On View

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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This Saturday, 31 artists will disrupt 30 museums across the UK with surreal interventions intended to honour the 102nd anniversary of the First International Dada Exhibition, staged in Berlin in 1920.
All the artists taking part identify as d/Deaf, disabled or neurodivergent. The event has been organised by DASH, a disabled-led visual arts charity based in London, and funded £125,000 ($152,000) through the Ampersand Foundation Award.
“We Are Invisible We Are Visible” was first concocted in 2020 as a response to the question of what the Dada movement would have been like if it had emerged during lockdown. Reviving the spirit of Dada aims to challenge assumptions about disabled people and explore ideas around accessibility, communication, and representation.
The works planned are primarily performances, dance, and nonsensical happenings, and the venues taking part include Tate’s four locations in London, Liverpool, and St Ives, Turner Contemporary in Margate, the Hepworth Wakefield, the Arnolfini in Bristol, the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art in Gateshead, Manchester Art Gallery, Ikon Gallery in Birmingham and Modern Art Oxford. 
“We Are Invisible We Are Visible” takes place on July 2, 2022. Below, see more preview images of works by the participating artists.
Tony Heaton, Great Britain From A Wheelchair (1995). Photo: Paul Kenny. Heaton will perform at the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead.
Andrea Mindel, Mea Culpa (2021). Photo: Vic Lentaigne. Mindel will perform at Towner Eastbourne.
Aaron Williamson, Invisible Man. Photo: courtesy of DASH. Williamson will perform at Ikon Gallery, Birmingham.
Aaron Williamson, Hiding in 3D. Photo: courtesy of DASH. Williamson will perform at Ikon Gallery, Birmingham.
Bel Pye, Cocoon. Photo: courtesy of DASH. Pye will perform at the Centre for Contemporary Art Derry~Londonderry.
Anahita Harding, Are You Comfortable Yet?. Photo: courtesy of DASH. Harding will perform at Tate Modern, London.
Nicola Woodham, Buffer performance detail at Cafe Oto, London, in 2021. Photo: courtesy of DASH. Woodham will perform at the Harris, Preston.
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Six colourful and richly detailed tapestries by British artist Grayson Perry have been installed in the nave of Salisbury Cathedral in the west of England. The group, titled “The Vanity of Small Differences,” has already toured the country, but this is the first time they have been staged in a church setting.
The works, each measuring four meters by two meters, were inspired by William Hogarth’s narrative painting series, specifically The Rake’s Progress (1734) which follows the rise and fall of the debaucherous Tom Rakewell. The 18th-century artist typically used these paintings to make biting social commentary about pretensions and class.
Here, Perry’s protagonist Tim Rakewell explores upward mobility in the present day, using a cast of characters based on people the artist encountered while traveling to various regions of the UK for a TV program.
“Rich in colour and content, it is Perry’s acutely observed attention to detail which draws you in,” said curator Beth Hughes. “I’m sure we all have moments of familiarity as we look through this tableau of English life and see that mug we have at home and ask ourselves, which social class do I belong to?”
References to classical and religious art can be found in the paintings, including to Giovanni Bellini’s The Agony in the Garden and Andrea Mantegna’s The Adoration of the Cage Fighters.
“The Vanity of Small Differences” runs until September 25 2022. See images of the installation below. 
Installation view of Grayson Perry’s tapestry series “The Vanity of Small Differences” in Salisbury Cathedral. Photo: Finnbarr Webster.
Installation view of Grayson Perry’s tapestry series “The Vanity of Small Differences” in Salisbury Cathedral. Photo: Finnbarr Webster. Courtesy of Salisbury Cathedral.
Installation view of Grayson Perry’s tapestry series “The Vanity of Small Differences” in Salisbury Cathedral. Photo: Finnbarr Webster.
Installation view of Grayson Perry’s tapestry series “The Vanity of Small Differences” in Salisbury Cathedral. Photo: Finnbarr Webster. Courtesy of Salisbury Cathedral.
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Sirens wail in the distance and horns honk, a piano plays a quiet melody, and church bells ring. The sounds that wash over you in Bill Fontana’s “Silent Echoes” installation at the Villa Albertine in New York this weekend are the city noises “heard” by the bells of Notre Dame, Paris’s historic cathedral. 
The Bay Area artist was allowed the rare opportunity to enter the fire-damaged building earlier this year to install accelerometers on the church’s 10 bronze bells, starting with the largest and oldest, known as Emmanuel. These allow him to record the bells’ vibrations, which they continue to emit even when not actively ringing, in response to their environment. 
Working with technicians at the Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique (IRCAM), which is linked to the Centre Pompidou in Paris, Fontana is able to make these recordings audible to human ears. 
“The personality changes with the weather and the time of day,” Fontana said. “During normal business hours in Paris, Notre Dame is a construction site. So, the bells will hear the construction. When it is the late afternoon or evening, you sometimes have a street musician with a boombox in front of the cathedral. Early in the morning in Paris, I hear birds in the bell tower.”
Installation view of Bill Fontana’s “Silent Echoes : Notre-Dame 2022” at the Centre Pompidou, June 8–July 2, 2022. Photo: courtesy of the artist.
He has been live streaming the results in a sound installation now on view at the Pompidou, and is bringing the work to New York for two days (June 25-26), where he will also be showing videos taken from high up in Notre Dame’s towers. The aim is to get other institutions interested in presenting the piece. 
“With a live-streaming artwork, it would be possible to set up spontaneous pop-up exhibitions anywhere,” Fontana said. He is now working with the French telecommunications giant Orange to explore whether the fiber option network they installed in the bell tower to transmit the audio signals from the bells would also be capable of supporting live cameras. 
“The bells are acting basically like acoustic mirrors. They’re reacting to life around Notre Dame,” Fontana said. “At the Centre Pompidou, you don’t need a video element—you’ve got the best view in the world there. But when you’re at a museum, thousands of miles away, it would be interesting to have that kind of live view.”
[embedded content]Fontana is already bringing the work to Istanbul, where he has a solo show at the Arter gallery, and to the Ars Electronica festival in Linz, Austria. The Louvre Abu Dhabi has also shown interest in presenting the piece, he said, and he hopes a New York institution will pick it up as well. 
On Friday, Fontana is previewing the installation to a group of art world guests at the Villa Albertine, the French government’s cultural space in Manhattan, just down the street from the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The work will remain on view to the public through the weekend, transmitting the sounds of Paris in real time. “The sounds of the bells are not altered in any way,” Fontana said. “Their placement and movement in the space creates the composition.”
Bill Fontana in Notre Dame’s bell tower, underneath the largest and oldest bell, named Emmanuel. Photo courtesy of the artist.
He has previously described the sounds of Paris reverberating through the bells as the “spirit” of Notre Dame, showing that the historic church, which was devastated by fire in 2019, is a survivor. “It’s alive and well,” Fontana said, “and it’s ongoing.” 
His contract with Notre Dame allows his recording equipment to remain installed in the church through to the end of its restoration. Which means he will be able to hear the church as it returns to bustling activity. 
“I’ve spent so many hours of my recent life listening to these bells,” Fontana added. “It’s this very beautiful, almost mystical sound.”
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A bronze statue of Sally Ride, the first U.S. woman in space, was dedicated at the Cradle of Aviation Museum in Garden City on Long Island on Friday—the nation’s first monument to a woman astronaut.
At the time of her first mission in 1983, aboard the Space Shuttle Challenger, Ride was also the youngest American ever to make the journey into space, at just 32 years of age. She died of pancreatic cancer in 2012, when she was 61.
Then President Barack Obama posthumously awarded Ride the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2013. He presented it to Ride’s partner, Tam O’Shaughnessy, allowing the late astronaut to finally come out as a member of the LGBTQ community—the first in NASA history to do so.
The memorial to Ride’s groundbreaking achievements is the brainchild of documentary filmmaker Steven C. Barber, and is actually the third NASA monument he has spearheaded.
Sally Ride, the first U.S. woman to go to space, monitoring control panels from the pilot’s chair on the flight deck during the Space Shuttle Challenger’s STS-7 mission in 1983. Photo courtesy of NASA.
His initial inspiration was a sculpture of Apollo 13 astronaut Jack Swigert at the Capitol building’s National Statuary Hall in Washington D.C., by George and Mark Lundeen of Lundeen Sculpture in Loveland, Colorado.
Ahead of the 50th anniversary of the moon landing in 2019, Barber helped raise $750,000 from Rocket Mortgage to install seven-foot-tall bronze statues of Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins at the Kennedy Space Center’s Moon Tree Garden in Cape Canaveral, Florida.
Six months ago, Barber unveiled an Apollo 13 monument of Swigert, James Lovell, and Fred Haise at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, completed thanks to $750,000 from Grainger Industrial Supply.
Lundeen Sculpture made the Apollo 11 monument in the Moon Tree Garden at Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Photo courtesy of the Kennedy Space Center.
“As I went through my journey of building the Apollo 11 monument and the Apollo 13 monument, it occurred to me very early on that there were no monuments commemorating any of the 65 women who have flown in space and the over 12,000 women that had worked at NASA,” Barber told Artnet News in an email.
All three monuments are the work of Lundeen Sculptors, designed by the Lundeen brothers and Joey Bainer.
“When I take a vision to the Lundeen Sculptors, they inevitably make it better,” Barber said. “They decided to put the Space Shuttle in Sally’s right arm, pointing to the stars, which I thought was absolutely genius.”
Lundeen Sculpture’s Sally Ride monument. Photo by Warwick Productions.
A less complex composition than the two Apollo monuments because it features only one figure, the Ride memorial cost just $300,000 to create and install. But much like a NASA mission, the project was not without its complications.
“I spent several months calling hundreds and hundreds of executives at Fortune 500 companies getting unbelievable, gut-wrenching, demoralizing rejections,” Barber said.
In the end, he secured funding from the Matson Family Foundation, Peter Diamandis of the X Prize Foundation, Cinemark Theatres, and Maria Shriver.
And then there was the artwork itself.
The mold of the Space Shuttle for Lundeen Sculpture’s Sally Ride monument. Photo by Warwick Productions.
“The sculpture was originally done in clay on a steel armature, but the night it was finished, it was consumed in fire that destroyed our studios,” George Lundeen told Artnet News in an email. “Although [it was] a great setback, we were able to reconstruct Sally Ride from the ashes.”
The company cast the work in bronze at a foundry using the lost wax process and finishing it with a multicolored patina.
The monument’s upcoming unveiling follows on the heels of the March release of the Sally Ride quarter from the U.S. Mint, part of the American Women Quarters Program, which will release 20 coins honoring historic women over the next four years.
The artist behind the coin’s design is Elana Hagler, part of the mint’s Artistic Infusion Program, and the sculptor who executed the artwork is Phebe Hemphill, who has worked at the mint since 1987.
The Sally Ride quarter, part of the American Women Quarters Program. Courtesy of the United States Mint.
The coin shows Ride at the window of the Space Shuttle, an image that was inspired by a statement she once made: “When I wasn’t working, I was usually at a window looking down at Earth.”
“I think the design reflects Sally’s dreamy view of the future and fierce determination,” O’Shaughnessy told Nerdist.
The first American Women Quarter was released in January, featuring writer and activist Maya Angelou. Chinese American film star Anna May Wong, American Cherokee activist Wilma Mankiller, and suffragist Nina Otero-Warren are also being honored this year.
Steven C. Barber with Lundeen Sculpture’s Sally Ride monument at the Cradle of Aviation Museum in Garden City on Long Island, New York. Photo courtesy of Steven C. Barber.
The Lundeens and Barber plan to continue building statues recognizing the achievements of women in NASA history, such as the African American mathematicians Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan, and Mary Jackson, who were depicted in the film Hidden Figures, and Mae C. Jemison, the first African American woman to go to space.
Barber is also shooting a documentary about Ride, which he hopes to release on a major streaming platform in 2023.
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The Picasso Museum in Paris is staging an exhibition of never-before-seen works by the Spanish master, bequeathed by his eldest child, Maya Ruiz-Picasso, in 2021.
The show features nine major works by the artist and personal family items dating from 1895 to 1971. The selection includes drawings, paintings, photographs, ephemera, a coloring in book, and an adorable how-to-paint book that the artist and his lover Marie-Thérèse Walter made for Maya.
Maya Picasso, Maya au bateau (1938). Photo © Succession Picasso 2022.
The exhibition, “Maya Ruiz-Picasso, Daughter Of Pablo,” was co-curated by Picasso Museum curator Emilia Philippot and Maya’s daughter Diana Widmaier-Ruiz-Picasso, who discovered drawings and sketchbooks by chance while going through storage. She showed her mother, who is now 86, and she remembered making the drawings with her father.
Maya recalled that time, paper, and pencils were in short supply then. “Who has never heard it said when looking at a canvas by Picasso, ‘A child could have done that!’” Diana wrote in the book accompanying the show. “Many of the artistic revolutions of the 20th century were greeted with mockery and scandal, it is true, but in Picasso’s case there is a hint of truth in that judgment. As Maya, his first daughter, recalls, ‘the mystery of life, and therefore of childhood, always filled that father of mine with interest.’”
Pablo Picasso, Lettre à Maya (1946). Photo © Succession Picasso 2022.
Picasso drew with Maya the way he had with his own father, who was a drawing professor, and the sketchbooks reveal this touching exchange.
“That’s probably why my father wrote in my exercise books and colored with my pencils. I still have fond memories of those moments when we met up in the kitchen to draw together. It was the only place in the apartment where it was warm,” Maya said, according to the Observer.
Pablo Picasso et Maya Ruiz-Picasso, Pommes (n.d). Photo © Succession Picasso 2022.
The drawings also give insight into Picasso as a father and as an artist.
“There’s a beautiful page where he’s drawing a bowl and she’s drawing a bowl,” Diana told the Observer. “Sometimes she’s making an image and he’s doing another, showing her the right way to do it. Sometimes they would depict different scenes. Other times, he would draw a dog or a hat. Sometimes he’s using the whole page to draw one particular thing. Other times, he’s depicting certain scenes, scenes of the circus. It’s very interesting.”
Pablo Picasso, Maya à la poupée et au cheval (1938). Photo © Succession Picasso 2022
“Maya Ruiz-Picasso, Daughter Of Pablo” is on view at Musée Picasso in Paris through December 31, 2022.
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