On View

We have finally received Ray Johnson’s dispatches from the other side. Last month, the Morgan Library & Museum opened “PLEASE SEND TO REAL LIFE,” an exhibition unearthing 200 never-before-seen photos by Johnson, the founder of the international mail art network know as the New York Correspondence School, who died in 1995.
After studying abstraction under Josef Albers at the famous Black Mountain College, Johnson left North Carolina for New York in 1948, along with professors John Cage, Merce Cunningham, and Richard Lippold.
Though he was set up for fame as a painter, he took Albers’s advice, according to the Morgan, and burned his early works between 1954 and 1956, to make room for the miniature mass media collages he called “moticos,” now hailed as precursors to Pop art.
Hazel Larsen Archer, Ray Johnson at Black Mountain College (1948), gelatin silver print. The Morgan Library &Museum, Purchased as the gift of David Dechmanand Michel Mercure, 2021.56. © Estate of Hazel Larsen Archer.
Photography was always a cornerstone of Johnson’s practice, but it wasn’t until 1992—two decades after leaving Manhattan for Long Island—that he adopted a Fujifilm QuickSnap camera and told curator Clive Phillpot: “I’m pursuing my career as a photographer.” Johnson would go through 137 disposable cameras by December 1994.
Among his experiments with the popular medium, Johnson would snap works in photobooths, often bringing in his cutout collages in artistic cameos. Photography could also enrich existing works with new meaning, such as his “Movie Stars” series of large-scale collages on corrugated cardboard, which often featured famous faces. Outdoor Movie Show in RJ’s backyard (1 June 1993), for example, sees these works lined up as if ready to film a scene, surrounded by the semi-autobiographical bunny character that was Johnson’s calling card.
Ray Johnson’s Photo Booth Portraits (1960s). Courtesy of the Ray Johnson Estate. Digital image courtesy of The Morgan Library & Museum. Artwork courtesy the Ray Johnson Estate. © Ray Johnson / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
In January 1995, Johnson killed himself by jumping off a bridge in Sag Harbor, drowning in the water below. “I think Ray will become famous after his death, because he won’t be around to impede the dissemination of his work,” remarked New York art dealer Richard Feigen in the New York Times obituary that followed.
Although he bristled against institutions trying to show his work, there’s been an uptick in exhibitions culled from Johnson’s estate in the decades that followed his death, including shows last year at the Art Institute of Chicago and David Zwirner. Both focused mostly on Johnson’s collages and situating him among colleagues like John Cale and Joseph Cornell.
More than 5,000 color photographs by Johnson have survived, many kept off view in envelopes. The Morgan show’s curator, Joel Smith, told Arnet News that Johnson’s estate donated the 200 on view now to the museum’s permanent collection in 2019, courtesy of art advisor Frances Beatty. Research on the works carried on through early 2020.
Elisabeth Novick, Untitled (Ray Johnson and Suzi Gablik) (1955), gelatin silver print, Courtesy of the Ray Johnson Estate.
“The pandemic caused changes in scheduling that pushed [the show] back to summer 2022,” Smith said. “In the interim, we learned more about the photographs, and also acquired the 1948 photograph of Johnson by Hazel Larsen Archer that became the earliest (and first) piece in the exhibition.”
Still, no one knows for sure what Johnson meant to do with all the film he shot. “It would be trivial to hunt through this large, complex, often comical, always personal body of work for nothing more than a rebus suicide note,” Smith’s essay in the show’s catalog notes. “Ray Johnson never made himself that easily readable.”
Immediate and intimate, Johnson’s work is about the present moment. Taking a prototype selfie in a shop window mirror, Johnson holds up a bunny-eared collage reading: “PLEASE SEND TO REAL LIFE.” Maybe he meant the former New York magazine REALLIFE. Smith hears Johnson saying: “Here, Life, take this thing I’ve made; I’m going to the other place.”
“PLEASE SEND TO REAL LIFE: Ray Johnson Photographs,” is on view at the Morgan Library & Museum, through October 2.
See more images from the exhibition here.
Path of headshots and back steps (spring 1992). The Morgan Library & Museum. Gift of the Ray Johnson Estate, courtesy of Frances Beatty. © Ray Johnson/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
RJ silhouette and wood, Stehli Beach (autumn1992). The Morgan Library & Museum, Gift of the Ray Johnson Estate, courtesy of Frances Beatty. © Ray Johnson / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
Headshot and Elvises in RJ’s car (February 1993). The Morgan Library & Museum, Gift of the RayJohnson Estate, courtesy of Frances Beatty. © Ray Johnson / Artists Rights Society (ARS),New York.(ARS), New York.
Andy Warhol life dates on flowers (July 1992). The Morgan Library & Museum, Gift of the Ray Johnson Estate, courtesy of Frances Beatty. © Ray Johnson/Artists Rights Society (ARS),New York.
Jasper John (February 1993). The Morgan Library & Museum, Gift of the Ray Johnson Estate, courtesy of Frances Beatty. © Ray Johnson/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
Bunny tree in backyard (17 April 1993). The Morgan Library & Museum, Gift of the Ray Johnson Estate, courtesy of Frances Beatty. © Ray Johnson/Artists Rights Society (ARS),New York.
Harpo Marx bunny, headshot, and payphone (February 1994). The Morgan Library &Museum, Gift of the Ray Johnson Estate, courtesy of Frances Beatty. © Ray Johnson/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
Shadow and manhole (spring 1992). The Morgan Library & Museum, Gift of the Ray Johnson Estate, courtesy of Frances Beatty. © Ray Johnson/Artists Rights Society (ARS),New York.
Four Movie Stars, Locust Valley Cemetery (31 March 1993). The Morgan Library & Museum, Gift of the Ray Johnson Estate, courtesy of Frances Beatty. © Ray Johnson/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
Outdoor Movie Show on RJ’s car (February 1993). The Morgan Library & Museum, Gift of the Ray Johnson Estate, courtesy of Frances Beatty. © Ray Johnson/Artists Rights Society (ARS),New York.
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While preparing for her first public art exhibition—a series of paintings reproduced on bus shelters in New York, Chicago, and Boston—artist Wendy Red Star turned to museums for research. 
She was looking into parfleches, or painted rawhide bags that tribes of the North American Great Plains used for transporting food and other personal belongings. For their makers, typically tribal women, the cases were utilitarian. But for Red Star, who is Apsáalooke (Crow), the objects represented something more: a shared tradition that kept these women’s stories alive, even when historians didn’t bother to do so.
But not every museum the artist turned to was eager to help. One, she said, initially denied all access to the Crow objects in their collection, citing fears of cultural appropriation. Another required authorization from the Crow Tribe’s executive office—which might be akin to, say, asking for Congressional approval to study a Civil War flag. 
“It just causes me such anxiety,” Red Star said of her experience negotiating with these institutions, which she referred to as “gatekeepers.” 
“Maybe the fear is rejection,” she went on. “But to me, that rejection is so heavy because ultimately, it’s lost knowledge. And that’s what’s happened to Native people. Our knowledge has been taken away from us. It’s a terrible feeling.”
Wendy Red Star, Buffalo Woman and Shows Going (2022). Photo: Nicholas Knight. Courtesy of the artist and Public Art Fund, NY.
Eventually, Red Star received the support she was looking for, and the results of her effort make up “Travels Pretty,” her new Public Art Fund-sponsored show of paintings installed across bus shelters in three cities. It’s on view now through November 20. 
Information gathering at museums was just one stage of what the artist considers her research process. The other was more experiential: recreating the designs of Crow craftswomen past, often to meticulous effect. 
“It was a way for her to learn and study these objects in a more tactile way,” said Public Art Fund associate curator Katerina Stathopoulou, who curated the show. “She was almost retracing the hands of the artists who painted these parfleches hundreds of years ago.”
Wendy Red Star, Walks Pretty (2022). Courtesy of the artist.
In their two-dimensional form, Red Star’s designs scan more as painterly abstractions than reinterpretations of tribal craftwork. But accompanying each of the artist’s parfleches is a series of phrases that provide additional context clues—and a hint of poetic flair: “Rose and Soft Violet,” “Packing Case,” “Mother Taught Her Daughter,” “Double Funneled Diamond.” 
The phrases were culled from the artist’s own research into the bags at museums, but also elsewhere—in textbooks, online articles, and so on. Most carry an air of cold institutional description: “Antedated Painting,” “Symmetrical Design.” Some even feel steeped in colonial gaze: “Industrious Apsáalooke Women,” “Parading In Style.”
That Red Star would be drawn to these descriptions makes sense. Her own work often makes liberal use of labels, captions, and annotations, appropriating the kind of taxonomical language so often used to portray her culture. Sometimes, the goal is satire, as in her photo series “Four Seasons” and the “The Last Thanks,” both of which found the artist recreating the doll-filled dioramas of museums. 
Other times, the strategy is more equivocal, as was the case with her 2019 series “Accession,” which paired her own photographs of an annual Crow parade with Works Progress Administration era-card catalogues that depict, in stunning watercolors, Native objects from the Denver Art Museum’s collection. One set of materials imagined tribal culture; the other showed it in all its contemporary vibrance.
Wendy Red Star, Brings Together (2022). Photo: Mel Taing. Courtesy of the artist and Public Art Fund, New York.
“Travels Pretty” no doubt falls into the latter category of Red Star artwork, fusing anthropological rhetoric and rich tribal design into a complex message about how heritage is shared across lines of time, geography, and culture. And Red Star, for her part, does not let the institutions have the last say. Each of her parfleches is named after a woman from the Apsáalooke tribe mentioned in the 1885 Crow Census. 
“In one way, I am trying to build this counter-archive that is accessible and makes sense of my own living experience,” Red Star said. “I feel like I am the counter-archive.”
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As its title tells you, “The Clamor of Ornament” is a raucous explosion of color and pattern. The Drawing Center’s summer show throws pretty much everything that might plausibly be fit in the category of “ornament” into its mix. As a result, there is truly something for everyone here.
The title of the show is an art history joke: It riffs on Owen Jones’s famous Victorian style manual, The Grammar of Ornament. But while Jones tried to create a system that connoted taste and decorum, this show—curated by Emily King with Margaret-Anne Logan and Duncan Tomlin—is anti-systematic and wildly eclectic. From William Morris wallpaper to Japanese woodblock prints, and from graffiti tags to scrimshaw, the show is like a stream of consciousness riff on its subject, breathlessly channel-changing between centuries and media.
It’s not without its critics either. In the New York Review of Books, critic Jed Perl unleashed a 3,000-plus word attack on the show, declaring it emblematic of the degeneracy of contemporary taste. But even Perl admitted, “There’s real fun to be had here.”
See some of the highlights of “The Clamor of Ornament,” below, and judge for yourself.
Installation view, “The Clamor of Ornament: Exchange, Power, and Joy from the Fifteenth Century to the Present” at the The Drawing Center, New York. Photo: Daniel Terna
Installation view, “The Clamor of Ornament: Exchange, Power, and Joy from the Fifteenth Century to the Present” at the The Drawing Center, New York. Photo: Daniel Terna More

At age eight, artist Guadalupe Maravilla was among the first group of children to flee from El Salvador when it was divided by a violent civil war. He arrived, undocumented, in the United States, both alone and not—separated from his family but surrounded by strangers bonded by a shared journey. 
As a “way to distract myself from the real harsh reality and make a connection with the people I’d just met,” Maravilla turned to Tripa Chuca, a Salvadoran children’s game, the artist told Artnet News. 
“I played with the coyotes who were hired to bring me over; I played with the grandmothers that would watch me and take care of me in their houses in New Mexico,” he said. “It’s always been a way to bond with people.”
In the game, participants scribble pairs of numbers on a piece of paper while their opponents connect the pairs with a single stroke, making sure that no lines touch in the process. Emerging eventually is what Maravilla calls a “labyrinth, a topographical map of sorts.” 
“To me,” he said, “it starts to feel like a fingerprint between two people that had similar journeys.”
Installation view of “Guadalupe Maravilla: Tierra Blanca Joven,” 2022. Courtesy of the Brooklyn Museum of Art.
As most of his shows do, Maravilla’s new exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum began with a game of Tripa Chuca. The results of the game, played between he and a frequent collaborator who similarly emigrated from El Salvador, greets visitors on a wall at the show’s entrance, teasing the artist’s own transnational perspective. 
The show’s title posits an altogether different metaphor. “Tierra Blanca Joven,” as it is called, refers to a volcanic eruption from the fifth century C.E.—among the largest in recorded history—that blanketed a several-thousand-mile stretch of present-day El Salvador with ash and debris, uprooting entire communities of Maya people in the process. 
The goal, Maravilla explained, is to draw a connection between the “many different types of displacement” that have occurred in his home country: those induced by an ancient environmental calamity, by a civil war four decades ago, and by ongoing violence in the region today.
Installation view of “Guadalupe Maravilla: Tierra Blanca Joven,” 2022. Courtesy of the Brooklyn Museum of Art.
The idea is echoed, too, in Maravilla’s choice to integrate nearly two dozen ancient Maya figurines, vessels, and other sculptures from the museum’s collection into the show. 
“What are these objects doing in Brooklyn?” he recalled thinking upon seeing the Maya artifacts in the institution’s storage rooms. “They were somehow taken from El Salvador in Central America and brought, through multiple hands, to the Brooklyn Museum.”
Maravilla was also drawn to the objects for their one-time connection to customs of healing and ceremony, which is an important aspect of the artist’s own artistic creations.
“My sculptures are an evolution of these ceramics and these objects,” he said. “That’s what has influenced me the most over the years, looking at these ancient rituals from my ancestors.”
A decade ago this December, Maravilla was diagnosed with colon cancer. He ultimately beat the sickness, but the experience—and the rituals he turned to in the process—had a profound impact on his work.
Guadalupe Maravilla, Disease Thrower #0 (2022). Courtesy of the Brooklyn Museum of Art.
Included in the show are three examples of Maravilla’s Disease Thrower series of large, elaborate sculptures inspired by various indigenous healing practices he researched at the time. The most recent of the bunch, Disease Thrower #12122012, was named after the date he was diagnosed.
Made of myriad found materials both organic and man-made (rocks and ropes, animal bones and medical objects, metal gongs) the artworks look imposing, occasionally even monstrous. But they act as sites of rehabilitation: Maravilla frequently employs the sculptures for his own healing rituals with others.
Over the last two years, in particular, the artist held hundreds of healing ceremonies with his work, many for undocumented immigrants in his own New York neighborhood. The pandemic “opened up these doors [making] everyone… aware of how much healing we need to do.”
Shortly after “Tierra Blanca Joven” opened, Maravilla offered something similar for the objects in the show. He invited a Mexican shaman to perform a private ritual in the gallery cleansing both the Maya artifacts and his own creations from “all the weight they must carry.”
“Guadalupe Maravilla: Tierra Blanca Joven” is on view now through September 18, 2022 at the Brooklyn Museum of Art.
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Art lovers have a prime chance to get to know the work of Catalan artist Jaume Plensa this summer, in two exhibitions in two distinctive European holiday destinations.
First, head up to Yorkshire Sculpture Park in northern England, where the exhibition “In small places, close to home,” is taking place. Plensa is no stranger to the stunning 500-acre site founded in 1977: he held an exhibition here in 2011, and hosts two of his works permanently—including the serene, 23-foot tall sculpture Wilsis (2016), situated by the shore of the lake in the park. But rather than the monumental outdoor sculptures for which he is famous, this new solo exhibition, which runs through October 30, focuses on the artist’s drawing practice.
“Drawing is an incredible laboratory where you can develop intuitions—I feel much more free than when I am working with sculpture. Drawing is a place for freedom,” said the artist, born in Barcelona in 1955, on the importance of drawing in his artistic practice.
Spanning two locations within the park, the show features new works in addition to drawings from the archive. In the park’s Weston Gallery, Face (2008), a series of portraits drawing from the artist’s collection of old anthropology and geography books, is accompanied by excerpts from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights—”the most beautiful poem in the world,” according to the artist. Also on view for the first time is a group of 28 drawings titled April is the Cruellest Month (2020–21), created during the Covid lockdown and charting humans’ collective psychological reactions around the pandemic’s uncertainties.
The exhibition continues in the 18th-century chapel nearby, where two calm marble sculptures of girls’ heads with closed eyes are installed in the middle of the hall, in dialogue with 16 large-scale drawings of unknown faces from the series Anònims (2003), as if they were a community of souls gathering together in the meditative space, which is guarded by the 13-foot tall White Nomade (2021) erected outside the chapel.
Meanwhile, the Musée Picasso in Antibes—on the magnificent coast of southeastern France—is hosting exhibition “La lumière veille” (“The Veil Light”) through September 25.
Timed to the 10th anniversary of the installation of the artist’s monumental sculpture Nomade (2010) (a much larger version than the newly installed piece at Yorkshire Sculpture Park) on the terrace of the bastion Saint-Jaume, which has become a local landmark, the new museum show takes a deep dive into Plensa’s artistic practice. It brings together some 90 works created between 1982 and 2022. These rare drawings reveal Plensa’s artistic evolution, as well as his attachment to the use of alphabets and characters from different cultures and the depth of human psyche, which set the stage for the development of the sculptures that he is best known for today.
View the highlights of the two Plensa shows below:
“In small places, close to home,” Yorkshire Sculpture Park
Jaume Plensa, 2022. Photo © Jonty Wilde, courtesy Yorkshire Sculpture Park.
Installation view of Jaume Plensa, “In small places, close to home,” at Yorkshire Sculpture Park, 2022. Photo © Jonty Wilde courtesy Yorkshire Sculpture Park.
Jaume Plensa, Face II (2008). Courtesy the artist. Photo Gasull Fotografia © Plensa Studio Barcelona.
Installation view of Jaume Plensa, “In small places, close to home,” at Yorkshire Sculpture Park, 2022. Photo © Jonty Wilde courtesy Yorkshire Sculpture Park.
“La lumiére veille,” Musée Picasso, Antibes
Installation view of Jaume Plensa, “La lumière veille,” at Musée Picasso Antibes, 2022. Photo: François Fernandez.
Jaume Plensa, Aire (1988). Photo: Leopold Samsó @ Plensa Studio Barcelona © Adagp, Paris, 2022. Courtesy the artist and Musée Picasso, Antibes.
Jaume Plensa, Full Moon (2018). Photo: Gasull Fotografia @ Plensa Studio Barcelona© Adagp, Paris, 2022. Courtesy the artist and Musée Picasso, Antibes.
Jaume Plensa, Shadow study LXVI (2011). Photo: Gasull Fotografia @ Plensa Studio Barcelona © Adagp, Paris, 2022. Courtesy the artist and Musée Picasso, Antibes.
Jaume Plensa, Orphans (2005). Photo: Gasull Fotografia @ Plensa Studio Barcelona© Adagp, Paris, 2022. Courtesy the artist and Musée Picasso, Antibes.
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British artist Christopher Le Brun recently celebrated his 70th birthday, but despite having been painting for decades, the artist remains as deeply curious about why he paints and where his inspirations come from as when he started. In fact, in his London home and studio, the artist keeps a framed drawing he made in his younger years, the dash-like passages in the sketch echoing the mark-making in his most recent gestural canvases.  More

Piet Mondrian—the Dutch painter synonymous with rigidly gridded abstractions—never used a ruler, it turns out. 
That was one of numerous revelations highlighted by conservators at the Fondation Beyeler in Basel, Switzerland, who have concluded a multi-year research project that preceded a retrospective of the famed artist, which is on view now through October. 
Mondrian “made marks at the edges, then very slowly painted these lines. They look precise but they are based on intuition,” said Ulf Kuster, who organized the exhibition. For the Dutch artist, painting was a “long process of looking, of composing, of erasing,” the curator explained. 
The Neo-plasticist’s greatest hits abound with myriad right angles and intersecting lines, so it’s hard to believe that he didn’t use an aid. But Mondrian’s hesitance to using a ruler says more about his dogmatic—and often arduous—approach to art, Kuster pointed out. 
Piet Mondrian, Composition With Yellow and Blue (1932). © Mondrian/Holtzman TrustPhoto: Robert Bayer, Basel.
“I really learned that [Mondrian] was a painter who was always in control of what he did,” the curator said of his experience working on the show. “I didn’t realize how painstaking this process of painting must’ve been for him and how thoughtful he looked at things and how much he reflected on painting.” 
“Mondrian Evolution” is the name of Kuster’s exhibition, which marks the 150th anniversary of the artist’s birth. It also doubles as a description of what viewers can expect at the Beyeler: a tip-to-toe survey of Mondrian’s career, beginning with his younger efforts in portraiture and landscape.
Those early paintings, completed in the Netherlands just before and after the turn of the 19th century, don’t look like the ones for which he would later become known. But it’s also not hard to spot shared strands of DNA. See, for instance, his many studies of whirling windmills and multi-branched trees: it’s clear that, even then, the artist was trying to translate into oil paint the geometry that governs the world around us.
“He was looking for harmony, but harmony is never symmetry,” Kuster said. “Harmony has to have tension over time.” 
Piet Mondrian, Mill in Sunlight (1908). © 2022 Mondrian/Holtzman Trust. Photo: Kunstmuseum Den Haag.
With exposure to painters like Picasso and Braque, and a multi-year stint in Paris, abstraction began to suffuse Mondrian’s canvases around 1911. His once-representational scenes of Dutch waterways dissolved into Cubist abstractions that, while still based in the lived world, prioritized form over content. 
Within the next decade, he returned to the Netherlands, then went back to Paris. His loosely-painted cubes morphed into hard rectangles; his cool, fauvist-inspired palette was replaced by solid bands of color. The style that would come to be known as “De Stijl” was born.
From classic figuration to cutting-edge abstraction, the full trajectory of Mondrian’s work on view at the Beyeler mirrors the evolution of modernism itself. However, the Dutch artist also shows us the importance of looking beyond that familiar story, Kuster pointed out. 
“Mondrian is someone who teaches you a lot about painting,” said the curator, demonstrating his own affection for the artist. “The very art historical—and in many ways helpful—idea that modern art is a development from figuration to abstraction is okay, but it’s not really interesting to artists.”
“For an artist,” Kuster went on, “It’s not important if it’s representational or non-representational, because it’s always abstract. It’s always abstract, because painting is abstraction.”
See some of the highlights of “Mondrian Evolution” below:
Piet Mondrian, No. VI / Composition No.II (1920). © 2021 Mondrian/Holtzman TrustPhoto: Tate.
Piet Mondrian, The Red Cloud (1907). © 2022 Mondrian/Holtzman Trust. Photo: Kunstmuseum Den Haag.

Piet Mondrian, Church Tower at Domburg (1911). © 2022 Mondrian/Holtzman TrustPhoto: Kunstmuseum Den Haag.
Piet Mondrian, Windmill in the Evening (1917). © 2022 Mondrian/Holtzman Trust. Photo: Kunstmuseum Den Haag.
Piet Mondrian, Woods Near Oele (1908). © 2022 Mondrian/Holtzman Trust. Photo: Kunstmuseum Den Haag.
Piet Mondrian, Flowering Apple Tree (1912).© 2022 Mondrian/Holtzman TrustPhoto: Kunstmuseum Den Haag.
Piet Mondrian, Lozenge Composition with Eight Lines and Red/Picture No. III (1938). © Mondrian/Holtzman TrustPhoto: Robert Bayer, Basel.
“Mondrian Evolution” is on view now through October 9, 2022 at the Fondation Beyeler in Basel, Switzerland.
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The Prince’s Palace of Monaco has just reopened to the public after a period of restoration, boasting a newly discovered series of frescoes that had been hidden from sight for centuries. 
The wall paintings had been left untouched and it is not known why they were originally covered up. They are believed to have been painted by Genoese artists during the 16th century. This is due both to the style of the works as well as the lime-based plaster used, detected during a multispectral analysis. 
“This discovery places the Grimaldi family and Palace of Monaco within a new art historical context as a Renaissance palace,” Said chief conservator-restorer Julia Greiner to Artnet News. “The discovery has ignited numerous research projects including conservation and sustainability which have been inspired through his sovereign highness, Prince Albert II’s interest and dedication to environmental issues. Furthermore it has brought together a pluridisciplinary team of approximately 40 specialists that have worked on this project for the last 8 years.”
Hercules’ tenth labour: the Cattle of Geryon in the Galerie d’Hercule. © Photo Maël Voyer Gadin – Palais princier de Monaco.
Restorers began routine repair work in 2013 but first realized there were new artistic treasures to uncover in 2015 when examining the lunettes and vaulted ceiling of a loggia in the courtyard. It had been repainted in the 19th century but images of Hercules’s twelve labors were found remaining underneath. 
The cleaning process revealed richly skilled renderings of these scenes, allegorical figures, and decorative elements totalling some 600 meters squared.
Frescoes have also come to light elsewhere in the palace. In the Chamber of Europe, previously named the Salon Matignon, an electrician accidentally began the process of uncovering a medallion painted on the ceiling that shows the mythological abduction of Europa by Jupiter. 
Ceiling of the Chambre Louis XIII mid-restoration. © Photo Maël Voyer Gadin – Palais princier de Monaco.
In 2020, a large scale fresco depicting Ulysses was also found in the Throne Room. 
The official residence of the Sovereign Prince of Monaco, the palace was built as a fortress in 1191. In the 700 years since 1297, it has been home to the Grimaldi family, currently Prince Albert II. 
An opening initially planned for April 2020 had to be delayed due to the pandemic. The palace and its trove of newly-discovered frescoes now remains open until October 15.
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