section d’Or group, Blanchard began making colorful, collage-style Cubist works, choosing to depict predominantly female subjects or humble still lifes. A particularly fun example on show is the sensually anthropomorphized Green Still Life with Lamp (ca. 1916–17).
Blanchard’s ability to produce exploratory works on the same radical terms as her male peers helped earn the respect of a highly patriarchal art world. Just after her death, her friend, the painter and critic André Lhote, recalled how “her unquestionable technical control, allied with her intense humanity, [which] made her work staggering.” Picasso also praised two works Plate of Fruit and Child with Balloon that were acquired by the Musée de Grenoble in 1926.
Maria Blanchard, Botella y copa de frutas sobre una tabla (c. 1917-18). Courtesy of Colección Zorrilla Lequerica.
Once she had decided to settle in Paris permanently, the artist changed her name from María Gutiérrez, taking her mother’s french surname Blanchard to make a complete break from her beginnings in comparatively conservative Spain.
Partly informed by the “return to order” prevalent in the 1920s after the horrors of World War I, Blanchard soon developed the lessons of Cubism in new directions, pursuing her own vision. Unlike many of her male peers, she was neither particularly interested in the dark complexities of modernity or increasingly abstract investigations of form. Rather, Blanchard was interested in capturing typically marginalized experiences, often focusing on subjects who were working-class or people of color.
Maria Blanchard, The Fortune-Teller (1924-25). Photo: © Studio Monique Bernaz, Geneva.
She began painting everyday domestic scenes of people—mostly women—cooking, embroidering, doing household chores, getting dressed up, or breastfeeding, usually surrounded by their offspring. Whereas the identities of the women in Picasso’s many wacky portraits are almost irrelevant, a real sense of characters is evident throughout the work of Blanchard.
“Her Cubist experience likely gave her the momentum needed to continue to develop the germ of the personal project she brought with her upon leaving [Spain],” suggests the Picasso Museum’s artistic director José Lebrero Stals in the show’s catalogue. Unsurprisingly, Blanchard’s chosen themes were often picked apart by critics, who believed them to be unsophisticated and evidence of a Spanish primitivism.
During the 1920s, Blanchard was an established artist that worked with a group of dealers known as Ceux de Demain, most notably Frank Flausch, who supported her until his death in 1926. After the death of Gris in 1927, Blanchard’s health deteriorated and she died from tuberculosis on April 5, 1932, at the age of just 51.
Maria Blanchard, Girl at her First Communion (1914). Photo courtesy of Photographic Archives Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía.
One of Blanchard’s best known works, Girl at her First Communion is an ominous interpretation of a girl’s societally-sanctioned rite of passage into womanhood. It was shown at the Salon des Indépendants in 1920 and now hangs in Spain’s pre-eminent modern art museum, the Reina Sofía in Madrid. That year, Blanchard was also included in “French Avant-Garde Art,” a landmark exhibition in Barcelona that saw her work shown alongside artists like Matisse, Miró, and Picasso.
For many decades after her death, as the continent of Europe faced the upheaval of war, only a small circle of dedicated collectors kept Blanchard’s memory alive and preserved her work. Reviewing one exhibition of her work at the Galerie Drouant-David in 1942, the critic Maximilien Gauthier described her “as a woman, a failure.” In 1950, another critic G.J. Gros claimed that she “did not sacrifice her art” to her womanhood because “she was crippled and without beauty.”
It wasn’t until 1982 that Blanchard received proper institutional recognition at the now defunct Museo Español de Arte Contemporáneo in Madrid. Another retrospective followed at the Reina Sofía in 2012, the same year her work was exhibited at Fundación Botín in Santander. So far, however, there have been no major museum show outside of Spain and much work remains to be done to bring international attention to Blanchard’s many achievements.
“Maria Blanchard: A Painter in Spite of Cubism” is on view the Picasso Museum Màlaga in Spain through September 29, 2024. 
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Right now, a room in a stately Florentine palazzo is filled wall-to-wall with gleaming gold. But this isn’t yet another ornate private chapel patronized by a powerful mercantile family during the early Renaissance. Rather, these paintings, crammed together in a salon-style hang that even covers the ceiling, are part of major exhibition of new and older works by Anselm Kiefer at the Palazzo Strozzi, on view through July 21.
Nevertheless, these works may well inspire visitors to contemplate a higher, spiritual realm. The German artist is one of the most celebrated of his generation for his ability to take epic themes of history, memory, philosophy, and myth, and not merely depict but actually materialize them on canvas in an act that has been described as alchemy.
Installation view of “Anselm Kiefer: Fallen Angels.” Photo: Ela Bialkowska, OKNO Studio Ⓒ Anselm Kiefer.
The show’s starting point is Engelssturz (Fall of the Angel) (2022-23), which is situated in the palazzo’s central courtyard and depicts a passage from the Book of Revelation in which the archangel Michael, representing Good, battles against rebel angels that represent Evil. This eternal theme, as relevant today as it was in Renaissance society, runs central to the entire exhibition. It invites open-ended reflection about ourselves, humanity at large, our shared past, and the kind of society that we hope to live in.

“The concepts of the Holy Spirit and the Trinity continue to captivate me,” Kiefer said a recent conversation with Palazzo Strozzi’s director Arturo Galansino. “Theodicy, a part of philosophy that examines the relationship between divine justice and the presence of evil in the world, is particularly intriguing. It asserts that God is inherently good, and yet the world is plagued by evil. Theologians argue that this coexistence is a result of the presence of free will.

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“When I first visited Florence, approximately at the age of seventeen—I must consult my diary, its writing is a lifelong practice of mine—I recall making notes about Palazzo Strozzi,” Kiefer told Galansino, reflecting on his lifelong relationship to the venue. “The reason remains elusive, but perhaps its ‘minimal’ allure rendered it one of my favorite edifices in the world.”
Installation view of “Anselm Kiefer: Fallen Angels.” Photo: Ela Bialkowska, OKNO Studio Ⓒ Anselm Kiefer.
Perhaps appropriately for works containing such layered references to literature, poetry, philosophy, religious texts, and ancient myths, Kiefer’s paintings are densely stratified, almost morphing into relief sculptures. Raw materials like seeds, sand, ashes, onto great hefts of lead, are used for their evocative rather than descriptive powers. In this way, the pieces take on a monumental presence despite being affixed to a wall.
“I perceive a painting as an ongoing process rather than a finished product,” Kiefer told Galansino. “I keep paintings for years, occasionally revisiting and reworking pieces dating as far back as 1969.”
He later added, “for me, painting is not merely about creating an artwork, but rather, it symbolizes my personal struggle.”
Installation view of “Anselm Kiefer: Fallen Angels.” Photo: Ela Bialkowska, OKNO Studio Ⓒ Anselm Kiefer.
Of the inscriptions that sometimes adorn his work, Kiefer said, “I have always had a strong affinity for writing, literature, and poetry. The words I choose to inscribe have, for me, a certain aura about them.”

“Inscriptions can serve as a form of commentary, sometimes aligned with the painting, and sometimes in contrast to it,” he added.

Installation view of “Anselm Kiefer: Fallen Angels.” Photo: Ela Bialkowska, OKNO Studio Ⓒ Anselm Kiefer.
The exhibition also contains lead-printed versions made in the 2000s of photographs taken in 1969 known as Kiefer’s “Heroic Symbols” series. The artist himself appears in the images performing what he has described as “occupations” in various locations across Europe. In one case, he donned the Nazi-era Wehrmacht officer uniform that once belonged to his father and made a provocative gesture reminiscent of the now taboo Sieg Heil salute. Kiefer has returned again and again to the weight of recent German history in his work.
Reflecting on contemporary conflicts, Kiefer told Galansino, “men are ill-conceived. Their actions often defy comprehension. They destroy themselves. Wars have persisted throughout history, spanning various regions.”
Installation view of “Anselm Kiefer: Fallen Angels.” Photo: Ela Bialkowska, OKNO Studio Ⓒ Anselm Kiefer.
Born in 1945 in the southern German town of Donaueschingen, Kiefer gained international renown in 1980 when he and George Baselitz represented West Germany at the 39th Venice Biennale. For the past three decades lived and worked in France. His work was recently the subject of Anselm, a 3D documentary by the German filmmaker Wim Wenders.
“Anselm Kiefer: Fallen Angels” is on view at Palazzo Strozzi in Florence, Italy until July 21, 2024.
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Archie Moore has made history. Not only did he become the first artist from Australia and the first First Nations artist to win the coveted Golden Lion for best national pavilion at the 60th edition of the Venice Biennale this spring, his “quietly powerful” installation “kith and kin” is also a work that dives deep into history, tracing the footsteps of his ancestors dated as far back as 65,000 years in a meticulously hand-drawn family tree inscribed across the surface of the walls and ceilings of the pavilion.
“The recording of names, places and time in the family tree drawing serves as proof of identity — evidence of my Aboriginality,” he said. Born in 1970 in Toowoomba, a city in Queensland, Australia, Moore is a Kamilaroi-Bigambul artist whose practice centers around histories—his own and those of his nation. He explores key signifiers of identity: skin, language, and genealogy, racism, and understanding and misunderstanding that occur between cultures.
The somber work in “kith and kin” is the embodiment of his research that took place over more than four years and included 3,484 people; with piles of state records on display in the center of the installation, Moore draws attention to the depth of research as well as the high rates of incarceration of First Nations people, and its documentation.
We caught up with Moore to learn more about his historical win in Venice, which will sow the seeds for changes to come in the future.
Archie Moore, “kith and kin” (2024), Australia Pavilion at Venice Biennale 2024. Photographer: Andrea Rossetti. © the artist. Image courtesy of the artist and The Commercial.
As the first Australian and the Kamilaroi-Bigambul artist to win this coveted award, were you surprised when they announced that you were the winner at the auditorium? How did you feel when you were sitting there at the ceremony?
I was very happy to receive the award. While I didn’t know that we were going to win the Golden Lion, we did get a phone call from La Biennale the night before saying that we should attend the ceremony. The call came in just as Naminapu Maymuru-White (who is exhibiting in “Foreigners Everywhere”), her grandson Ŋalakan Wanambi and Merrkiyawuy Ganambarr arrived at “kith and kin” to sing to all of the ancestors that I inscribed into the artwork. It was an incredibly moving experience and I felt touched that they wanted to make this significant gesture within my installation. Naminapu and Ŋalakan gifted me a golden owl artwork, which in retrospect seems like it was a premonition of things to come.
The process of creating “kith and kin” appears to be very intense to outsiders just by the sound of it. It is hard to imagine the incredible amount of research involved (how many pages of documents are we talking about?), and the labor of spending two months inscribing the 65,000 years of history on the dark walls of the pavilion. How was this work developed?
My research started in 2016. I started looking in the archives for my mother’s Kamilaroi-Bigambul side and my father’s British-Scottish side. I have come across hundreds of pages of material in archives and museums and digitized newspapers and archives on the National Library of Australia’s search engine Trove as well. I’ve been using the genealogical website ancestry.com and there are more than 3,500 people in my ancestry.com tree.
I spoke to a lot of people through the Ancestry website, mainly descendants of people who were relatives of people who worked or owned properties around where my parents lived, asking if they had letters, photographs, stories, or rumors that tie back to my family. I also talked to many family members in Inverell and Brisbane.
The recording of names, places, and time in the family tree drawing serves as proof of identity—evidence of my Aboriginality. If anyone were to research those names of my ancestors you will find records that identify them and their tribal groups. This proof of Aboriginality may be required for employment in Indigenous-identified positions, enrolling in schools, government loans and assistance, and for land rights claims where a continuous and unbroken connection to [the] country since colonization needs to be proven. The artwork continues to grow by adding new names, places and other information.
Archie Moore, “kith and kin” (2024), Australia Pavilion at Venice Biennale 2024. Photographer: Andrea Rossetti. © the artist. Image courtesy of the artist and The Commercial.
How did you pull it off with those months spent in Venice? What were your working hours? What motivated you to keep going and completing the work? How did you share the work with your three collaborators? What was the most challenging part?
I had to draw the mural twice. I did it once at 1:3 scale in Australia in pen and paper on my kitchen table. This was then digitised and placed within a digital model of the pavilion so that we could see the composition of the artwork and tweak the artwork before coming to Venice. And then again in the Australia Pavilion over eight-hour days, six days a week for five weeks. We would draw for 45 minutes and then stretch and rest to ensure our bodies could endure the long installation process. The writing on the ceiling was the most physically challenging and now I know how Michelangelo felt working on the Sistine Chapel.
You have said that your family’s history was something you had “been avoiding.” But this changed when you became interested in genealogy, and you took the opportunity to ask your mother a lot of questions. How and why did you change from avoiding your family’s history to embracing and diving deep into it? What kind of questions did you ask your mother? 
My Mother’s minor stroke was what made it urgent—the thought of losing that archive and she also became more open about discussing things. The stroke also seems to have made her more lucid. I was asking her about people I would see mentioned in archival material. I was cross-referencing what she said with what was written down in an official document. This made me aware of how good her memory was.
For instance, I came across a genealogical chart from when anthropologist Norman Tindale visited Boggabilla in 1938 and interviewed my great-grandmother on my maternal side. What Tindale recorded from my great-grandmother seems very accurate and correlates with what my mother has said. He drew a Western linear family tree; in my artwork the linear part of the mural becomes engulfed with and outnumbered by all the traditional Aboriginal names for people, plants, animals, waterways and land.
Archie Moore, “kith and kin” (2024), Australia Pavilion at Venice Biennale 2024. Photographer: Andrea Rossetti. © the artist. Image courtesy of the artist and The Commercial.
The epic family tree you realized at the pavilion represents 65,000 years of history, and yet, none of this was mentioned in your school days. Has this changed today? And how do you think the visibility and exposure of your Golden Lion win will make a further difference?
I don’t know exactly what is in the school curriculum of today, but I hope there is more of First Nations history being taught compared to when I went to school and was taught that Australia’s history started with Captain Cook and the British invasion. One of the aims of the exhibition was to bring international attention to First Nations Australian culture, sovereignty, and greater recognition of Indigenous deaths in custody and the lack of action in solving this fatal issue. The artwork also highlights how we are all part of one larger family and should be living in peace. Moreover, “kith and kin” foregrounds how injustices, such as racial discrimination and deaths in custody, would not happen if we saw ourselves as part of one large family.
On the Creative Australia website there’s a warning that there may be names or images of First Nations people who are deceased on the website. Is there superstition about this among the Kamilaroi and Bigambul people? Can you share with us some special cultural traditions or characteristics among the Kamilaroi and Bigambul that a lot of people especially foreigners don’t know about? 
In most Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities, hearing recordings, seeing images or the names of deceased persons may cause sadness or distress and, in some cases, offend against strongly held cultural prohibitions.
At the entrance to the “kith and kin” exhibition, there is a warning that the artwork contains names of the deceased. The names of the deceased in the coronial inquests have been redacted out of respect for the dead, even though this is publicly available information so that they aren’t just represented as statistics. While names in the family tree are represented as part of a tightly woven kinship system.
Artist Archie Moore stands on stage with his Golden Lion at the Lion Award Ceremony during the Art Biennale. Photo: Felix Hörhager/picture alliance via Getty Images.
Do you agree that the theme of “Foreigners Everywhere” has finally set a stage for the art world and beyond to properly look at the historical voids of the violence of the colonial era? With many still haunted by the histories of colonization or even facing re-colonization, how will this edition’s Venice Biennale make a difference?
I’ve made an artwork that comes from the personal histories of my family. Accessing documents from archives that feature my great-great-great-grandfather—where my family began to be documented—and everyone else related. Although the accounts of how they were classified, documented, and the nature of their circumstances are personal, they are not unique and other Aboriginal people will have similar experiences. The exhibition covers more than 65,000 years of time; I wanted to show how long Aboriginal cultures have existed and—in spite of invasion, massacres, and systemic over-incarceration —continue to exist into the now.
Did you have time to look at the Biennale or other exhibitions in Venice? Do you have any favorites? 
Unfortunately, I did not have time to see all 87 pavilions. The Cercle d’Art des Travailleurs de Plantation Congolaise at the Dutch pavilion with their objective of land regeneration through art was one of the highlights.
What will happen to the family tree inscribed on the walls of the pavilion when the exhibition concludes in November?
I chose to use the material of chalk in “kith and kin” because it represents the fragility of life; it is a metaphor for how easily people, histories, and memories can be wiped away. At the end of the exhibition, the walls will be painted over, but those names will forever be part of the pavilion’s DNA. The ancestors and family members will be inscribed onto the walls of the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art in Brisbane, Australia when “kith and kin” is on display in 2025-2026. The installation can be re-made again in other locations.
What is next for you? 
My next exhibition expands upon my series of ‘Dwelling’ installations in which viewers are immersed within the architecture and memories of my childhood home. For this exhibition at Samstag Museum of Art [in Adelaide, Australia] there will be a significant moving image component as it is commissioned with the 2024 Adelaide Film Festival.
The 60th Venice Biennale runs through November 24. 
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Jennifer Angus uses her bare fingers to delicately remove a pin holding down the thorax of a large, green insect affixed to a foam board she had used to transport its body. She must be careful: the specimen has been used so many times that holes have appeared in its form. After removing the pin, she hammers the body to the gallery wall to begin forming a pattern.
“It’s about the negative space between the bodies” Angus said as she worked to install her new solo show at the Bruce Museum in Greenwich, Connecticut. The show, “Jennifer Angus: The Golden Hour,” (on view through September 8, 2024) reuses the bodies of around 5,000 bugs to comment on an impending human-made global catastrophe.
The show begins with an Alice in Wonderland-esque experience in which Angus plays with scale. She has made small model homes that are elevated on platforms and form a sort of “main street” leading to a small church. The intent is to make the viewers feel insect sized.
Along the walls are small display boxes, dioramas in which Angus has personified some of her insects. In the same room, she has placed some of her damaged specimens in jelly jars to create a kaleidoscopic stained-glass window. The orange walls and glow of the “stained glass” give the room a feeling of sunset, mirroring the name of the show.
Jennifer Angus holds an insect specimen that she prepares to nail to a wall at the Bruce Museum in Connecticut as part of an art installation. Photo by Adam Schrader
The titular “golden hour” references the warm glow of light that illuminates the sky as the last rays of sunlight begin to fade, Angus said in a statement. She proposes that human life is in its golden hour and draws comparisons to the Doomsday Clock, a symbol for the likelihood of a human-made global catastrophe caused by things like nuclear war or climate change.
“We are in the twilight of the world as we know it,” she said in a statement. “‘The Golden Hour’ is intended to highlight what we stand to lose if action is not taken to prevent climate change, preserve natural habitats, quell the use of insecticides and overall see nature as something to be protected as opposed to a commodity to be used.”
In the next room is Angus’s cabinet of curiosities, where the artist has removed drawers from an antique to create more dioramas using her bug specimens. In some, she mixed the fallen-off parts of different bug species to create characters like the Cicada Lady, who has a cicada head, a beeswax body, and grasshopper arms.
A closeup shows the artist Jennifer Angus removing a pin from a bug she transported to be used in an exhibit at the Bruce Museum. Photo by Adam Schrader.
“She’s sort of a teacher, which I think is a reflection of me,” she said. The artist was inspired to anthropomorphize the bugs because of Beatrix Potter’s The Tale Of Two Bad Mice, in which she made these mice look “cute.”
During the installation, this room also included what Angus called her “bug hospital”—complete with an emergency room and an outpatient clinic. Specimens that suffered damage during transport or installation are taken there to be glued back together.
“We’ve trained the registrar here how to fix them. She’s now a certified bug surgeon,” Angus said. “We repair them if we have the pieces and we put the not-so-great specimens high up or low down and keep the best ones at eye level.”
The show does not contain informational text, Angus said, because she is “not a fan of didactic work.” But she said she hopes the message of her work is clear, or at the very least, that people go to her website and find out more information about the world of bugs.
Lou Adams, a printmaker and former assistant to the artist Jennifer Adams, helps the latter install her artwork using bugs at the Bruce Museum in Connecticut. Photo by Adam Schrader
“Really, my hope is that anyone who comes to see the show will think about insects differently and not be so quick, most important of all, to get out that can of Raid,” she said.
Angus began working with bugs because she teaches textile design at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. About 20 years ago, she was researching textiles in northern Thailand and came upon a garment that was embellished with green metallic beetle wings.
“It makes total sense because these are mother nature’s sequins. They’re shiny, metallic green,” Angus said. So, she learned more about how bugs had been used by different cultures over time. For example, in the Victorian era, beetle wing embroidery used bug parts for high fashion. And in Southeast Asia, some cultures used them in headdresses.
Model houses, including one that once housed crickets, is pictured in an installation by the artist Jennifer Angus at the Bruce Museum in Connecticut. Photo by Adam Schrader
One day, she decided to try her hand at using bugs to make patterns, which she said “felt really reckless” at the time. But the reaction she got from viewers of her first exhibit of such work affirmed her newfound medium.
“From a distance, the insects are flattened, and it looks like wallpaper and so people would walk up and then I’d literally see them take a step back as they realized what it was,” Angus said. “We see wallpaper as a domestic space. Yet that thing we don’t want inside is insects.”
Angus was surprised by the affordability of insect specimens. At the time, each bug cost her about 25 cents—even if they were somewhat difficult to purchase from insect specimen dealers used by academic institutions and museums. The most expensive insects in the exhibit are gold beetles from Costa Rica that can cost over $100 a pop.
“The internet was just starting so you would get a big book with all the species in black and white, no pictures. I had to learn what was right for my type of work,” she said. They have since become more expensive to buy but easier to obtain online.
Damaged bugs that cannot be repaired or reused in Jennifer Angus’s artworks are preserved in jellies she makes and includes in an installation mimicking stained glass effect. Photo by Adam Schrader
It was fortuitous Angus chose the first specimen she did, the Eupholus schoenherrii—a type of blue weevil. She selected them for their pattern but realized quickly their bodies could withstand wear-and-tear. Cicadas also do well for her purposes, but butterflies and moths do not, she learned. And she never works with rare or endangered species.
“People go, ‘how many insects died for this exhibition?’ and I tell them that, first of all, these are reused,” Angus said. “What you’re seeing has gradually accumulated over more than 20 years. And if you’re upset, wonderful. That’s fantastic. Do something. Most of the species I used come from a tropical rainforest. We all know how fast the Amazon is being cut down.”
Even Angus was a little squeamish when she opened her first shipment of bugs and over the years there have been some species too gross to work with. But now, she admits she can eat dinner beside her bugs while working.
The artist Jennifer Angus is pictured holding bugs as transported to be used in a show of her work. Angus uses insects to create geometric patterns and other art, Photo by Adam Schrader
“I frequently say to the people that are upset, ‘These are adult specimens because if they weren’t, they’d be larvae. And it’d be a totally different show,’” she said. “There are going to be people who aren’t going to like this, I remember an e-mail that I got, and the subject line was ‘insecticide.’ I thought, ‘that’s quite clever.’”
Angus and her critics often end up agreeing that they want to see the insects thrive, even if their means to that end are different. But sometimes she also thinks about insects that conservationists don’t want to flourish, like invasive lanternfly species.
While Angus has had her fair share of critics, entomologists and the science community have supported her artistic endeavors. She recalled an exhibition at the University of Nebraska where the chair of the entomology department thanked her for making entomologists “look sexy.”
A valuable beetle known as Chrysina aurigans, native to Costa Rica, is pictured in an artwork by Jennifer Angus at the Bruce Museum in Connecticut. Photo by Adam Schrader
When asked if she had ever considered using live bugs in her work, Angus revealed that she had once used live crickets. Returning to the houses on “main street,” the artist said the very first one had its windows and doors covered with plastic film to keep live crickets in.
“I was reading about cricket cages, which are popular in China in summer because they have a beautiful song. In Germany there was a similar tradition, but it was a much more elaborate house. So that’s where I got this idea,” she said. “But what I have found after the first showing is curators really hate having to look after the livestock.”
Photo by Adam Schrader.
Angus noted that the number of artists working with insects is relatively small and so they all sort of know each other.
“Like Catherine Chalmers, she’s the cockroach lady,” Angus said. “Jan Fabre, a Belgian artist, covered the royal palace with beautiful elytra. It’s inspiring, yet it’s horrific.”
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When we think of Abstract Expressionism, we think of large, declarative canvases onto which pigment has been flung, dripped, pooled, or applied in broad, bold brushstrokes. Usually by men. “Montage,” a new exhibition at Gazelli Art House in London, puts the spotlight on women Abstract Expressionists, offering a mix of big names like Helen Frankenthaler, Grace Hartigan, and Betty Parsons alongside those whose legacies are still unfairly overlooked, like Perle Fine, Nancy Grossman, and Sonja Sekula.
“Montage” shows how these artists, best known as painters, also applied the movement’s radical, experimental spirit to smaller-scale collage works. This survey of mixed-media works includes examples made using all manner of found materials like wood, tissue paper, and sand, in many cases embellished with paint, ink, and charcoal. In this way, the works also evince the enduring influence of European Modernism on the midcentury New York art scene.
Artnet News picked out four artists from the show whose work was critically acclaimed in their lifetimes and are now finally receiving the attention they deserve.
Perle Fine 
Perle Fine in her New York studio in c. 1963. Photo: Maurice Berezov, courtesy of Perle Fine Estate and Gazelli Art House, © AE Artworks.
Born in Boston in 1905 to Russian immigrant parents, Fine showed an early interest in art and moved to New York in her early twenties to pursue an education at the Art Students League. There she opted to study under the renowned German-born artist Hans Hofmann, who was instrumental in developing the formal breakthroughs that defined European movements like Cubism into a more gestural, expressive style. Over time, Fine cultivated a number of high-profile collectors including Museum of Modern Art founding director Alfred Barr, art director and publisher Emily Hall Tremaine, and architect Frank Lloyd Wright, but also supported her practice by working as a gallerist.
By 1945, Fine had developed an interest in nonrepresentational art and joined the American Abstract Artists group. Five years later, Willem de Kooning nominated her to join “the Club,” a members-only meeting place on 8th Street where a tight-knit community of artists met to socialize, plan, and debate. The group selected her to participate in the historic Ninth Street Show, which featured artists like Philip Guston, Elaine de Kooning, Joan Mitchell, Robert Motherwell, and Barnett Newman; the show established Abstract Expressionism as a major American art movement. Fine exhibited in all six of the subsequent annual invite-only exhibitions until 1957.
Perle Fine, Supersonic Calm (c. 1966). Courtesy of Gazelli Art House and Berry Campbell, New York. © A.E. Artworks.
In 1968, Fine noted that collage helped her learn how construct a composition. “When you do something to that white paper, when you put one or two forms on that white paper, that simple sheet of white paper can become one of the most beautiful things in the world if those forms are put in there in such a way as to involve every inch of that from top to bottom and from left to right,” she said. “Which is something I never was as aware of as when I worked this out in collage and later in painting. So that another great truth about art was revealed to me in this way!”
After many years living with Alzheimer’s, Fine died of pneumonia aged 83 on May 31, 1988.
Lilly Fenichel
Lilly Fenichel in her studio. Courtesy of Lilly Fenichel Foundation.
Fenichel was born in 1927 to a Jewish family in Vienna that fled the Nazis in 1939, eventually settling in Hollywood. After completing her studies at the California School of Fine Arts (later renamed the San Francisco Art Institute) in 1952, Fenichel became a regular on the burgeoning Los Angeles art scene and eventually a key member of the second generation of the Bay Area School of Abstract Expressionism. She supplemented her income by working as an art director and costume director in the film industry.
From early in her career, Fenichel became known for striking works made using monochromatic or somber palettes. Though she befriended significant artists on the West Coast like Larry Bell and Ed Ruscha, she decided in 1952 to move to New York, where she believed women artists were more respected. There she befriended artists like Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko and began teaching art classes at the Museum of Modern Art.
Lilly Fenichel, Collage IV (1961). Courtesy of Gazelli Art House and Berry Campbell, New York, © Lilly Fenichel Foundation.
“I was an Abstract Expressionist, but with a lot of drawing in it,” Fenichel reflected in 2011. “From the early ’60s, I drew a lot. They were kind of surrealist, very personal, demon, abstract drawing and paintings… There was a progression from those into these minimal paintings that were in my first one person show, at the Santa Barbara Museum in the late ’60s.”
In 1981, Fenichel moved to New Mexico, having fallen in love with the city of Taos some decades previously. She died in Albuquerque in 2016, just short of age 90.
Sonja Sekula
Sonja Sekula in her Breton Studio in 1945. Courtesy of Peter Blum Gallery.
Born in Lucerne, Switzerland in 1918, Sonja Sekula moved around with her family from a young age, settling in New York in 1936. She eventually joined the Art Students League and studied under fellow European-born Modernist artists George Grosz from Germany and Morris Kantor from Russia. She fell in with a crowd of exiled Surrealists like André Breton and began exhibiting through major gallerists like Peggy Guggenheim and Betty Parsons, in one case appearing alongside Pollock and Newman in a 1949 show. At one time, she lived with dancer-choreographer Merce Cunningham and composer John Cage.
Sekula was known for small, densely intricate, usually very colorful works. Shortly after she joined Betty Parsons, some of the gallery’s biggest stars, like Pollock and Rothko, complained that it had let in too many artists, “many of them amateurs, most of them women,” and left.
Sonja Sekula, Untitled Collage (1959). Courtesy of Gazelli Art House.
Those who knew Sekula remarked on her easy, spirited nature. It is also notable that she was very open about her homosexuality. “To feel guilt about having loved a being of your own kind body and soul is hopeless—let us hope there were many pure moments in each of these attractions and loves,” she wrote in her journal.
It has been recorded that during frequent hospitalizations in psychiatric wards, doctors tried to cure Sekula of her homosexuality. In 1961, she wrote: “Life was an interesting experience. I do not regret it.”
Sekula returned to Switzerland with her family in the 1950s. She died by suicide in Zürich in 1963 at the age of 45.
Amaranth Ehrenhalt 
Amaranth Ehrenhalt shot for Vogue in 1951. Courtesy of Anita Shapolsky Gallery.
As an extension to the main exhibition, Gazelli is also showing work by artist Amaranth Ehrenhalt, who was born in 1928 and grew up in Philadelphia, earning her BFA at the University of Pennsylvania in 1951. She later moved to New York, where she befriended many artists and began producing work in the Abstract Expressionist style. At one time, she recalled how her desk was a door propped on top of a bathtub in her tiny Greenwich Village walk-up. As well as paintings, Ehrenhalt produced textiles, ceramics, and even a 150-foot mosaic mural in the French town of Banlieue, where she once lived.
Having long harbored a love of Europe, when Ehrenhalt was invited on a three-week trip to Paris, she ended up living there for four decades, supporting herself as a divorcée with two children through odd jobs. Her reputation inevitably suffered from being so far removed from the center of the art world at that time, but she came to know influential artists like Sonia Delaunay, Alberto Giacometti, Natalia Goncharova, and Yves Klein.
Amaranth Ehrenhalt, Neilius I (1958). Courtesy of Gazelli Art House.
In 2018, Ehrenhalt said in an interview with White Hot Magazine: “I am a colorist. I like to think about my work as a symphony on a flat surface. Everyone who has written about me use words like energy and color, ‘joie de vivre.’”
Ehrenhalt moved back to New York in 2008, where she died at the age of 93 on March 16, 2021 from coronavirus.
“Montage” is on view at Gazelli Art House in London through July 13, 2024. 
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The Met is honoring one of the bonafide greats of American decorative arts. A new exhibition is dedicated to Edward C. Moore, the influential collector, celebrated silversmith, and creative leader of Tiffany & Co. in the late 19th century.
“Collecting Inspiration: Edward C. Moore at Tiffany & Co.” opened on June 9 and features 70 precious silver creations produced during Moore’s tenure as chief designer at Tiffany & Co. These are paired with an impressive 180 items from Moore’s personal collection, which spans ancient Greece to Japan and the Islamic world.
So, who was this distinguished doyen of silversmithing? Born in New York City in 1827, Moore apprenticed under his father before inheriting the business in 1851. His artistry soon caught the eye of the very best in the business at Tiffany & Co., where he was offered an exclusive contract before being appointed chief silver designer in 1868. Only a year prior, Moore had been awarded the gold medal at the world’s pre-eminent Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1867.
Installation view of “Collecting Inspiration: Edward C. Moore at Tiffany & Co.” at The Met in New York City, opening June 9, 2024. Photo courtesy of The Met.
Over the following two decades until his death in 1891, Moore would leave his mark on one of the most iconic American luxury design houses. Highlights from this era on show at the Met include the Bryant Vase of 1876, the first piece of American silver to enter The Met’s collection, and an ornate 1874 pitcher bearing an elephant head.
Vase, Tiffany & Co. (1878), Private Collection, New York and Vase, Tiffany & Co. (1877), Brooklyn Museum. Courtesy of The Met.
By pairing these exquisite 19th century archival pieces alongside the trove of historic treasures to which Moore found himself drawn, the exhibition initiates fascinating lines of inquiry into the possible influences at play in his work. Some particularly magnificent pieces from across centuries and continents include a Roman perfume bottle from the 1st century C.E., a 13th-century Syrian enameled glass bowl, an 18th-century Murano glass cup from Venice, and a 19th-century Japanese lacquered box.
An installation image of an intricate swan. Photo: Eileen Travell, courtesy of The Met.
Moore’s dedication to learning from the past and natural beneficence is perhaps best exemplified by his decision to found a school for apprentices at Tiffany & Co. and to supply the students with cherished items from his private collection to use as models and stylistic inspiration, according to a 1891 report in The Studio. The paper also noted how Moore had been motivated not by vanity but by a deep appreciation of beauty, or “the definite purpose of supplying standards, as perfect as could be obtained, in the several industrial arts.”
Moore bequeathed more than 2,000 objects from his expansive holding of glass, ceramics, and metalwork to The Met. These exceptional items formed the basis of the museum’s collection of decorative arts.
“Collecting Inspiration: Edward C. Moore at Tiffany & Co.” runs at the Met from June 9 through October 20, 2024. It was made possible by Tiffany & Co. 
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