“Is that a real Monet?” asks a visitor to Takashi Murakami’s new exhibition at Gagosian New York, “JAPONISME → Cognitive Revolution: Learning from Hiroshige,” on view through July 11. The Japanese artist has subjected the French Impressionist to his characteristic screen-printing technique in Claude Monet’s “Water Lily Pond” And Me, Submerged in the Pond Like Gollum (2025), a slick copy that from a squinting distance might fool you. Conveniently, squinting distance is a popular suggestion for the best way to view Impressionism. Murakami knows his audience; he knows they are always looking at and through screens, and that the lure of the apparently famous now pulls harder than the onetime aura of originality.

The same fate has befallen Murakami himself, known more as a celebrity figure than a serious artist. But both his skill and his knowledge of art history, which includes a PhD in traditional Japanese painting, are evident in this exhibition. Despite appearances (and the inclusion of several examples of his Louis Vuitton monogram canvases, allusions to the artist’s collaboration with luxury brands), this show seems less about outward attraction and more about inward exploration. The bulk of the work comes from Murakami’s take on Hiroshige’s 100 Famous Views of Edo (1856–58), a series that began with his 2024 show at the Brooklyn Museum (which houses a set of Hiroshige’s prints). Murakami scaled up the prints to made them into immersive canvases, adding glitter and some of his signature characters to create a “spot the difference” effect, but he was essentially devoted to retracing one of the great treasures of Japanese culture. Copying, in this instance, is a form of reverence and even inheritance: Muarakami has described using the copies to understand his place within the history of art, claiming in an interview with ARTnews that “maybe I wasn’t outside the story—I just hadn’t seen how the thread connected yet.”

That story isn’t limited to the art of Japan. What’s new here is Murakami’s copying of European artists including Monet, who were themselves drawing on Japanese influences—what was termed “Japonisme” by the nineteenth-century French critic Philip Burty. Like Murakami’s own aesthetic, Superflat, which can be traced to the decimation of Japan’s economy post-WWII, Japonisme came in the wake of Western aggression against the formerly closed state. By the 1860s, gunboat diplomacy resulted in asymmetrical treaties that forced Japan to engage in unfavorable trade with the West and that prompted an influx of Japanese art, which appeared radical to European eyes.

Artists newly exposed to Japanese prints including Hiroshige’s adopted the flat planes of strong color, vertical orientation, and emphasis on patterning that they observed in Japanese art as they worked to develop a mode of modern painting. Recognizing a fresh sense of truthfulness in this Japanese influence—one based in the essence of things, rather than an illusionistic imitation—brought another critic, Théodore Duret, to declare “Before Japan it was impossible; the painter always lied.”

What truth is at stake in this new iteration of Japonisme? At a time when cultural borrowings are more likely to be condemned as appropriation, Murakami seems to be intervening in a debate about who has the right to copy whom. The Japonaise of Claude Monet’s “La Japonaise” (2025) takes on Monet’s 1876 portrait of his wife Camille dressed up in a kimono. (The Monet was the subject of controversy in 2015 when the Museum of Fine Arts Boston exhibited it alongside a kimono visitors were invited to try on, as if identity can be assumed and dropped like a garment.) In addition to Monet’s copied signature, Murakami added his own in conspicuous Latin script in what may be a gesture of reclamation but one that also implicitly undersigns the initial borrowing. He similarly recreates the cover of a French illustrated magazine dedicated to Japan (Fig. 2 Paris Illustré Cover of the May 1, 1886 issue Butterfly, 2025), featuring a reproduction of a print of a Japanese geisha. Van Gogh (whose work Murakami also copies for the show) had traced the woman’s body from that same cover in 1887, aligning Murakami with a mode of modern art that made liberal use of whatever was available to it.

Still, cultural borrowings have consequences, including potentially transforming the actual people who make up those cultures into consumable motifs. Murakami may allude to these consequences in his inclusion of UFOs in several of the copied works: a small vessel floats above the bridge in James McNeill Whistler’s “Nocturne: Blue and Gold – Old Battersea Bridge” Then a UFO Flew By (2025). Beyond introducing an element of surprising strangeness, the UFOs invoke current issues around so-called “illegal” aliens, asking what aspects of other cultures we are willing to accept and what degree of difference is tolerated. A more searing response is on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York as part of “Monstrous Beauty,” a superbly curated show on “chinoiserie,” another instance of Europeans drawing influence from Asian cultures. At the end of a series of galleries showing Asian women’s bodies adorning everything from teacups to mirrors, Patty Chang’s Abyssal (2025), a porcelain massage table shot through with holes referencing the 2021 Atlanta spa massacre, makes those bodies real, and renders their appropriation a deadly serious matter.

Pure pleasure abounds in Rachel Ruysch’s paintings on view at the Toledo Museum of Art—the first major exhibition dedicated to this extraordinary artist, organized with the Alte Pinakothek in Munich and traveling next to the MFA Boston. The visual splendor of this Dutch Golden Age painter’s work, featuring gorgeous arrays of fruits and flowers animated by buzzing insects, delights in tableau after tableau. Darkened backgrounds heighten the impact of deeply saturated hues of every conceivable color, painted with such an exquisite touch that one might be tempted to reach across and wipe away a drop of gathering dew.

The canvases are pleasurable but also restlessly ambitious, as Ruysch herself was. She combined a dazzling number of blooms in overflowing arrangements that include tulips, marigolds, roses, irises, lilies, anemones, and even an ear of corn, all of which appear to be stretching to reach beyond the bounds of their frames.

Is it trivial to think of flowers in times like these? Writer Elaine Scarry has claimed that “of all the objects in the world, flowers are the most beautiful.” Beauty, for Scarry, bears a direct relationship to justice: It is a reminder of our vulnerability, our susceptibility to something outside ourselves. Beauty is a crucial element of our aliveness. And like life itself, the beauty of Ruysch’s arrangements is thrown into relief—and made more precious—by the certainty of death. Stems are snapped. Leaves yellow and wilt. A lizard prepares to pounce on a nest of freshly lain eggs.

Unlike the symbolic memento mori of many still lifes, Ruysch’s investment in the cycle of life seems to come from her involvement in ongoing scientific research. Ruysch’s father was a scholar with a collection of natural history specimens so renowned that Peter the Great eventually purchased it. Ruysch had bees, beetles, and butterflies readily available to study. She also had access to Amsterdam’s growing botanical collections, for which her father had edited a catalog.

It’s worth noting that Ruysch was hardly the only woman painting in the 17th century. Curator Robert Schindler’s rediscovery of the little-known work of Rachel’s sister, Anna, was one impetus for organizing this show, and placing works by the sisters side-by-side, the exhibition shows the extent to which they were in dialogue. A section dedicated to scientific illustration also includes examples by several other female artists, including Maria Sibylla Merian who, at the age of 52, traveled to the Dutch colony of Suriname in South America to study insects. Scientists at this time were particularly interested in different forms of biological reproduction, leading to a widespread fascination with the Surinam toad, which carries its eggs on its back. Ruysch’s father had an embalmed specimen, and Ruysch illustrated it in a letter that was sent to the Royal Society in London, putting her at the center of scientific communication at the highest levels.

This exhibition significantly advances the scholarship on Ruysch’s career. The curators collaborated with botanical experts to inventory the many species Ruysch depicted for the exhibition catalog. This research reveals the rise in the 1690s of non-native specimens as Dutch trading networks thrived. Plants from at least five different continents appear in her arrangements, including passionflower, cacti, and the stinking carrion flower (Orbea variegata, native to South Africa, for which the museum has provided an olfactory sample). These are inherently global paintings, products of histories of colonialism and trade that are inseparable from the history of art.

For all their lavish abundance, Ruysch’s arrangements are also emphatically tenuous things. There is little to anchor their elements in place: The loose gather of thin rope in her first major work, Swag of Flowers and Fruit Suspended in Front of a Niche (1681), hardly seems up to the task of containing its bounty. We can easily imagine the elements of her pictures slipping out of the perfect alignment into which she has willed them. On occasion, she further tempts fate by perching an insect on an already drooping stem, as with the Garden Tiger moth atop a fine sprig of wheat in Flowers in a Glass Vase (1704); the moth encourages us to consider the effects of gravity on these elaborately constructed worlds. In a 1692 portrait of Ruysch at work by Michiel van Musscher (the curators argue she painted this scene’s floral arrangement), she is deliberately pinching a bloom into place, gazing casually at the viewer in full cognizance of her own talent. Out of an array of source material before her, including cut flowers and botanical illustrations, Ruysch assembles something that is much more than the sum of its parts.

The world holds together in its wondrous beauty, Ruysch’s work suggests, because we will it to be so. In the powerful economic hub of 17th-century Amsterdam, it’s easy to see how she might have felt this way. The damage wrought by such hubris is now obvious, and it can be tempting to leave nature to its own devices in response. Ruysch invites us to think about what might be lost if we let go.

Suzanne Valadon’s painterly style was brash and unflinching. She was self-taught, gleaning tips and techniques from the painters for whom she modeled, and she did not shy away from harsh colors. An 1898 self-portrait places green shadows across her forehead and chin to create a vivid contrast with the glaring reddish tones that dominate the composition. She returned to herself as a subject repeatedly, and in another self-portrait from 1931, appears as a bare-breasted 66-year-old with the same resolute gaze and piercing expression as her younger self. Despite Valadon’s proximity to artists investigating abstraction, including Picasso and Matisse, she remained—firmly, even stubbornly—committed to representation throughout her career.

A recent swell of attention devoted to the French painter—the subject of six major exhibitions in as many years, including a 200-work retrospective at the Centre Pompidou in Paris through May 26—has generated no clear conclusions about Valadon’s place within the history of art. The Pompidou show, revealingly, has no subtitle: It is simply “Suzanne Valadon.” A previous exhibition at the institution’s Metz location declared the artist to be in “A World of Her Own,” both celebrating and isolating her contributions. A 2021 exhibition at Philadelphia’s Barnes Foundation subtitled “Model, Painter, Rebel” signaled the multiple roles the artist played in her lifetime.

While failing to characterize Valadon’s work definitively, these titles are an improvement on the historical telling of her story. Valadon (1865–1938), who came of age in the heady world of Montmartre’s cabaret scene, achieved commercial success as an artist in her lifetime. But she fell under the shadow of her artist son, Maurice Utrillo. When she has been written about, it is often in reference to the male artists with whom she associated. Books dedicated to Valadon refer to her as The Mistress of Montmartre and Renoir’s Dancer. Even the name by which we know her, Suzanne, was based on her bodily availability to the male gaze—after Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec compared Valadon, who was then a popular model called Maria (born Marie-Clémentine), to the biblical story of Susanna and the Elders.

The recent exhibitions, in focusing on Valadon’s art rather than her personal life or modeling career, reveal a broader shift in the art world toward prioritizing female agency. In her iconic essay “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?,” one of Linda Nochlin’s explanations for the lack was propriety: Women were not permitted to study the male body, the most vaunted subject of 19th-century academic painting. Perhaps, then, this explains the fascination with Valadon’s representations of nudes, which have featured heavily in every recent exhibition and publication about her work.

Rendering naked figures was Valadon’s most blatant assumption of her own power. Adam and Eve (1909), a thinly veiled portrait of Valadon and her future (second) husband André Utter, is often hailed as the first representation of a naked man by a female artist. With its slender figures laced with sinewy muscles, the painting proves Valadon was comfortable with the human body in all its flawed reality (the fig leaves for modesty were a later, unwelcome, addition). A slew of Valadon’s portraits of female models includes soft bellies, sharp collar bones, and visible body hair, and the recent exhibitions of her work celebrate her unidealized approach to this canonical art subject.

But Nochlin was calling for much more than simply adding female artists to the existing canon and modes of representation. She saw the absence of significant female figures in art history as a “crucial question of the discipline as a whole”—one that, once answered, might transform the field and “challenge traditional divisions of intellectual inquiry.” Valadon’s revolutionary potential for art history lies not in her essential femaleness but instead in her participation in a radical milieu during a formative moment in the modern city of Paris. Her work speaks not only to the history of art but also to the emergence of mass culture at a time when so-called high art and popular representation became inextricably intertwined.

VALADON WAS NOT just female but poor. Her mother was a laundress in a small town in western France, her father unknown to her. The two came to Paris around 1866, settling in the working-class district of Montmartre a few short years before the arrival of both war and popular revolution. Valadon, only 4 years old when Prussian troops invaded the city, was sent to live with an aunt in Nantes. She missed the siege and the Commune that came after, but returned to a city marked by the scars of battle and a neighborhood characterized by revolt.

That defiant spirit fueled Valadon as she made her way in life, working odd jobs, modeling, and drawing for her own pleasure. She became a single mother at age 18 to Maurice Utrillo, giving him the last name of a Spanish journalist who was a friend. Marriage to a banker in 1896 afforded her the opportunity to focus on painting, but the partnership dissolved when Valadon later began an affair with André Utter, who was Maurice’s friend. That she became a successful artist despite these circumstances testifies not only to her determination (which critics often coded as “virile” and “masculine”) but also to the possibilities for social mobility in the rapidly changing world of late 19th-century Paris.

Valadon was working on the cusp of 20th-century modernity, a period of profound transformation in where and how people lived and the opportunities they enjoyed for leisure and pleasure. Montmartre experienced an influx of residents displaced from the gentrifying center of Paris, notably the community of artists who would provide Valadon’s initial livelihood as well as entertainers—including some at a circus, at which she claims to have performed—who would make her life so lively.

Nearby neighborhoods also welcomed arrivals from France’s overseas colonies, contributing to a growing demographic of people of color that art historian Denise Murrell has traced in her work on 19th-century Paris. Valadon captured, obliquely, one aspect of this changing city in a series of five portraits of a Black model painted in 1919. When two of the paintings went on view at the Barnes Foundation in 2021, the museum convened and published a roundtable of scholars including Murrell and Ebonie Pollock (whose undergraduate thesis first brought the paintings to scholarly attention).

As part of the roundtable, Adrienne Childs cautioned against reading the images as free of the racism that defined Valadon’s time and that mars the long history of depictions of Black women. But Valadon, having worked as a model herself, may have been uniquely capable of understanding aspects of the Black woman’s experience, registering an embodied empathy for the tension in the figure’s left arm, which supports her weight, or the strain on her right, holding an apple steadily aloft as Valadon herself had in Adam and Eve. Times were changing, and Valadon was both benefiting from and recording that change.

Valadon’s capacity for appreciating change makes the still lifes she produced in the 1920s and ’30s feel especially fresh. Like the nudes, they are in dialogue with one of the most traditional forms of painting, harkening back to Jean Siméon Chardin’s 17th-century compositions and Edouard Manet’s 19th-century adaptations. Yet they are equally testaments to the fullness and freedom of Valadon’s life.

The Violin Case (1923) is rich with pattern, texture, and color, and Valadon’s large-scale painting of male nudes, Casting the Net (1914), forms its backdrop—those characteristically lean legs seeming to walk amid a table strewn with patterned textiles, ceramic vases, a jug of flowers, a well-worn book, and the violin of the title.

The inclusion of her own painting within another composition signals that these aren’t neutral or even symbolic objects. They are aspects of Valadon’s lived experience. Rendered unfussily, with the same unflinching gaze she brought to her models, the depicted things represent both the finest of art and the most quotidian of artifacts. They capture the world of Montmartre as one of sensory pleasure, a place where music, painting, and literature were available to everyone, even those born without privilege. Working between art and the everyday, Valadon opened up new possibilities for an art of the everyday—an idea of art we continue to benefit from in the present. 

To paint a glamorous woman, naked but for a loosely hung fur coat and a long drape of pearls, and have her not be the focal point of an image is just one of the striking aspects of Walton Ford’s new series of paintings, on view at Gagosian in New York through April 19. Based on the artist’s research into the Marchesa Luisa Casati, the paintings are far more interested in the experience of her feline companions: two dazzling cheetahs she reportedly paraded along the canals of Venice. One of the cats fiercely occupies the center of La levata del sole (2025), backlit by the rising sun. The other is poised in the midground, a pigeon snapped in its maw. Standing off to the side with a defiant pose and provocative gaze, Casati is alluring but hardly the painting’s most compelling feature.

Ford is well-known for his work appropriating—and subverting—the conventions of natural history illustrations. He has perfected an aesthetic of animal liveliness, one that trades in the genteel authority of 18th- and 19th-century science but smuggles in some contemporary humor and critique. Prints done in the style of famed ornithologist John James Audubon, for example, appear to replicate Audubon’s life-sized depictions of American birds. But Ford’s versions are often riven with barely suppressed psychological tension, channeling the violence behind Audubon’s representations. Audubon both loved his birds, rendering them with ardent vivacity, and ultimately killed them in pursuit of his image.

Ford has found in the animal world a rich source of narrative ironies, with animals both mirroring human dramas and revealing the animality of human society. In these new works, he brings a human actor into the scene in more explicit ways. Casati was a Milanese heiress living large in early 20th-century Venice; she became involved with the Futurists and sought to make her life a work of art. In addition to the cheetahs, she allegedly wore snakes as necklaces and cultivated a menagerie of lion cubs, panthers, monkeys, peacocks, and other exotic species. Her wild parties and exuberant lifestyle, combined with the eternal beauty of Venice, provide captivating content for Ford’s images.

The paintings are themselves exquisite objects. Ford’s dexterity with watercolor balances trompe-l’oeil illusionism, particularly in the cheetah’s mesmerizing coats, with painterly abandon, as in the pooling reflections on the surface of the Grand Canal. Ford, the gallery reports, initially intended to make just one painting on the subject: the golden, glowing, La levata del sole (2025). But he was so taken with the result that he carried on, and one of the most rewarding parts of the show is seeing the characters develop across the series. Each work takes an Italian title, often referring to literature published by Casati’s lover, the military officer and decadent poet Gabriele D’Annunzio.

Decadence, a literary and artistic movement that emerged in the 19th century and was popular in Casati’s time, dwelled in hedonism as an antidote to bourgeois mores, and the decadence here is truly ravishing. The cheetahs’ jeweled collars sparkle, the Marchesa’s lithe body shimmers in the moonlight. And then, like any good thing, there starts to be too much of it. The golden glow of La levata del sole becomes the sickly-sweet, bubble-gum pink of La Marchesa (2024). The latter work depicts the aftermath of a fête. Revelers in the background drape themselves among ruins, their bodies seemingly turned to stone. There may be some vanitas in this image, with scattered carnival masks and overturned wine jugs nodding at symbolic resonance. But the cheetahs, licking the leavings clean, seem unbothered by any metaphoric significance.

Across the paintings, it’s the animals who take the cake. In one of the most enigmatic works in the series, Casati—wrapped in a magnificent python—stands in the arched opening to a derelict alleyway while her companions scrounge discarded kitchen scraps. By the 1930s, Casati had lost her fortune, but Ford imagines a world in which she kept the cheetahs. Both have jewel-studded collars and diamond-encrusted leashes, though no one deigns to hold them. Titled Desiderio infinito (2025), the work throbs with desire: Casati’s, the cheetahs’, and our own, for these delicious paintings.

At the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, Connecticut, a group show inaugurates the museum’s new sculpture garden, with works prompting questions about what gardens have been and can still be.

Perhaps more than any other art form, gardens give us particular, material insight into the relationships between humans and their environment. So proposed the renowned garden historian John Dixon Hunt, who described gardens as “sophisticated… deliberate… and complex in their mixture of culture and nature.” Gardens have been sites for the display of immense power over the earth, as in Louis XIV’s Versailles, but they have also provided spaces for resistance, as in the subsistence gardens enslaved peoples cultivated in the American South. Titled “A Garden of Promise and Dissent,” the exhibition at the Aldrich deliberately engages this wide range of garden histories.

Rachelle Dang’s Seedling Carrier (2019) echoes human attempts to control nature on a global scale. Based on eighteenth-century innovations that allowed imperial explorers to transport living plant matter on yearslong oceanic voyages, Dang’s wood and aluminum carrier is filled with broken pots and surrounded by scattered ceramic seed pods. Rendered entirely in white, the sculpture’s ghostly presence indicates that despite attempts at care and containment, many plants did not survive the journey.

Global exchange takes on a different resonance in work by Guyanese artist Suchitra Mattai. In the intrepid garden (2023), a tapestry of worn saris is punctuated by decorative shelves holding small sculptures based on European porcelain figurines that depict pastoral fantasies of a harmonious, effortless relation to nature. Against the vibrant colors of the tapestry, the sculptures’ glaring whiteness and saccharine imagery offers a comment on the legacy of British colonialism in Guyana; cast in salt, they allude to the oceanic transit on which colonialism depended. After the abolition of slavery, sugar was cultivated by Indian indentured laborers, including Mattai’s ancestors, and the intrepid garden also evokes the degradation of Guyanese soil through extensive sugar plantations.

More contemporary and commercial attempts to manipulate nature arise in Jill Magid’s contribution. Magid explores the “Richards Function,” a mathematical model used to optimize the length of flower stems and coordinate their growth with the demands of the market. Her A Model for Chrysanthemum Stem Elongation where y is 52” (2023) stretches 52 inches high, the maximum height a chrysanthemum stem can reach and a measure that corresponds to the value of the flower. Drawn in neon lights, the sculpture’s glaringly unnatural medium reinforces the artificiality of the cut flower market.

The prominent inclusion of hands in two of the show’s works remind us that whatever they symbolize, gardens require tending. Cathy Lu’s Nuwa (Gold) (2023) is a porcelain sculpture of arms stretching upward, based on the mother goddess Nuwa of Chinese mythology. The figure is punctuated with holes holding tiny grape stems, a nod to the role Chinese immigrants played in cultivating vineyards in California’s Sonoma Valley. Kelly Akashi’s Life Forms (Labellum) (2023) has the artist’s own hands cast in bronze, cradling a glass orchid. Blowing glass, Akashi literally breathes life into her art, emphasizing the reciprocity between body and ground that gardening requires.

The Aldrich’s wooded surrounds are part of a long history of colonialism—Ridgefield was the site of a number of Revolutionary War skirmishes and is on the ancestral homelands of Wappinger and Munsee Lenape Peoples—and the exhibition thoughtfully critiques some enduring colonial orientations to the environment. Yet none of this show’s social commentary contradicts the idea that a garden is so often site of pleasure. The works on view are materially lush and visually resplendent, delighting in the possibilities for color and texture that nature affords.

This meeting point of pleasure and critique arrives at an unstable climax in Brandon Ndife’s Shade Tree (2022/2024). Ndife cast an array of domestic furniture in matte gray polyurethane resin and arranged it invitingly in the museum’s garden. Upon approach, however, the sculptures contain a number of unsettling assemblages, with what look to be heavy wooden tabletops resting on collapsible camp chairs. The shade trees of the title refer to the environmental inequities of urban landscapes that are often hotter than shaded, suburban enclaves; tellingly, despite the propensity of trees around the Aldrich grounds, the sculptures sit in the open lawn, exposed to the elements. Ndife’s work is like a garden in that it seems familiar, yet is full of layered histories. To return to Hunt’s terms, it is sophisticated, deliberate, and complex.

THE DREAM OF TEACHING: take students to a museum, put them in front of a great work of art, have them describe what they see, and in so doing, discover that greatness for themselves. Rarely, many a museum educator will share, is this what happens. We arrive before the work of art riddled with biases, assumptions, presumed knowledge, and conditioned patterns of viewing, all of which make it tremendously difficult to see what is right in front of us.

This is the problem Albert Barnes was contending with when he founded his museum and educational institute in Marien, Pennsylvania, in 1922. The baggage visitors brought to the art in his collection included a conservative resistance to the avant-garde, yes, but even more than that, they brought with them the widespread racism of early 20th-century America.

Today, the Barnes Collection is best known for its lush Renoirs and joyous Matisse mural; Barnes acquired his collection at a time when Monet still looked radical to most Americans. But he was also one of the earliest United States collectors to exhibit African objects as art. And famously, he took a formalist approach to displaying his collection, selecting and grouping works not by chronology or context but by visual elements like color and shape.

At the Barnes Collection, relocated to a new building in downtown Philadelphia in 2012 against its founder’s wishes, these “ensembles,” as the foundation calls his groupings of artworks, have been meticulously re-created. The arrangement provides one of the most singular experiences of art viewing in museums today, juxtaposing work made in distinct eras, places, and media. In theory, such an approach would de-hierarchize a historically elitist field and welcome new makers and modes of representation.

In his new biography of Barnes, Blake Gopnik foregrounds this democratic ethos, focusing specifically on the philanthropist’s contributions to building racial equality—despite Barnes’s notoriously cantankerous personality and his tendency toward invective and slur. Barnes’s support for Black culture extended beyond his collection. He made a point of hiring African American workers for his factory and paying them a fair wage, invested in the Black magazine Opportunity, and eventually partnered in his foundation with the historically Black Lincoln University.

GOPNIK OPENS HIS BOOK, The Maverick’s Museum: Albert Barnes and His American Dream, at a 1924 banquet at the Civic Club in Harlem. The event is often invoked as one of the founding moments in the Harlem Renaissance, gathering together more than 100 writers, publishers, and editors, from the renowned intellectual W.E.B. Du Bois to the young poet Gwendolyn Bennett. The guest list deliberately included white supporters of Black creativity; Barnes was in attendance. Gopnik describes the arrival in an indigo-blue Packard sedan of “an ox of a man in a double-breasted greatcoat and fedora.” Barnes loved to make an entrance, and he thrilled at being one of the few white attendees able to speak to the aesthetic qualities of African art.

Not just speak to, but show off, as he declared: “I have in my house ample proof in the works of these moderns that much of their inspiration came from ancient [Black] art.” This overture may come as a surprise to those readers who know Barnes for his widely beloved collection of French painting. I suspect part of Gopnik’s goal is to produce such surprise, to make us see Barnes in a new way.

But the move also speaks to the role African art played in French modernism, from Picasso’s Cubist forms to Modigliani’s masklike portraits. And it underscores how difficult it is to chart those always asymmetrical relationships between the African artists who inspired and the European artists who appropriated them.

Barnes saw himself as “elevating” what were often ritualistic objects to the status of “art,” but theorists like Walter Mignolo point out how this kind of thinking still relies on a hierarchy bound up with the explicit and implied violence of coloniality. Many of the African objects European artists were exposed to were stolen or looted, their very presence in Europe made possible by way of an imperial infrastructure of transit.

Gopnik does not try to absolve his subject from the prevailing prejudices of his time; he admits Barnes was operating, using 21st-century parlance, with a “white-savior complex,” that Barnes cast African cultures as primitive, and also manipulated support for Black communities in pursuit of his own ends. Barnes, for example, balked at a proposal for the construction of 126 small houses adjacent to his foundation in Merion that he saw as detracting from his stately property, and made threats to discourage the zoning commission.

In navigating Barnes’s approach to African art, Gopnik relies heavily on the scholarship of Alison Boyd, author of a dissertation on Barnes and the director of research and interpretation at the Barnes Collection. Boyd argues that though Barnes appreciated African art, he was ultimately unable to see it as modern. Boyd’s appointment is an example of the Foundation’s willingness to question its founder’s legacy, as is their recent commission of a film by Isaac Julien. To celebrate the institution’s centennial in 2022, an exhibition debuted Julien’s five-screen installation Once Again … (Statues Never Die); the work was also included in last year’s Whitney Biennial. The film stages a conversation between Barnes and the quintessential Harlem Renaissance philosopher Alain Locke, the exchange based on actual correspondence between the two men. Speaking in the museum’s galleries, both meditate on the role African culture played in the history of art, and the ways art might champion African identity.

The film also deals with the ethics of holding African objects in Western museums at all. It includes views of the Pitt Rivers Museum, a notorious repository of looted objects (some recently returned). Julien draws connections between the violence of the past and artmaking in the present. In the film, we see the 20th-century African American sculptor Richmond Barthé at work on Black sculptural bodies in an atelier filled with neoclassical plaster casts; Barthé’s sculptures were exhibited as part of Julien’s installation. A song cowritten and performed by Alice Smith layered throughout the film speaks to restitution not as a question of righting past wrongs but of restoring future possibilities. Ultimately, Julien leaves open the matter of how museums might reckon with their often fraught inheritance.

THE BARNES WHO FEATURES in Julien’s film shares much with the character Gopnik offers, not least his strident tone and seeming inability to listen. When he could have been comfortable enough to relax and enjoy his collection, he remained restless and argumentative. Barnes, a chemist, made his fortune with a new formulation for an antiseptic that became widespread in treating gonorrhea. He developed that product, Argyrol, with his business partner, chemist Herman Hille. The two later parted ways, in part because Hille (accurately) accused Barnes of bribing doctors to plug their products.

Gopnik recounts numerous spats between Barnes and his sometimes friends, entertaining episodes that leave the reader feeling a sense of tedium with a man who seems to work constantly against his own best interests. It is relevant to Gopnik’s story about a “maverick’s” pursuit of the American dream that Barnes was born poor, that he had to fight for what he wanted from the start, and that he carried throughout his life a sense of his status as an outsider despite his growing fortune.

One friend Barnes seems never to have strayed from was the pragmatist philosopher John Dewey. The two met when Barnes took Dewey’s graduate seminar at Columbia in 1917 and maintained a friendship for 35 years. Dewey’s progressive approach to education provided the basis for the educational program Barnes developed, bolstering Barnes’s own interest in creating a democratic environment for learning. The philosopher dedicated his 1934 book Art as Experience to Barnes, suggesting the relationship was to some degree reciprocal, though the $5,000-a-year stipend Barnes arranged for Dewey likely helped.

Barnes first tested Dewey’s pedagogical ideas on his factory workers, engaging them in weekly seminars to look at art and discuss philosophical texts. Once he established his foundation, Barnes initially hoped those workers who had become most interested in his art would be the guides to the collection: Those few burgeoning art lovers “will take the others of our workers into the Foundation a couple of times a week and each will describe his own honest reactions to what he sees.” Rather than a top-down approach to art education, the “Barnes Method” relied on individual self-determination, making the museum, in its founder’s words, “nothing but a place where people can see for themselves.”

Barnes elaborated his method in thousands of published pages and trained select appointees to teach it. And yet, Barnes seemed rarely to have appreciated what anyone else saw in his collection. Reputedly, he hovered behind visitors and ejected them from the museum if they said something he didn’t like—this, assuming they were admitted at all. Barnes required interested parties to write to request admission, and many aspiring admirers were refused. Gopnik cites a critic who described the rigorous admissions process: “There are formalities to be undergone, records to be looked into. The Pope, sitting on his throne in the Vatican, is much less careful for his most holy toe than is Dr. Albert Barnes for his hundred and twenty Renoirs and his two and forty Soutines.”

The stakes were high for Barnes. His ultimate goal was not to cultivate a world of art lovers. He had in mind something much grander: the making of a richer and fuller American life. That he saw art as the path to a better world is admirable; that he controlled the interpretation and experience of that art so rigidly, less so. Regardless, his work is testament to a belief that would seem quaint, if it didn’t also seem so desperately necessary—that art, in Gopnik’s words, can “do real work in the world.” If only those in power would let it. 

Literally sent from the raging fires in Los Angeles, “Breath(e): Toward Climate and Social Justice” just arrived at the Moody Center for the Arts at Rice University. Organized by the Hammer Museum, it is on view in Houston through May 10. That a show about climate change would flee LA under such duress might seem uncanny if disaster wasn’t becoming so terrifyingly commonplace.

The exhibition, however, veers clear of outright terror; there’s enough of that in the news. Instead, 14 resoundingly smart artists experiment with solutions, some of them literal, as with Xin Liu’s work with a solvent capable of dissolving plastic. Others are speculative, as in Cannupa Hanska Luger’s sculptural installation of looming Indigenous space travelers clad in protective gear made from recycled materials, nomads surviving in a hostile environment.

The show was adapted to Houston’s local climate, with works attending to the particularities of the Gulf Coast landscape and to the city’s role as the so-called energy capital of the world. Liu is using the solvent—developed in a Rice lab—to slowly degrade 3D-printed models of downtown Houston and the Rice campus. Luger’s figures are backed by a threaded horizon line that replicates Houston’s low-lying topography, and accompanied by a video featuring the oaks outside the Moody, connecting the here and now to the future possibilities his work conjures.

Brandon Ballengée’s “MIA” series (2020), including MIA Black Driftfish, MIA Redface Moray Eel, and other missing species, addresses the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill still palpable in Gulf waters. Ballengée, who is also a scientist, identified 14 endemic fish species that have not been sighted since the disaster. He then painted them in crude oil collected from both Deepwater Horizon and the Taylor Energy oil spill, still ongoing off the coast of Louisiana. To make the oil malleable, he had to mix in Corexit, the same chemical dispersant BP used to clean up the 134 million gallons it spilled in the Gulf. Arguably, this substance is as toxic as the oil itself. So to prevent off gassing of the works’ noxious media, Ballengée sealed his “ghost species” between sheets of glass.

Suspended like the specimens collected in natural history museums, the fish are now artifacts of human as much as natural history. Ballengée combines his artistic practice with outreach initiatives hoping to start conversations, which have proven fruitful. He has located at least two of the missing species through collaboration with people who live and work in the Gulf.

More ghostly still is Clarissa Tossin’s Rising Temperature Casualty (Prunus persica, home garden, Los Angeles), 2022. A silicone cast of a peach tree from her garden that failed to survive Los Angeles’s heat and drought hangs upside down from the ceiling, with bits of delicate bark clinging to its limp branches. Its inert form provides the exhibition’s most somber, mournful note.

The fear and guilt saturating our media landscape, so many climate activists and educators have argued, are not conducive to action and change. What’s needed, Jennifer Atkinson and Sarah Jaquette Ray write in The Existential Toolkit for the Climate Crisis: How to Teach in a Burning World (2024), are community and care. That is why Mel Chin chose not to engage directly with environmental issues in his work for the show: he claimed that empathy had to precede action. He instead organized an open call for volunteers to share transformative moments from their lives in listening sessions. Chin worked with the volunteers to visualize their stories and the metaphysical resonance they held in simple oil on steel paintings. Modeled on retablos, the project brought a devotional quality to the act of listening, offering both a practical and a persuasive step toward building the solidarities necessary for meaningful change.

Hope, Rebecca Solnit has written, is the belief that what we do matters. It comes from the realization that not only is another world possible, but that it’s already here. LaToya Ruby Frazier’s contribution shows us this other world, driven by goodness rather than greed. Her “Flint is Family” photographs (2016–22) depict the community affected by the famed Flint water crisis. The third and final act of the series is on view at the Moody: it documents the contributions of Moses West, the engineer responsible for an atmospheric water generator that provided safe, clean, and free water to Flint by collecting condensation from the air. The photographs show moments of exuberant relief as residents worked together to distribute the water. The pictures stand as proof that in the wake of disaster, there are people who will still prioritize generosity, resourcefulness, and altruism—something to hold on to as the disasters keep coming.

Mark Dion, an artist who has long worked with archives as a motif, recently established one of his own. The work, titled Mrs. Christopher’s House (2024), is one of four houses comprising the Troy Hill Art Houses in Pittsburgh; each residence constitutes a single work of art. Dion’s name is bringing new attention to the project that, since 2013, has remained discreet, with little to visually distinguish the “art houses” from other homes in the neighborhood.

Inside, Dion finds a permanent home in which to gather a number of his signature strategies, especially his engagement with the ordering and arrangement of collections ranging from the natural historical to the truly eclectic. Almost all the displays can be traced to past exhibitions. An attic filled with hundreds of small boxes, available to the visitor to open and peruse, harkens back to Memory Box (2015). A 2012 installation in New York’s Explorer’s Club becomes Pittsburgh’s own “Extinction Club”—visitors are made members upon entering the small room, where they are invited to sit down in the clubby chairs among half-smoked cigars and illustrations of extinct species papering the walls. A taxidermied bear was brought from Dion’s work at Storm King Art Center (2019).

Even an office is labeled with the title of one of his volumes, Bureau of the Centre for the Study of Surrealism And Its Legacy (2005). Here and throughout Dion’s work, the real and the fictional blur. Taxonomic charts on the walls borrow the aesthetic of science but are populated with terms from the history of art and absurd twists: a bird is labeled with the names of 20th-century avant-garde movements, a shark is juxtaposed with a rolling pin and a cola bottle.

In the project’s self-referentiality, the way it archives Dion’s own career, Mrs. Christopher’s House echoes the concerns of another Troy Hill Art House, that of the Polish artist Robert Kuśmirowski. In Kunzhaus, Kuśmirowski combines excerpts from his exhibition history with the history of the house’s past inhabitants, namely the Kunz family who rented rooms in the building beginning in the late 19th century. (Dion’s own project is likewise named after his house’s most well-known inhabitant).

Kuśmirowski’s practice engages Cold War legacies and retrofuturism, two aesthetics that today have a decidedly nostalgic feel at home in this domestic environment. Think a basement filled with transistor radiators and darkroom equipment, and a kitchen-cum-science lab, with text-based computer systems installed on countertops and coils of recording tape retrofitted into an electric stove. The ties to history here are evocative but thin, loose gestures at lost pasts. The same can be said for Darkhouse, Lighthouse, in which Lenka Clayton and Phillip Andrew Lewis reflect on a far more distant past—the Mesoproterozoic-era inland sea where the city of Pittsburgh now stands.

All of the Troy Hill Art Houses are filled with thrifted and gathered things, found objects that retain their own histories even as they are incorporated into fictional new ones. The first to be constructed, Thorsten Brinkmann’s La Hütte Royale (2013), made liberal use of Pittsburgh’s Construction Junction, a reuse shop that yielded such treasures as a massive bronze bell, standing in the entryway as a surrealist doorbell. Though the houses differ wildly, they share what the critic and art historian Hal Foster has called the “archival impulse.” Like actual archives, the installations are subject to entropy, their records wearing away—literally in the case of Brinkmann’s, where vinyl records set spinning for the past 12 years are worn down to emit only a wheezing gasp of sound.

Moving through the spaces, I found myself tempted to try and piece together clues, to puzzle out relationships between things. In alluding to history without providing a secure narrative, the installations put the visitor in the position of the historian, wading through the available records and trying to construct some plausible version of truth out of the many interpretive possibilities.

Destabilizing truth once felt like a revolutionary tactic, and later a fashionable theoretical move; today it is a dangerous political strategy. Training the visitor in discernment, then, becomes a political project of its own. The exercise is sometimes overly literal: Kuśmirowski’s house includes two mirrored rooms identically furnished, the visitor challenged to identify subtle differences between them. It is also sometimes overwhelming, as in Dion’s hundreds of treasure-filled boxes. But the feeling of overwhelm is worth sitting with, as increasingly, we outsource the task of sifting through large quantities of information to machines. In the Art Houses, where data is material and experiential, looking closely and carefully is presented as a profoundly human, urgently essential task.

In some of her later still lives, the painter Tamara de Lempicka signed her name on a trompe l’oeil scrap of paper, small slips whose curled edges seem to peel away from the painting’s surface. A common trope in Golden Age Dutch vanitas scenes, the convention at once indicates Lempicka’s affinity with the history of painting and serves as a reminder that the artist wore her identity lightly. Born, as new research reveals, Tamara Rosa Hurwitz-Gorska in 1894, Lempicka identified variously as Monsieur Lempitzky, Tamara de Lempicka, and Baroness Kuffner, changing it up as her career and social status shifted. This adaptability first anonymized her femaleness and later foregrounded her rising rank once she married a Baron. More than a changing name, her willingness to shift herself to suit the times was crucial to Lempicka’s success and survival in a period of dramatic historical shifts, especially at the height of her career in the années folles of 1920s Paris.

Lempicka’s personal life is at the forefront of the revived and booming interest in her work, which includes a feature-length documentary (The True Story of Tamara De Lempicka & the Art of Survival), a Broadway musical (Lempicka), and the artist’s first major US museum retrospective, open now at San Francisco’s de Young museum and traveling to Houston in the spring.

The exhibition opens with a photograph of the artist herself, the picture of glamor in a dark lip, roller set curls, and tilted beret. Lempicka’s biography provides plenty of fodder for intrigue. She helped her first husband to escape Russian imprisonment in the wake of the 1917 Revolution, fled St. Petersburg for Paris and later Hollywood, and painted seductive images of lovers both male and female.

Lempicka studied drawing in the studio of André Lhote where, after some early forays into Cubism and abstraction, she developed a clarity of line and a voluptuous attention to the nude figure. She declared herself the painter of Art Deco, and that movement’s shimmering surface effects accord with both her personality and style. As a portraitist, Lempicka employed a high-contrast technique that transformed her sitters into sculptural objects—or transformed sculpture into paint, as in a 1930 study of Bernini’s Ecstasy of St Theresa. Her work, cool and tonal, lent itself well to reproduction, and she appeared regularly on the cover of the German magazine Die Dame. An icon of Europe’s “new woman,” Die Dame was aimed at stylish and independent figures like Lempicka herself; the magazine too was recently and briefly revived by the art collector and publisher Christian Boros.

Why Lempicka now? The recent documentary suggests the show is part of an ongoing reckoning in the museum world with the limitations of a largely white, male canon of art history. Lempicka offers a compelling female heroine, one who painted strong women existing beyond the male gaze. Yet there are more specific ways Lempicka sheds light on our present moment. In the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic, before it became clear how long it would last, and how badly it would exacerbate systemic injustices, there was a sense that the world might emerge into another roaring ’20s, a period of release and collective celebration. On one level, Lempicka’s work shows us what this could have looked like: soaring skyscrapers, slinky dresses, fast cars, free love.

The 1920s, of course, were not all that great, and they were certainly not great for everyone—not least for Lempicka, who despite all the apparent glamor and success was struggling with a failing marriage, with raising a child without being saddled with the career-stifling label “mother,” with the looming threat of fascism in Europe. For a 1928 painting, she cloaked her daughter Kizette in a billowing white Communion gown, a guise intended to conceal her Jewish lineage that suggests Lempicka was well aware of the need to dissimulate her origins given the political climate. In 1929 she set sail for America, arriving, in her telling, at the very moment of the stock market crash and losing much of her wealth in the process.

The duplicity of the times is there in her paintings, in the hard-edged shadows and in the way the body becomes a machine, with conical breasts and curls like carved metal. Even her most sensuous works are all polished, impenetrable surfaces, as in La Belle Rafaëla (1927), absent body hair or a belly button. The hardened figures who inhabit Lempicka’s canvases seem to embody lines taken from her lover Ira Perrot’s poetry: “White, black, gray is their kingdom of stone / their reign is the reign of hard minerals / their soul colder than cold stone / the icy gaze of their opal eyes.” Words for survival in another twenties tinged with darkness.

Olafur Eliasson’s survey “Your Curious Journey” announces the artist’s environmentalist priorities in the opening work: a series of before-and-after photographs of Icelandic glaciers titled “The Glacier Melt Series 1999/2019.” Images taken in 1999 and 2019 are displayed side-by-side in the exhibition, organized by the Singapore Art Museum and traveling around Southeast Asia and New Zealand through 2026. The paired images, arranged in a grid, reveal substantial loss of glacial ice over time.

Eliasson has committed his practice to raising climate awareness since the 1990s. The most famous example is his 2014 project Ice Watch, which saw chunks of icebergs harvested from a fjord, then spectacularly installed in European capitals, where locals watched them melt. Here, as in The Glacier Melt Series, viewers were made to witness effects of climate change that can feel distant or hard to see.

But where Ice Watch generated the kind of participatory engagement for which Eliasson is known, with visitors touching the ice and moving around and through it, The Glacier Melt Series reads like a geography textbook. The succession of 30 comparisons is relentlessly didactic, leaving little room for affect or interpretation. And perhaps this is part of Eliasson’s point: there should be no bones about climate change.

Still, it’s hard to reconcile this work with the erratic delight of Ventilator (1997) hanging nearby. An electric fan moves of its own accord, making swooping arcs through the gallery. Ventilator speaks to the constantly shifting dynamics of intentions and consequences: Its motorized function was initiated by human action, but its subsequent movement is propelled by forces beyond the artist’s control. Tracking the fan’s unpredictable trajectory generates an experience that is closer to what it is to live with climate change, rather than to look at it as a before and after, a fait accompli.

Such static qualities also characterize one of the show’s newest pieces, The Last Seven Days of Glacial Ice (2024). In this sculpture, the ice has no chance of melting, as it has been rendered in bronze. Based on the dissolution of an ice block Eliasson recovered from the south of Iceland (he was raised in Denmark by Icelandic parents), each of seven successively smaller bronze casts is paired with a glass orb representing the volume of water lost. The bronze aligns the piece with classical sculpture, making the work a monument, the iceberg, something of the past to contemplate from a distance. The die has been cast; little remains for the viewer to do.

The Last Seven Days turns water into glass, something fixed and hard. Beauty (1993), by contrast, expands water’s perceptual resonance in ways that invite engagement and marvel. Gently falling mist combines with projected light and the viewer’s perception to create an ethereal rainbow.

Lasers and fog comprise Symbiotic Seeing (2020), on an upper floor in the Singapore Art Museum stop, and together generate an ever-changing cloudscape, supposedly attuned to the moving heat of the viewer’s body. I tried and failed to find the interactive component of the swirling mist; there, in the darkened space of the installation, the glaciers are far from view. The same can be said for Eliasson’s new work at the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, where a major exhibition devoted to the artist (as part of PST ART: Art & Science Collide) focuses entirely on the optical distortions of kaleidoscopic sculpture. Delight as they may, what I crave is an art that will connect the pleasures of this world with its perils, without diminishing either.

In his best work, Eliasson finds this sweet spot. It appears in a glimpse into the artist’s studio, as part of Movement Microscope (2011). The 16-minute video introduces elements of dance into the labors of everyday life, a subtle interruption of routine that heightens attention to happenstance. We see the work of design and fabrication, but also the wonder of a shared meal, produced by Eliasson’s renowned studio kitchen and sourced in part from an on-site garden. That moment of connection between the small and the grand, the sensory and the social, the local meal and the global conditions impacting its ingredients, felt like the bridge I was missing between so many of the other pieces.

Some of the paradoxes that inhabit Eliasson’s recent work find clear form in Adrift Compass (2019), its title an apparent oxymoron. Compasses should orient us, giving us purpose and direction. This one, made of driftwood, points north, but in the darkness of the gallery, cut off from the outside world, it does indeed leave us adrift. Knowing where to go is not the same as generating movement, just as recognizing the effects of climate change is not the same as stopping it. Eliasson’s recent and more spectacular work may be the product of this frustration, of seeing so clearly the change that has come and yet feeling so acutely our inability to respond.