Three exhibitions in the Engadin Valley explore how the Swiss mountains have inspired some of the painter’s most playful work
The festive bird has often been served up by artists and writers including J.M.W. Turner and Charles Dickens
Trade was conducted on an unprecedented scale, banks were established, and coinage proliferated like never before. The widespread use of money in everyday life transformed every aspect of European society, including its values and culture. Bringing together some of the most acclaimed manuscripts in the Morgan’s collection and other exceptional objects including a renaissance purse, a brass alms box, and a hoard of coins, this exhibition will explore the fate of the avaricious, attitudes towards the poor, contentious lending practices, and money management.
The famous Hours of Catherine of Cleves, the Hours of Henry VIII, and the Prayer Book of Queen Claude de France will be presented from a decidedly new angle, combining economic and art history to consider the early history of capitalism and the crisis in values that it sparked. These will feature alongside lesser known treasures, including an Italian account book in its original binding and a stunning leaf from a register of creditors made in Bologna, Italy, in 1394–95. As people today reflect on fluctuating markets, disparities in wealth, personal values, and morality, the themes addressed in this exhibition are as relevant as ever.
A compact album presentation of Hockney’s newest explorations in portraiture
This concise volume illustrates around 40 acrylic on canvas works painted by David Hockney (born 1937) at his Normandy studio—depicting his friends and visitors, as well as the artist himself. David Hockney: Normandy Portraits showcases a series of some previously unseen portraits, across 48 pages, uninterrupted by text, to allow readers to engage directly with the artworks.
These new works highlight the ongoing importance of portraiture within the artist’s practice and demonstrate his sentiment that “drawings and paintings … are a lot better than photographs to give you a sense of the person.”
Hockney returned to painting after an intensive period spent depicting the Normandy landscape using an iPad. The portraits were painted quickly and directly onto the canvas without underdrawing. As Hockney has said, “to do a portrait slowly is a bit of a contradiction.”
‘Botticelli Drawings’ By Furio Rinaldi (Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco/Yale).
His strawberry-blond Venus on a wind-propelled scallop shell still pulls Florence’s tourists from the gelateria to the Uffizi — but a rarer Botticelli feast is currently on offer in San Francisco, where the Legion of Honor is presenting the first exhibition ever of this Renaissance master’s fragile drawings (through Feb. 11). In this authoritative catalog, Rinaldi makes several new attributions, including two exquisite head studies of a man gazing upward and a woman with modestly lowered eyes. For a Florentine in the later 15th century, the core of painting was disegno (“design,” but also “drawing”), and Botticelli put drawing first. Delicate highlights of white and yellow show the light on tensed muscles or bowed heads. Effortless squiggles cohere into Simonetta Vespucci’s curled hair or John the Baptist’s camel cloak. His line feels spring-loaded; his saints and angels seem ready for the dance floor; his paintings’ grace and vigor started with a pen.
‘Abraham Ángel: Between Wonder and Seduction’ Edited by Mark A. Castro (Dallas Museum of Art; distributed by Yale University Press).
Like Vermeer, the Mexican portraitist Abraham Ángel, who died at age 19 in 1924, left little behind. His 20 extant works (on view in Dallas through next January) reproduce beautifully in a slim but convincing catalog that doesn’t overstate the case. Ángel’s preferred substrate was cardboard, and the bumpy nap of it really shows in these pages. So do the Fauve-like colors he used to outline his sitters. (Instead of black he preferred blues and browns, as Alice Neel would.) Playfully primitive, these knowing likenesses (among them Ángel’s tutor and lover, Manuel Rodríguez Lozano) combined Mexico’s burgeoning populist aesthetic with a private romanticism that seems nonetheless to have sought clarity on the promise of his country’s Revolution.
‘Woven Histories: Textiles and Modern Abstraction’ Edited by Lynne Cooke (University of Chicago Press).
This major looker of an exhibition catalog loosens up the warp and weft of conventional views of modern art — all those tight-knotted hierarchical categories (high versus low, art versus craft) on which our institutions and markets still rest — and demonstrates the universe of formal and conceptual brilliance that has always traveled on a parallel track. The sheer variety of work produced by more than 50 artists chosen by the book’s editor, Lynne Cooke, will knock your socks off. (Just wait till you see what’s happening in the field of basketry alone.) So will the visual imaginations of individual geniuses we already know like Anni Albers, Ruth Asawa, Gego, Lenore Tawney and Sheila Hicks, and the others we’re introduced to here.
The Week In Art Podcast (December 8, 2023): This week: the final big art market event of the year, Art Basel in Miami Beach. The Art Newspaper’s associate digital editor, Alexander Morrison, talks to our acting art market editor, Tim Schneider, in Miami about the fair, as tensions rise ahead of the pivotal 2024 US election.
In Athens, the National Museum of Contemporary Art, or EMST, is next week opening a months-long programme which will end up with the entire museum filled with women artists. We talk to EMST’s director, Katerina Gregos, about the programme, called What if Women Ruled the World? And this episode’s Work of the Week is two objects: the 15th-century Florentine artist Francesco Pesellino’s panels telling the story of David and Goliath, made for a luxurious cassone or chest for the Medici family.
The panels belong to the National Gallery in London and have just been restored for a new exhibition there, Pesellino: A Renaissance Master Revealed. We talk to Jill Dunkerton, who did the restoration, about these extraordinary paintings.
Art Basel in Miami Beach, Miami Beach Convention Center, until Sunday, 10 December.
What if Women Ruled the World? begins at EMST, Athens, on 14 December.Pesellino: A Renaissance Master Revealed, National Gallery, London, until 10 March 2024.
Curated by Stephan Wolohojian and Ashley E. Dunn
“MANET/DEGAS,” the fall blockbuster at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, begins with an unabashed, double-barreled bang: Édouard Manet’s last great self-portrait, paired up alongside one of Edgar Degas’s first. The juxtaposition provides a thrilling object lesson in the stolid compare-and-contrast curatorial methodology that defines the exhibition, but if it’s meant to show the two artists on an equal footing, it doesn’t stage a fair fight. Forty-six years old when he executed Portrait of the Artist (Manet with a Palette), ca. 1878–79, Manet is at the height of his painterly power, looking backward and forward at once.
Fifteen artists reflect on 2023
By Kenturah Davis, Vaginal Davis, Anri Sala, Tracey Emin, Doron Langberg, Dena Yago, Adam Alessi, Oto Gillen, Mire Lee, Nigel Howlett, Lúcia Koch, K.R.M. Mooney, Sula Bermúdez-Silverman, Niklas Taleb, Party Office
To take stock of the past year, Artforum asked an international group of artists to select a single exhibition or event that most memorably caught their attention in 2023.
KENTURAH DAVIS
Lauren Halsey (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York)
Emerging onto the Met’s rooftop, I’m greeted by sphinxes with faces carved in the likeness of the artist’s loved ones. These figures surround and protect a large architectural monument, its surfaces engraved with coded inscriptions that pay homage to the people and energy of South Central Los Angeles. The structure forgoes the exuberant color I’ve come to expect in Halsey’s work, making me think about the ways Egyptian art and architecture have changed over time—once colorfully embellished, and now animated purely by shadows. In this way, Halsey’s sanctuary suggests that it’s been standing there for millennia, transformed by the sun and communing with the cosmos.
VAGINAL DAVIS
Annette Frick (MARTa Herford, Germany)
You can easily get royally preggers if you stand too close to the hairy eyeball of Annette Frick. For more than forty years, the Berlin-based photographer-filmmaker and consummate artiste has been known mainly for her captivating chronicles of underground queer scenes. At her retrospectacle “A Moment in No Man’s Land,” was enchanted by her sensual large-format self-portraits and stunning nude cycle “Aus dem Wasser” (Out of the Water), 2007–2008, referring to mythological figures such as Ondine and Lilith. I had never seen her architecture-portrait hybrids and was mesmerized, wondering just what else she has hidden in her voluptuous archive.
ANRI SALA
Saâdane Afif (Wilhelm Hallen, Berlin)
It’s difficult to express the poetry and poignancy of Saâdane Afif’s exhibition “The Coalman,” part of the artist’s larger endeavor to give form to a heptahedron. Here, the artist installs his personal collection of coal sculptures handcrafted by miners in their spare time alongside Is it possible that you have no coal left?, 2023, a facsimile of a letter from French composer Claude Debussy to his coal merchant, penned during the particularly severe winter of 1916–17. The repurposed missive serves as a coda to the exhibition as a whole, posing a question that resonates in manifold ways in the present (perhaps even applying to a shortage of new forms).
October 8, 2023–January 15, 2024
Special correspondent Jared Bowen of GBH Boston reports for our arts and culture series, CANVAS.
Among the art-gallery going public, is anyone still unaware that there have always been women artists, even before the 19th century? Perhaps a few still think that women first picked up their paintbrushes around the time they started campaigning for the vote. Certainly, the further back you go, the more surprising it may seem – given the limitations placed on women – that some were nonetheless able to build successful artistic careers. But beginning in earnest with the National Gallery’s blockbuster Artemisia Gentileschi exhibition of 2019, a flurry of shows has put the names of various Renaissance women in lights. Just this year, we have had ‘Lavinia Fontana: Trailblazer, Rule Breaker’ at the National Gallery of Ireland, ‘Mary Beale: Experimental Secrets’ at Dulwich Picture Gallery, ‘Artemisia Gentileschi: coraggio e passione’ at the Palazzo Ducale in Genoa, and ‘Sofonisba Anguissola: Portraitist of the Renaissance’ at the Rijksmuseum Twenthe in Enschede, to name only a few.
October 27, 2023 through January 28, 2024
Combining highlights from the Morgan’s collection with carefully selected loans, this exhibition will provide a comprehensive look at the Tiepolos’ work as draftsmen, focusing on the role of drawing in their creative process and the distinct physical and stylistic properties of their graphic work. At the core of the collection and exhibition are substantial groups of Giambattista’s drawings that relate to major ceiling fresco projects of the 1740s and 1750s.
A fresh look at the style, function, and material properties of these working drawings has yielded new insights into their purposes. Most significantly, the exhibition presents for the first time extremely rare pen studies for Tiepolo’s magnum opus, the ceiling fresco above the staircase of the Würzburg Residenz of 1752, and a group of bold sketches newly connected with his ceiling fresco of 1754 at the Venetian church of Santa Maria della Pietà.
Other sections of the exhibition highlight the introduction of Domenico to the family workshop, the exchanges between father and son, and the great series drawings by both: Giambattista’s fantastic heads and figures seen di sotto in su, and Domenico’s drawings of animals, biblical scenes, and contemporary life.
The exhibition will end with a wall including striking examples from Domenico’s late Punchinello series. October 27, 2023 through January 28, 2024
Then a more detailed look at the Sam Josefowitz Collection of Rembrandt prints – the most comprehensive and impressive in private hands – as we examine some of the highlights of these graphic masterpieces.
On 7 December 2023, Christie’s will be offering a selection of these prints across two sales in London: Old Masters Part I and The Sam Josefowitz Collection: Graphic Masterpieces by Rembrandt van Rijn.
Boomers Daily 