On View

Not every show is worth a special trip. But “Real Corporeal,” an ambitious exhibition organized by Gladstone Gallery in the former home of Gavin Brown’s enterprise in Harlem, justifies a commute. Helmed by London curator Ben Broome, the show brings together works by an intergenerational cast of artists in a variety of media, all concerned with re-asserting the body’s presence in the gallery space.
As anyone who’s ever had to use the restroom at an art show might know, white cubes are meant mostly for the mind and eyes. But a robust performance program accompanying the show aims to pack bodies into the gallery, where visitors will be surrounded by 30 works from artists with conversant practices.
“If one is to conceptualize the exhibition as a family gathering, the aunts and uncles are seated interspersed amongst the younger cousins,” the press statement reads. Renowned electronic musician Klein has a work, cheekily titled Life as a Clout Chaser is Hard (2022), alongside a contribution by her mentor, artist Mark Leckey. Sara Sadik’s moving images are kindred with those of Cyprien Gaillard.
Those who come to see Arthur Jafa’s latest, Dirty Tesla (2021), which riffs off his practice of sequencing found footage, may stay for Tommy Malekoff’s Desire Lines (2019), a 15-minute video of strange spectacle that contrasts car tires with fireworks. Also on view are figurative paintings by sought-after artists Chase Hall, Pol Taburet, Amanda Ba, and George Rouy.
Broome told Arnet News that the massive Harlem space was a natural fit for “Real Corporeal”: “It’s an incredible gallery for showing art—there’s nothing else like that monastic top floor in New York City.” But the architecture is but one of many entry points.
Broome maintains there’s no single “best spot” to understand “Real Corporeal” from—except the mind, counterintuitively, “when you’re on the train home thinking anxiously about whether Klein’s work Life as a Clout Chaser is Hard applies to you.”
Or, better yet, catch a performance. Gladstone recently hosted Chassol on September 24, and Slauson Malone 1 on September 26. Keep your eyes on the gallery’s Instagram for future announcements, including a yet-to-be-revealed performance from Joan Jonas, the eldest artist in the show.
“Without her,” Broome said, “I wonder how many of these artists would be here.”
“Real Corporeal” is on view at 439 West 127th Street through October 15, 2022.
Tommy Malekoff, Desire Lines (2019). Two-channel digital video and sound. Installation view. Courtesy of the artist and Gladstone Gallery. Photography by David Regen
Installation view, “Real Corporeal,” including Arthur Jafa’s Dirty Tesla (2021) at center. Photography by David Regen.
Christelle Oyiri, The Twilight of The Idols (2022). Printed 4 plexiglass panel installation. Installation view, Photography © Jay Izzard
Installation view featuring works by George Rouy, Chase Hall, Christelle Oyiri, Walter Pichler, and Klein. Photo by David Regen
Chase Hall, Up and Downstate Boys (2022). Acrylic and coffee on cotton canvas
Pol Taburet, Fertilizer / Neg (2022). Installation view, with viewers. Photography © Jay Izzard
Installation view, featuring works by Pol Taburet and Rhea Dillon. Photo by David Regen
Amanda Ba, The Plower and the Weaver (2022). Oil on canvas
Mark Leckey, To the Old World (Thank You for the Use of Your Body) (2021). Two channel 9:16 video installation, aluminum, steel, with 7.1 surround sound. Installation view. Photo by David Regen
Christelle Oyiri, Family Fresco 2002 (2022). Printed 4 wooden panel installation. Installation view. Photography © Jay Izzard
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The Metropolitan Museum of Art has organized an important exhibition centered around 50 ceramic objects made by enslaved African American potters who were active in westernmost South Carolina during the 19th century.
“In the decades before the Civil War, a successful alkaline-glazed stoneware industry developed in Old Edgefield District, a clay-rich area,” the museum says in a statement. And while common depictions of slavery focus on the backbreaking labor of harvesting cash crops, the exhibition “Hear Me Now,” shows that enslaved people were also highly skilled artisans.
“When I talk to artists about it, they’re still incredulous about the fact that these jars were made, that they survived the kiln firing,” said co-curator Adrienne Spinozzi, an assistant research curator from the Met’s American Wing, of the unique ceramic housewares, which became a lucrative cottage industry in the plantation economy.
Face jug, by an unrecorded potter, attributed to Miles Mill Pottery (1867–85), Old Edgefield District, South Carolina, alkaline-glazed stoneware with kaolin glaze. Photo: Hudgins Family Collection, New York.
Michigan-based historian Jason Young co-curated the exhibition, contributing years of research and writing about the region’s pottery-rich past. Young also curated a show around Theaster Gates’s engagement with this history, called “The Clay Sermon.” Ethan Lasser, from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (where the show travels to next), rounded out the curatorial team.
Planning for the show started in 2017, when the Met acquired a face jug from an unrecorded Edgefield potter for their permanent collection galleries. Spinozzi saw the object as a route to have conversations about “American history and these really difficult and complex and challenging moments in our country’s past.” She then visited South Carolina to do further research.
The exhibition opens with 12 massive jars by David Drake—perhaps the best-known potter from Edgefield. Despite social restrictions against educating enslaved communities, Drake learned to read and write, developing exquisite handwriting, and he carved a wide array of simple literature onto his works, as well as signing and dating them. One jar from June 1834 reads “concatenation,” meaning a system of interconnection. Forty of the jars in the exhibition have similar “verses” carved onto them—sometimes poetic or biblical, sometimes informative (“this jar is for pork”) or even declarative,, proclaiming “I made this.”
Detail of work by Dave, later recorded as David Drake, American, ca. 1801–1870s.
Nineteen regional “face jugs” follow Drake’s works. These vessels, not commercial objects, were shaped to have visages with expressions in high relief. They appeared around 1858, half a century after the transatlantic slave trade had been outlawed, but the same year a ship arrived with 400 captive Africans—100 of which went to Edgefield’s potteries. Many face jugs are believed to resemble minkisi, ritual objects hailing from West-Central African religious practices.
“Hear Me Now” bridges that history with the present moment by including contemporary Black artists who resonate with the Edgefield story, including Simone Leigh, Adebunmi Gbadebo, Woody De Othello, Theaster Gates, and Robert Pruitt.
Theaster Gates, Signature Study (2020). Courtesy of the artist and White Cube, LondonPhoto: © White Cube/Theo Christelis.
“As curators, we brought a different set of questions to the material,” Lasser told Artnet News. “We were also conveners, drawing on our own networks to engage friends and colleagues in the act of interpretation.”
Scholarship on enslaved artists from American history has been slim. A team from the Met traveled with a conservator to South Carolina in 2019 to take samples of residue from the vessels’ interiors beyond their prohibitively slender necks. They’re now working with outside experts to learn what these enigmatic face jugs actually held.
“We’re building this database that includes photographs of the interior,” Lasser added. “We’re looking at these objects, looking at their histories, trying to see if we can trace them back to the African American community.”
Storage jar (ca. 1845), by an unrecorded potter, Trapp & Chandler Pottery (1843–ca. 1850), Old Edgefield District, South Carolina, alkaline-glazed stoneware with iron slip. Photo: Courtesy of the Collection of C. Philip and Corbett Toussaint.
“We want viewers to walk away with an appreciation of the full breadth and depth of this fascinating material,” Young added over email. “We want them to connect with the people who created this material, even while living under a harsh regime of American racism and slavery.”
To further this aim, on December 3, the Met will host a public program titled “Learning from Edgefield,” which will have discussions with historians, artists, and museum leaders on the best practices around working with African American cultural heritage sites like Edgefield, and how museums collect, display, and interpret objects by enslaved makers.
“I am most looking forward to the conversations the show opens up,” Lasser said, “about Edgefield and ceramics, enslavement and industry—perhaps even about museums and collecting today.”
“Hear Me Now” is on view through February 5, 2023, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. It then travels to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (March 4–July 9, 2023), the University of Michigan Museum of Art, Ann Arbor (August 26, 2023–January 7, 2024), and the High Museum of Art, Atlanta (February 16–May 12, 2024).
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No artist in the history of New York City quite exemplifies the grit and determination of the 1980s quite like Jean-Michel Basquiat. 
In a first for Austrian audiences, Basquiat’s legacy is being given a major retrospective at the Albertina Museum in Vienna. The show includes iconic pieces such as La Hara (1981), a skeletal portrait of a police officer that sold at auction for $35 million in 2017,  and Self-Portrait (1983).
The exhibition is being billed as a legacy-defining one for the artist. More than  50 major works have been lent from public and private collections, including Basquiat’s estate (the artist’s sisters, Lisane Basquiat and Jeanine Heriveaux, even attended the opening), the Nicola Erni Collection, and art dealer Thaddaeus Ropac.
Born in Brooklyn in 1960, to a Haitian father and Puerto Rican mother, Basquiat started developing his artistic style as a teenager, first conceiving the graffiti moniker SAMO in the 1970s with a high school friend, Al Diaz. 
Basquiat’s later work, which many critics defined as “neo-expressionism,” was deeply influenced by these early experiences creating street art, and by the rap and punk music scenes he was a part of. In 1979, together with filmmaker Michael Holman, for example, Basquiat formed an experimental band called Gray. 
The Albertina’s show unpacks the artist’s roots and follows his meteoric rise in the art world, from being the youngest ever participant at Documenta in 1982, to his relationship with other cultural superstars like Madonna and Warhol, through to his untimely death of a drug overdose in 1988, age 27.
“Basquiat: The Retrospective” is on view through January 8, 2023, at the Albertina in Vienna. See more images from the exhibition here. 
Visitors attend the “Basquiat: The Retrospective” exhibition preview at Albertina on September 8, 2022 in Vienna. Photo: Heinz-Peter Bader/Getty Images.
Visitors attend the “Basquiat: The Retrospective” exhibition preview at Albertina on September 8, 2022 in Vienna. Photo: Heinz-Peter Bader/Getty Images.
Visitors attend the “Basquiat: The Retrospective” exhibition preview at Albertina on September 8, 2022 in Vienna. Photo: Heinz-Peter Bader/Getty Images.
Visitors attend the “Basquiat: The Retrospective” exhibition preview at Albertina on September 8, 2022 in Vienna. Photo: Heinz-Peter Bader/Getty Images.
Visitors attend the “Basquiat: The Retrospective” exhibition preview at Albertina on September 8, 2022 in Vienna. Photo: Heinz-Peter Bader/Getty Images.
Visitors attend the “Basquiat: The Retrospective” exhibition preview at Albertina on September 8, 2022 in Vienna. Photo: Heinz-Peter Bader/Getty Images.
Visitors attend the “Basquiat: The Retrospective” exhibition preview at Albertina on September 8, 2022 in Vienna. Photo: Heinz-Peter Bader/Getty Images.
Visitors attend the “Basquiat: The Retrospective” exhibition preview at Albertina on September 8, 2022 in Vienna. Photo: Heinz-Peter Bader/Getty Images.
Visitors attend the “Basquiat: The Retrospective” exhibition preview at Albertina on September 8, 2022 in Vienna. Photo: Heinz-Peter Bader/Getty Images.
Untitled (1982) by Jean-Michel Basquiat. Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam. Photo: Studio Tromp; © Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat, licensed by Artesar, New York.
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A foreign dictator pleads his case with the U.S. President and fashionable First Lady. Rudy Giuliani weighs in. So does Senator Orrin Hatch. These are not from the top secret documents kept in Mar-a-Lago by former president Donald Trump, but the correspondence of another celebrity-turned-president, Ronald Reagan, drawn from his official archives. And for the Filipino artist Pio Abad, they are a record of how powerful people manipulate public opinion to maintain their status.
The Reagan letters all involve the late Filipino dictator Ferdinand Marcos and his wife, Imelda, who fled the Philippines in the wake of the People Power Revolution in 1986, and found refuge in Hawaii. The texts have been carved onto a series of Carrara marble tablets by Abad under the title “Thoughtful Gifts,” as part of his contribution to the Carnegie International exhibition in Pittsburgh, opening on Saturday, September 24.
“You can see that this wasn’t just a professional relationship,” Abad said of the communications between the two political power couples. “It was a personal one. And I think they genuinely liked each other.”
“Dear Mr. President, I have no other recourse but to write you this letter,” Ferdinand Marcos entreated with Ronald Reagan on October 20, 1988, in a last-ditch effort to avoid racketeering charges brought by Rudy Giuliani, then-U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York. The ousted dictator wanted the president to personally intervene in the case and allow the Marcoses to prove that the billions in cash, real estate, art, and gems they amassed during their decades in power—some of which they smuggled with them out of the Philippines—were not acquired using stolen funds.
“Imelda sends her prayers to you and Nancy,” Marcos ended his missive. “I remain your obedient servant.”
Pio Abad, Thoughtful Gifts (October 20, 1988) (2020).
In his reply, penned that same day, Reagan told Marcos that “the facts and circumstances in this case left me no choice except to defer to the Attorney General. I regret very much that this has become necessary but under our system you will have every opportunity to refute these charges.” He ended they note with an assurance that “Nancy joins me in extending to you and Imelda our best wishes.”
A day later, the Marcoses were indicted on RICO charges in New York, and although Ferdinand died just a few months later, Imelda would stand trial in 1990—and be acquitted.
In another letter, presented by Abad as a triptych, Giuliani outlined the evidence against the Marcos family in a dispatch to the Attorney General’s office, following a search of their daughter’s home in California. Giuliani wrote that the assets federal agents seized from the property—including more than 100 works of art and antique furniture—provided “further evidence that the Marcoses have continued to commit crimes and to conceal the fruits of their racketeering enterprise since they arrived in the United States.”
Although Imelda Marcos was acquitted of racketeering, the trove of art that authorities in the U.S. and the Philippines seized was sold at auction in New York in 1991. But hundreds of works acquired by the family using their ill-gotten gains remain unaccounted for, including a Picasso that was spotted on the wall of Imelda’s home during a visit from her son, Ferdinand Jr., after he won the Philippines presidential election earlier this year.
“These letters become portals to the past,” Abad said of the historical documents. “They are also like a palimpsest of how these characters were viewed then and how they are now.” Ferdinand Jr.’s rise to power, for example, largely came through a whitewashing of his parents’ actions during their reign. “The way that political personalities are recycled and reinterpreted throughout history, and the fact that we’re seeing this happen within a single generation, is frightening,” Abad said.
In a further twist of fate, the Carnegie exhibition opens almost 50 years to the day that Marcos declared martial law in the Philippines.
Pio Abad, installation view of Distant Possessions (2022) in the 58th Carnegie International. Photo: Sean Eaton. Courtesy of the artist and Carnegie Museum of Art.
Abad’s other work in the exhibition draws on the Carnegie Museum of Art’s own history, specifically its founding patron, Andrew Carnegie. In addition to being a philanthropist and art collector, the steel magnate was—first and foremost—an industrialist.
“Obviously Andrew Carnegie was one of the proponents of public philanthropy instead of paying your taxes,” Abad said. Carnegie was also a vocal opponent to a proposal being floated by the U.S. government at the time to annex the Philippines, even offering to buy its independence for $20 million.
In an essay published in 1898, Carnegie put forward his arguments for why Filipinos should be left to govern themselves. In a telling passage, Carnegie described the Philippines as a nation of “about seven and a half millions of people, composed of races bitterly hostile to one another, alien races, ignorant of our language and institutions. Americans cannot be grown there.”
Abad has taken that last sentence and enlarged it into a wall-sized mural, painted to mimic the neoclassical letters carved on the museum’s façade. The piece is meant to show that the ideological structures that underpin these cultural infrastructures “maybe haven’t really changed,” the artist said.
That does not mean change is impossible, however. “I think we are at a point where a lot of Americans are questioning the myths that they were brought up with,” Abad said. “Beliefs of exceptionalism are being picked apart—rightfully so.”
What Abad wants visitors to come away with from his project is to see that “as much as it’s a geopolitical study, it’s also an obsession informed by personal history. So it’s also universal.”
“It’s a transnational tragedy that touches all our lives, which is ultimately tied to capital or greed or impunity, and the need to transform political fact to personal myth,” Abad said. “Regardless of how distorted it becomes.”
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The Ukrainian photographer Boris Mikhailov is extremely worried that his apartment in Kharkiv, where some of his archives are stored, may have been bombed during the Russia-Ukraine war.
“They have no idea what state their place is in and what’s happened to their work and materials there, and are very worried,” Simon Baker, director of the Maison Européenne de la Photographie (MEP) in Paris, told Artnet News, referring to Mikhailov, 84, and his wife, Vita. The couple have been living between Berlin and Kharkiv for the past couple of decades. They used to travel frequently to Ukraine but have not been back there since 2019, in part due to the pandemic. 
Mikhailov, who was born in Kharkiv in 1938, was in Berlin preparing for his exhibition “Ukrainian Diary” at the MEP when he heard the news. “They realized that the area in Kharkiv where their apartment is had been bombed and might have been damaged but they don’t know,” Baker said.
From the series “Luriki” (Colored Soviet Portrait), (1971-85). © Boris Mikhaïlov. Collection Pinault. Courtesy Guido Costa Projects, Orlando Photo.
Several members of Mikhailov’s family have sought refuge in Berlin since the Russian invasion began in February. “Vita’s daughter and granddaughter managed to escape and drove to Berlin with their cat, and Boris’s son is also in Berlin,” Baker added.
Mikhailov was unavailable for comment. However, he told Le Monde in an interview earlier this month that “[t]he tears of Ukraine are with us. Understand that what is happening is very serious, it invades life and crushes everything.”
The pioneering and dissident self-taught photographer was an engineer when he was first given a camera in order to document the state-owned factory where he worked. (He was fired from the job after he was found developing nude photographs of his wife.) Under the rule of the USSR, he took subversive photography ​in ​Kharkiv—the landscape and backdrop of much of his ​work—which railed against propaganda. In 1971, he was one of eight photographers who established the Vremya group in Kharkiv, a non-conformist collective that is considered the backbone of the Kharkiv School of Photography. 
From the series “Case History” (1997-98). © Boris Mikhaïlov, VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn. Courtesy Galerie Suzanne Tarasiève, Paris.
On view in ‘Ukrainian Diary’, running until January 15, 2023, are some 800 photographs and projections of images, from conceptual to documentary to performance-based work, made from the 1960s onwards, chronicling life during the USSR and after its collapse. 
Among the highlights is the series “Yesterday’s Sandwich,” from the late 1960s through the late ‘70s. It grew out of Mikhailov’s observation that a third image appeared when two slides of colored film serendipitously stuck together. Another standout series is “Case History” (1997-98), which depicts people who became homeless following the dissolution of the USSR. 
Also on display is “The Theater of War, Second Act, Time Out,” showing people in Kyiv protesting the Ukrainian government’s decision not to sign the Association Agreement with the European Union, and Mikhailov’s latest series, “Temptation of Death” (2017-19), comprising elegiac diptychs that juxtapose earlier images of an unfinished Soviet-era crematorium with new ones.
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This week marks the debut of a glittering new attraction for New York City: the Hall des Lumières.
Located in the stately, landmarked Beaux-Arts headquarters of the former Emigrant Savings Bank near City Hall, it arrives courtesy of Culturespaces, one of the major forces that propelled “Immersive Van Gogh” to international sensation status last year via its L’Atelier des Lumières in Paris. The latter’s immersive Van Gogh lightshow featured as a date spot in the Netflix hit Emily in Paris.
To recreate that date-night magic, Culturespaces is betting big on Viennese painter Gustav Klimt. Now, New Yorkers don’t have to trek across the sea to the Belvedere museum in Vienna to see dorm-room poster favorite The Kiss. Instead, they can see it animated and projected at immense scale across the palatial insides of the Hall des Lumières for a show titled “Immersive Klimt: Gold in Motion,” alongside other famed Klimt works like the Beethoven Frieze and Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer (languid animations of works by fellow Viennese Succesionist Egon Schiele also make a cameo in the show).
If that’s not enough immersive entertainment for you, “Gold in Motion” runs on a loop with two other shows: one is an animated show dedicated to the rich patters of artist and architect Friedensreich Hundertwasser (1928–2000), carrying on the Viennese theme; the other is “Five Movements: Contemporary Creation,” a 10-minute experience featuring digitally augmented dance performances in five different styles from the technology studio Nohlab.
Be sure also to head down to the basement of the bank, where a new-media gallery has been nested within the Emmigrant Savings Banks’s giant safe. A mirrored chamber within which plays a piece made exclusively for Culturespaces by François Vautier, an ominous, spacey digital animation.
To give a sense of what to expect at the Hall des Lumières, check out the photos below.
The Hall des Lumières, located in the former Emigrant Industrial Savings Bank. Photo by Ben Davis.
Installation view of ‘Gustav Klimt: Gold in Motion’ at the new Hall des Lumières in New York. Photo by Ben Davis.
Installation view of ‘Gustav Klimt: Gold in Motion’ at the new Hall des Lumières in New York. Photo by Ben Davis.
Installation view of ‘Gustav Klimt: Gold in Motion’ at the new Hall des Lumières in New York. Photo by Ben Davis.
Installation view of ‘Gustav Klimt: Gold in Motion’ at the new Hall des Lumières in New York. Photo by Ben Davis.
Installation view of ‘Gustav Klimt: Gold in Motion’ at the new Hall des Lumières in New York. Photo by Ben Davis.
Installation view of ‘Gustav Klimt: Gold in Motion’ at the new Hall des Lumières in New York. Photo by Ben Davis.
Installation view of ‘Gustav Klimt: Gold in Motion’ at the new Hall des Lumières in New York. Photo by Ben Davis.
Installation view of ‘Gustav Klimt: Gold in Motion’ at the new Hall des Lumières in New York. Photo by Ben Davis.
Installation view of ‘Gustav Klimt: Gold in Motion’ at the new Hall des Lumières in New York. Photo by Ben Davis.
Installation view of ‘Gustav Klimt: Gold in Motion’ at the new Hall des Lumières in New York. Photo by Ben Davis.
Installation view of ‘Immersive Klimt: Gold in Motion’ at the new Hall des Lumières in New York. Photo by Ben Davis.
Installation view of ‘Gustav Klimt: Gold in Motion’ at the new Hall des Lumières in New York. Photo by Ben Davis.
Installation view of ‘Gustav Klimt: Gold in Motion’ at the new Hall des Lumières in New York. Photo by Ben Davis.
Installation view of ‘Gustav Klimt: Gold in Motion’ at the new Hall des Lumières in New York. Photo by Ben Davis.
Installation view of ‘Friedensreich Hundertwasser: In the Wake of the Vienna Secession’ at the Hall des Lumières. Photo by Ben Davis.
Installation view of ‘Friedensreich Hundertwasser: In the Wake of the Vienna Secession’ at the Hall des Lumières. Photo by Ben Davis.
Installation view of ‘Friedensreich Hundertwasser: In the Wake of the Vienna Secession’ at the Hall des Lumières. Photo by Ben Davis.
Installation view of ‘Friedensreich Hundertwasser: In the Wake of the Vienna Secession’ at the Hall des Lumières. Photo by Ben Davis.
Installation view of ‘Friedensreich Hundertwasser: In the Wake of the Vienna Secession’ at the Hall des Lumières. Photo by Ben Davis.
‘5 Movements: Contemporary Creation’ at the Hall des Lumières. Photo by Ben Davis.
‘5 Movements: Contemporary Creation’ at the Hall des Lumières. Photo by Ben Davis.
‘5 Movements: Contemporary Creation’ at the Hall des Lumières. Photo by Ben Davis.
‘5 Movements: Contemporary Creation’ at the Hall des Lumières. Photo by Ben Davis.
‘5 Movements: Contemporary Creation’ at the Hall des Lumières. Photo by Ben Davis.
The entrance to the underground gallery at the Hall des Lumières, in the old bank vault. Photo by Ben Davis.
François Vautier’s Recoding Entropia at the Hall des Lumières. Photo by Ben Davis.
The giftshop at the Hall des Lumières. Photo by Ben Davis.
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Through September 25, the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth presents 46 international female-identifying artists who focus on female subject matter in their works. The exhibition, titled “Women Painting Women,” brings together 60 portraits spanning the late 1960s to the present, recognizing “female perspectives that have been underrepresented in the history of postwar figuration,” according to the museum.
“Women Painting Women” approaches these aims over four thematic sections. “The Body” considers the full spectrum of figuration, “from unidealized to fantasized nudes,” the museum states in a press release. Works by stars like Mickalene Thomas and Alice Neel appear here.
“Nature Personified” explores appearances of mythological archetypes, like priestesses and goddesses—and their metaphysical powers—through the work of forces of nature like Tracy Emin.
Faith Ringgold and Amy Sherald have work in the section “Color As Portrait,” which “accounts for the exaggerated or dramatic use of color and form to convey content about female identity, including race, gender, and archetypes.”
In “Selfhood,” Elizabeth Peyton, Marlene Dumas, and more examine how psychology manifests in the physical form.
The show centers around painting—a medium traditionally associated with the privileged male artists who have dominated the art historical canon until recently. “The pivotal narrative in ‘Women Painting Women’ is how these artists use the conventional portrait of a woman as a catalyst to tell another story outside of male interpretations of the female body,” chief curator Andrea Karnes said in a statement. “They conceive new ways to activate and elaborate on the portrayal of women.”
“Replete with complexities, realness, abjection, beauty, complications, everydayness, pain, and pleasure, the portraits in this exhibition connect to all kinds of women,” Karnes adds, “and they make way for women artists to share the stage with their male counterparts in defining the female figure.”
See works from the exhibition below.
Arpita Singh, My Mother (1993), oil on canvas, from the collection of Sharad and Mahinder Tak. Photo: © Arpita Singh, courtesy Kiran Nadar Museum of Art and Talwar Gallery.
Hayv Kahraman, The Tower (2019), oil on linen. Photo: © Hayv Kahraman, courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.

Hope Gangloff, Queen Jane Approximately (2011), acrylic on canvas. Collection of Alturas Foundation, San Antonio, Texas. Photo: © Hope Gangloff, Courtesy of the Artist and Susan Inglett Gallery, NYC.
Emma Amos, Three Figures (1967), oil on canvas. The John and Susan Horseman Collection. Photo: © Emma Amos, Courtesy Ryan Lee Gallery, New York.
Somaya Critchlow, Untitled (Pink Hair) (2019), oil on linen. Isabella Wolfson Townsley Collection, London. Photo: © Somaya Critchlow, image courtesy the artist and Maximillian William, London.
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A 1972 retrospective of Diane Arbus’s work, mounted at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) just one year after she took her own life, divided viewers the way few exhibitions ever have. 
New York Times critic Hilton Kramer called it “an artistic and a human triumph,” praising the late photographer’s ability to “inhabit the mind and body and the milieu of certain people society has judged to be abnormal or unusual.” On this same topic Susan Sontag took issue, writing—somewhat infamously—that the artist’s “work shows people who are pathetic, pitiable, as well as repulsive, but it does not arouse any compassionate feelings.”
“Arbus’s photographs,” Sontag went on, “suggest a naïveté which is both coy and sinister, for it is based on distance, on privilege, on a feeling that what the viewer is asked to look at is really other.”
A word-of-mouth sensation both revered and reviled, the show drew out-the-door, around-the-block lines, quickly becoming the museum’s most-attended solo exhibition to date. “People went through that exhibition as though they were in line for communion,” John Szarkowski, MoMA’s legendary director of photography who curated the retrospective, once recalled. 
It’s no stretch to say that the show changed the way photography, a once-marginalized art form, was perceived by the institutional art world. And now, a full 50 years later, it’s going on view again. 
Diane Arbus, Four people at a gallery opening, N.Y.C. (1968). © The Estate of Diane Arbus.
Opening today at David Zwirner in New York is “Cataclysm,” a recreation of the 1972 show, down to the last picture.
Organized by Zwirner and Fraenkel Gallery in San Francisco, who jointly represent the Arbus estate, the show brings together 113 of the artist’s photographs across two floors and seven gallery spaces. It’s a museum-quality presentation, with all the prints secured via loan or consignment; some of them actually hung on MoMA’s walls in 1972. (No new estate-approved prints of Arbus’s pictures have been made since 2003.)
The name, “Cataclysm,” refers to the unexpected impact of the retrospective. “The pictures had a cataclysmic effect,” said dealer Jeffrey Fraenkel, who has worked with the Arbus estate since founding his eponymous gallery in 1979. “When people walked into MoMA and saw these photographs—BAM! No one had seen anything like them before,” 
“[Arbus] went further than anyone had and took chances and was so courageous,” Fraenkel explained. “’Fearless’ is the word. That was part of the electricity people were touched by.”
Diane Arbus, Tattooed man at a carnival, MD. (1970). © The Estate of Diane Arbus.
Arbus’s photographs, now among the most recognizable in art history, won’t have the same effect this time around. And for cynics, restaging a historic exhibition will surely feel, at first blush, contrived—a gimmick akin to, say, bringing Star Wars back into theaters for the umpteenth time. 
The business appeal is easy enough to see: for collectors, it’s the rare opportunity to collect Arbus’s greatest hits; for the galleries, the profit such an opportunity affords. Prices range from $10,000 to $175,000 for posthumous prints, and $40,000 to “close to a million” for prints made by Arbus herself, according to David Lieber, a partner at Zwirner. 
But there’s non-monetary value in putting on this particular show again, too.
Today, photography is cemented in the firmament of the contemporary art world, just as Arbus is cemented in its canon. Far more precarious, though, are the questions raised by her work—the same questions that stoked a furor five decades ago: Society otherized Arbus’s subjects, but did she? Can photographs empower, or do they only objectify? What does it mean to look?
Diane Arbus, A very young baby, N.Y.C. [Anderson Hays Cooper] (1968). © The Estate of Diane Arbus.What’s captured in Arbus’s pictures is not a “decisive moment” but a conditional set of relationships—a kind of social contract to which we as onlookers are made party. “When you look at an Arbus image, you’re always aware of this triangulation between the subject, the photographer, and the viewer,” noted Leiber.
Indeed, to engage with Arbus’s pictures is to engage with what it means to take a photograph of another human. And that, Fraenkel said, is an exercise just as vital in 2022 as it was in 1972.
“These are pictures I know very well. But when I walked into the gallery yesterday and turned left and saw a picture…I felt as if I was seeing it for the first time,” Fraenkel recalled upon visiting “Cataclysm.” “It sent lightning through my system.”
“There is nothing about the pictures that feels old. They feel thoroughly alive and speaking to us in this moment.”
Diane Arbus, Woman in a rose hat, N.Y.C. (1966). © The Estate of Diane Arbus.
​​”Cataclysm: The 1972 Diane Arbus Retrospective Revisited” is on view now through October 22 at David Zwirner in New York.
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