Henri Matisse’s landmark painting “The Red Studio” documented the artworks displayed in his workspace just outside Paris as it existed in 1911. For the first time since then, almost all the individual pieces depicted in his painting have been reunited for an installation at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. Correspondent Rita Braver reports.
Category Archives: Art
Preview: The American Scholar – Summer 2022

COVER STORY
Ulysses at 100
by Our Editors
Is there a novel more revered—and more famously unread—than James Joyce’s Ulysses? Despite its complexities, this love letter to Dublin, published a century ago, is a very readable chronicle of everyday life and everyday struggles. It’s a book about marriage, sex, religion, food, art, loneliness, companionship, and so much else. It’s a book, that is, about life. We hope that the following essays will send you on a quest to discover, or rediscover, this most staggering of epics.
A Remembrance of Places Both Empty and Full
The divine, stark photographs of Robert Adams
by Megan Craig
FICTION
How to Solve the Mystery of the Slope and the Line
by Cassandra Garbus
Reviews: The Week In Art
This week: our associate editor, Kabir Jhala, and editor-at-large, Jane Morris, have been in Kassel, Germany, to see Documenta, the quinquennial international art exhibition.
They review the show and respond to the escalation of a long-running row over antisemitism and broader racism, which has resulted in a work being removed from the exhibition. Virginia Rutledge, an art historian and lawyer, discusses the dispute over Andy Warhol’s appropriation of a photograph by Lynn Goldsmith of the pop icon Prince. The case will be heard in the US Supreme Court this autumn and has potentially huge implications for artistic freedom. And this episode’s Work of the Week is An Outpost of Progress (1992), a drawing by the late Spanish artist Juan Muñoz, inspired by Joseph Conrad’s short story of the same name.
Documenta 15, Kassel, Germany, until 25 September.
Juan Muñoz: Drawings 1982-2000, Centro Botín, Santander, Spain, 25 June-16 October.
Italian Culture: ‘Mitico – Follow The Art Path’ (2022)
For the 2022 season, Belmond has launched a partnership with internationally acclaimed art gallery – Galleria Continua – entitled MITICO, which celebrates the talents of four prominent artists, as they take the spotlight in some of Belmond’s captivating landmark gardens across Italy.
Evoking a feeling of inclusivity and community, MITICO embodies a new art philosophy: it is the reinterpretation of universal customs shared amongst different societies, such as cooking, painting, observing, and appreciating, and how these are consumed in their environments.
MITICO is a moment in time and history where cultures interact – ultimately it is a celebration of art de vivre. Deepening its long-standing connection to the arts, through MITICO, Galleria Continua and Belmond invite guests to see cultures through a different lens, tapping into each individual destination’s essence and beauty.
Design: East Fork Pottery And Shelter Collective In Ashville, North Carolina
One of the best ways to get a sense of the retro-urban city of Asheville, North Carolina is to visit with the designers and artists who call it home.
Previews: American Indian Magazine – Summer 2022

American Indian Magazine – Summer 2022
Highlights:
Watching Over the Past: Virgil Ortiz’s Futuristic Creations Are Perpetuating Cochiti Pueblo Pottery-Making Traditions
Virgil Ortiz still remembers the outings he took as a 6-year-old boy with his mother to creeks throughout their Pueblo of Cochiti in New Mexico. There, they would gather clay to mold into pots and storytellers—seated comical human or animal figures. His father was a drum maker and his mother and grandmother were both potters. He remembers giving prayers of thanks to Mother Earth for providing clay, a medium through which they could express themselves. “I was surrounded by art every day,” says Ortiz.
Profiles: British Sculptor Henry Moore (1898-1986)
Henry Moore achieved international fame as a sculptor, despite once being denounced for promoting ‘the cult of ugliness’. And he also remained a most unassuming man, finds Laura Gascoigne, as two new exhibitions of his work prepare to welcome visitors.
Sculptors are very rarely household names, but no one who lived through the 1960s could be unfamiliar with the name of Henry Moore. At the height of his international success, Moore’s monumental public sculptures in prominent locations — from the 12ft-high Knife Edge Two Piece (1962–65) outside London’s Houses of Parliament to the 26ft-long Reclining Figure (1963–64) outside the Lincoln Centre in New York, US — became such a feature of the urban landscape that they appeared in cartoons in the popular press. For a Modernist abstract sculptor, that was fame.
In the 1950s, Moore added a new subject to his signature themes of the mother and child and the reclining figure. As a young man, his first sight of Stonehenge by moonlight, in 1921, had left an indelible impression; 30 years later, he began a series of large bronze totemic forms recalling prehistoric monoliths.

Henry Moore with three of his Upright Motives c.1955.Photo: Barry Warner
Views: The New National Museum Of Norway, Oslo
The Norwegian capital Oslo is getting a new national museum for classical and modern art, architecture and design. The museum’s collection includes around 100,000 objects, ranging from medieval tapestries to modern design classics and contemporary artworks.
There will be rooms dedicated to, among others, the works of Edvard Munch , including “The Scream,” 19th-century landscape painting, royal robes worn by the Norwegian queens, as well as works by prominent artists, such as Gustav Vigeland, Hannah Ryggen, Claude Monet, Vincent Van Gogh and Ida Ekblad.
Reviews: ‘The Week In Art’
This week: why is Tate rejecting an archive of material relating to Francis Bacon, 18 years after acquiring it?
Our London correspondent Martin Bailey tells us about his recent scoop that Tate is returning a thousand documents and sketches said to have come from the studio of Francis Bacon to Barry Joule, a close friend of the artist, who donated them to Tate in 2004. We then discuss the material with Martin Harrison, the pre-eminent Bacon scholar and editor of the catalogue raisonné of Francis Bacon’s work published in 2016, and to Sophie Pretorius, the archivist at the Estate of Francis Bacon, who went through the Barry Joule archive item by item. Victoria Munro, the director of the Alice Austen House Museum in New York, discusses this still too-little-known photographer, and her documentation of immigration to the United States and the lives of queer women in the 19th and early 20th centuries. And this episode’s Work of the Week is Weißes Bild (1994), a painting by the late Luxembourg-born artist Michel Majerus, now on view at Art Basel—Aimee Dawson, acting digital editor, is at the fair and talks to Giovanni Carmine, curator of the Unlimited section, in which the painting appears.
Sophie Pretorius’s essay Work on the Barry Joule Archive is in the book Francis Bacon: Shadows published by the Estate of Francis Bacon and Thames and Hudson.
For more on the Alice Austen House Museum, visit aliceausten.org. The podcast My Dear Alice is out in the autumn.
Art Basel, until 19 June.
Ceramics: Ancient Athens Red-Figure Vase Painting
In this five-minute animated video, journey back to the 6th-century BCE workshop of the Athenian master Andokides and witness an ancient artist’s moment of creative ingenuity. For generations Athenian vase painters had employed black-figure technique, in which the figure is painted in a mixture of clay and water called slip and details are incised with a sharp tool.
At some point—we don’t know precisely when or why—a vase painter had the idea to reverse the scheme, leaving the figures the color of the clay and painting details with a brush. We now call this red-figure technique. Learn how ancient vase painters created vases in both styles and marvel at the technical virtuosity of the multi-step firing process that contributed to their distinctive, high-contrast look.