At first glance, the ICA Miami’s sunny, second-floor galleries offer some jarringly eclectic views: Unpainted found wood is paired with monochromatic prints, and oversized triptychs butt up against unvarnished planks with industrial hinges. These are all the work of one artist, Mildred Thompson (1936–2003), whose recent exhibitions have worked around her wide stylistic variance by focusing on a single period in her life, as in the memorable 2018 wood-focused show “Against the Grain” at the New Orleans Museum of Art. This first comprehensive retrospective boldly links disparate styles and techniques across five decades.

Thompson’s identities were as complex as her oeuvre, and this exhibition, titled “Frequencies,” acknowledges her artistic evolution as she pursued education and audiences while moving back and forth between the United States and Germany. The eclecticism that risks being jarring turns out to be the show’s strength: It extends Thompson the courtesy to be complex, a courtesy not often afforded artists from marginalized groups. Indeed, though exhibition didactics address Thompson’s life as a queer Black woman, it is her artwork that drives the narrative, not her identities.

Across 49 pieces sourced from the artist’s estate in Atlanta and Galerie Lelong & Co.—the first gallery ever to represent her, starting 14 years after her death—the show expands her visibility following the 2017 “Magnetic Fields” exhibition at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C., that reevaluated several overlooked Black abstractionists.

“Frequencies” features five groupings that balance a chronological progression with formal relations. The earliest works are a pair of 1959 etchings Thompson made in Germany as the first Black female student at the Hamburg Hochschule für bildende Künste, which the Museum of Modern Art acquired in 1963. The etchings avoid racializing their subjects, opting for fleshy forms, delicate eyelashes, and oversize hair, with stockings and high heels underlining the figures’ femininity. These are the only fully representational images in the show, highlighting Thompson’s strong proclivity for abstraction that grew in tandem with her interests in space, science, and spirituality.

Her formal affinities with the German Expressionists are evident, presumably inspired by her instructors and social circles from Hamburg; the didactics mention Emil Schumacher, Paul Wunderlich, and Horst Janssen in particular. The curator also points out that Thompson met Louise Nevelson in New York, ostensibly inspiring some of Thompson’s wood assemblages created from found materials in the 1960s and ’70s, when she resided in rural West Germany and traveled throughout Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East. She steered clear of the US due to the tangible racism she faced there as a Black artist: One gallerist even suggested she find a white artist to front for her if she sought an audience and commercial success. Thompson’s expatriate period is largely represented in “Frequencies” by way of these sumptuous wood constructions in two and three dimensions, notably, the humble Stele (ca. 1963) with its stacked squares sporadically punctuated with orange, blue, and red. Another standout is the graceful Wooden Picture (ca. 1972) whose slats transition from vertical to chevron to reveal an inner skin of purple.

When Thompson moved back to the US in 1974 for an NEA-funded artist residency with the city of Tampa, she declared “America has changed. I am ready now for America and I am eager to see if America is really ready for me,” going on to describe her birth country as an on-again, off-again lover. Her “Window” series from 1977 is the first body of work she created after repatriating. Bold stripes and stacked blocks offer a view through parted curtains and raised blinds of the American landscape—physical and social—that Thompson was giving a second chance. The artist’s abstraction matured further in her intaglio print series “Death and Orgasm” (originally made in 1978, shown here as a 1991 edition reprinted with master printer Robert Blackburn). The works’ individual titles make gripping references to spiritual practices, mythical sites, and heavenly journeys: Ascension, Mandala, Montsolva, Mulbris I, Variation of Mulbris I, and Saturnalia. Representing experiences just beyond the visible world, these amorphous forms undulate and climb, almost composing a face or a countryside or a celestial body. Mulbris I especially is gorgeously composed: The top half of the image is free of ink, its tonality conveyed instead by a pillowy embossed form.

By the 1980s, Thompson was preoccupied with new research on Einstein and quantum physics during short teaching stints in Paris before relocating permanently to Atlanta. In Georgia, she taught at Spelman and Morehouse Colleges, Atlanta College of Art, and Atlanta University. Only a quartet of watercolors represents this period: While three are untitled, Pleiades III signals Thompson’s shift to exploring the universal—whether at the macro level of galaxies, or the micro level of molecules and quarks.

The final two galleries feature a suite of outsize paintings for which the artist is most well-known. In the larger gallery, two “String Theory” pieces evoke the staccato brushstrokes of Alma Thomas with compositions that are far more engaging than those in Thompson’s relatively subdued “Heliocentric” series from 1993. The second gallery features the show’s standout installation, Music of the Spheres (1996), which permits the viewer to stand at the center of Thompson’s universe. These impactful tableaux representing Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Mercury are paired with the artist’s sonic vision for the planets, with sound emanating from speakers behind each painting, giving the impression of music pouring from each celestial body. Inspired by the NASA Voyager recordings, Thompson composed a soundscape for each painting, incredibly synthesizing early music software with musical instruments and even sounds from children’s toys. This is but a glimpse into her ability to work across media: She also published at least one children’s book and played in a blues band with her partner in Atlanta.

As Thompson’s first major retrospective, “Frequencies” succeeds in loosely threading together the abstraction in her distinct shifts across the decades, letting an expansive body of work feel complex and cohesive at the same time. While most of the larger paintings—specifically the “Heliocentric” series—are not particularly interesting individually for their simple compositions, the overwhelming scale and color repeated across the final two galleries are nevertheless compelling for the universe they create together. But Thompson’s universe was bigger than the show acknowledges: Though wall labels note her cosmopolitan life spent between Germany and the US, they neglect her time in Africa and the Middle East. The verticality and thin-limbed bodies in her “Vespers” series show clear references to West African popular sculpture, and key moments of Thompson’s life—like her romantic and professional relationship with Audre Lorde—trace back to her 1977 participation in FESTAC, the Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture, held in Lagos. Should the ICA find future venues or develop a publication from the exhibition (which this critic would fully support), shoring up some of these biographic touchpoints would more honestly situate the particular and the personal notes of Thompson’s reach, as we reconsider the universal in our narratives of mid- to late 20th-century abstraction.

“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.

Lauren O’Neill-Butler portrays the ten well-researched case studies that comprise her book on artistic activism, The War of Art: A History of Artists’ Protests in America, as qualified successes. The working class late 1960s Women Artists in Revolution group, for example, had a formative influence on the more renowned Art Workers’ Coalition, though the former’s emphasis on women-only spaces at times risked becoming, in Adrienne Rich’s words, “an end in itself.” The 1970s Black Emergency Cultural Coalition pioneered prison arts programs more humane than many of today’s versions, yet the group didn’t prioritize feminist concerns. The prominence of artist Rick Lowe’s 1990s Houston social sculpture, Project Row Houses, accidentally ushered in gentrification during the ensuing decades. Which is all to say that even when activist artworks manage to effect change, there are caveats.

O’Neill-Butler’s caveats establish the critic as a fair-minded chronicler of an artistic mode that can attract Pollyannaish claims regarding its impact. She states up front: “my argument is not that artists are the solution” to the “various ills of society.” “What I aim to show,” she continues, “is that they have motivated change and left a major mark.”

But this measured approach raises the question: why do artists persist in mobilizing art for protest when the odds are low their efforts will have substantial effects? An artistic intervention into a systematic problem can feel like putting a fresh coat of paint on a car whose check engine light is on. Here a picture emerges from the book, which covers the post–Civil Rights era: politically inclined artists recognize that their work may have long odds or limited agency, but they also recognize that change is necessary when conditions are trying. So they respond using the tools they know best.

Consider the prescient guerrilla media collective Top Value Television (TVTV), whose citizen journalism documented the 1972 Democratic and Republican conventions, during a contentious wartime US Presidential election. Their films, The World’s Largest TV Studio and Four More Years (both 1972), were broadcast across the country soon after the conventions and showcased vernacular perspectives unavailable in contemporary network journalism. O’Neill-Butler explains TVTV’s techno-utopic hope that “in the future everyone might have access to a portable video camera and that the resultant proliferation of images would quickly change hearts and minds,” but concludes with a dark caveat: “TVTV essentially paved the way for today’s deluge of verité footage on social media,” even if the group “could never have imagined the outcome.”

This fascinating cross-era comparison highlights both the value and the limitations of The War of Art’s case-study structure. The book set out to connect the flurry of 2010s US artistic activism, which resulted in developments such as the New Museum’s staff unionization and Warren B. Kanders’ resignation from the Whitney Museum’s board, with that activism’s art historical antecedents. As the case studies unfold, the overarching theme becomes the ways that successive generations of artist-activists “sit on the shoulders of their chosen ancestors.” In consecutive chapters about two queer 1990s New York City collectives, fierce pussy and Dyke Action Machine!, O’Neill-Butler observes how their respective wheat-pasted poster campaigns not only prefigured New Red Order’s 2020s Indigenous agitprop but also drew on aesthetic tactics from the 1980s AIDS activist group ACT UP, which itself drew on 1960s and 70s civil rights and feminist movement tactics.

Yet O’Neill-Butler’s historical comparisons rarely delve into wherefores and whys. Instead, she seems content simply to point out how the formal tactics of one movement parallel those of another, sidestepping their differences in context. And she remains unwilling to theorize or define activist art. In the introduction, she contends, “it is generally not helpful to offer strict definitions of activism aside from that it is always a means to an end.” Instead, she believes that “the best way to answer these questions is not through theory or evaluative tools, but through case studies.” But the choice isn’t inherently either-or, as if theory and history were oil and water. Her reluctance to draw conclusions feel like missed opportunities to spell out takeaways from her research, given the considerable legwork she’s done. Potential caveats to her own project thus go unexplored, as when she asks, but doesn’t answer, if recent artists have “normalized” or “instrumentalized” the term “activist.”

Take, for instance, the separate chapters on ACT UP and on the artist Nan Goldin’s late 2010s Prescription Addiction Intervention Now (P.A.I.N.) organization, which serve as the book’s opening and closing case studies respectively. In the former, O’Neill-Butler describes an iconic 1988 protest photograph of artist David Wojnarowicz, recently diagnosed with HIV, wearing a jacket that says: “IF I DIE OF AIDS—FORGET BURIAL—JUST DROP MY BODY ON THE STEPS OF THE FDA.” She views the jacket’s text and other ACT UP slogans, such as “Silence=Death,” as examples of what she calls activist art’s “take, copy, distribute” logic. But when, in the final chapter, she describes the “direct cue[s]” that P.A.I.N. took from “ACT UP’s media-savvy actions”— “speak[ing] through the media, not to the media”; staging die-ins—she stops short of considering the two eras’ dramatically different media environments. In the 2010s, the question wasn’t whether activist organizations spoke “through” or “to” traditional media outlets but how cannily they spoke outside them, using social media to parlay viral attention into institutional credibility.

In the TVTV chapter, O’Neill-Butler invokes artist Tania Bruguera’s concept of “political-timing-specific art” and quotes sociologist Stuart Hall on how such interventions can expose a culture’s “political, economic, and ideological contradictions.” The War of Art’s timing as a book inadvertently reveals similar tensions in our own artistic moment. The 2010s social media environment—which shaped so much recent discourse about the artistic activism that was this book’s impetus—looks quite different today, with many liberals retreating from X, and a general sense of fatigue with call outs and misinformation. Historical perspective is vital to understanding the present, and O’Neill-Butler does an excellent job chronicling recent artistic activism’s half-forgotten predecessors. But one moral of that history is to be careful what you wish for: even when it pans out, well-meaning citizen journalism or neighborhood revival art projects can have unintended downsides.

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.

For more than a decade, artist Hito Steyerl has been writing—in biting, playful prose—about how images, technology, and politics are all interlinked. Her newest book on the subject, Medium Hot: Images in the Age of Heat, out from Verso, throws her consistent through lines into relief, and brings forward inconsistencies in her thinking too.

Steyerl’s first book, The Wretched of the Screen (2013), was perhaps her most rousing. “Free Fall,” a standout essay therein, interrogates the European construction of linear perspective as a means for “enabling Western dominance,” then pivots to the increasing ubiquity of aerial perspective—a militaristic, surveilling way of seeing that “projects delusions of stability, safety, and extreme mastery.” Another essay, “Politics of Art: Contemporary Art and the Transition to Post-Democracy,” urges artists to examine the exploitative politics of the art world itself, such as its reliance on under- or unpaid labor.

The artist takes to related topics in her visual work too, sometimes treating the material with an unnerving absurdity. How Not to Be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV File (2013), one of her best-known works, navigates the question of invisibility in an increasingly surveilled world by satirizing the form of instructional video. Steyerl, the video’s protagonist, offers absurd suggestions for avoiding surveillance. Smearing chroma-key green makeup on her face, she “disappears” into the background; she also archly suggests being smaller than a pixel, being a woman over 50, and being a disappeared person as an enemy of the state. This jarring tonal contrast is emblematic of her work, the dissonance buffered by her focus on larger systems rather than specific scenarios.

Steyerl’s second book, Duty Free Art (2017), continues her project of highlighting how capital, exploitation, and art are intertwined, though it takes on a broader constellation of phenomena, including romance scams, freeport art storage, and the rise of fascism. Yet where in Wretched, the reader felt the keen glare of Steyerl’s concentration, in some of Duty Free Art’s essays, it’s hard to tell what’s fact or fiction, or just how serious Steyerl is about it all: As her international fame has risen, Steyerl has presented herself alternately as gadfly, critic, oracle of surfaces, and politically engaged artist. The opening anecdote in her 2014 essay “Proxy Politics: Signal and Noise”—about smartphone cameras using algorithms and scans from a user’s camera roll to “create” images—sounds fantastically interesting, jaw-dropping if true. But Steyerl’s description of the technology proves far more fanciful than the paper she cites.

These fabulations, paired with Steyerl’s gliding, affectless authorial voice, contribute to a sense of disorientation. Nevertheless, Steyerl topped ArtReview’s 2017 Power List as the most influential person in the art world for her “political statement-making and formal experimentation.” Her best work merges these aspects: Any viewer of How Not to Be Seen will surely consider their vulnerability to surveillance, and feel the futility of escape. In a 2023 interview, journalist Philip Oltermann asked her if she “saw art as a way to point a finger at social injustices, to educate people?” Steyerl replied with a decisive no, saying “it would be pointless if art worked like that. If you want to make a difference with art, which is a motive I perceive as questionable, then the single most stupid approach would be to tell people off.”

IN HER LATEST BOOK, Steyerl returns to her familiar territory of war and violent conflict, updated for the era of Web3, and this time she expresses her stance more decisively and simply than ever before. Steyerl herself has relied on AI before, using it to generate animations and graphics; her deep interest in—and intimate familiarity with—new technologies is part of what allows her to see their potential for exploitation. In Medium Hot, she comes down hard on the so-called promise of generative AI, cryptocurrency, and the AI-fueled accelerationist fantasies of Big Tech investors. It’s exciting to see Steyerl take such a definitive position; yet in doing so, the book exposes a core inconsistency of her practice, a puzzling political lacuna.

Steyerl’s primary critique is that the industry surrounding AI and Web3 uses enormous amounts of energy and is wildly exploitative not only of the environment, but of human “micro-workers,” remote laborers paid not in wages but in tiny gamified increments, dependent on completed tasks. Crypto mining has thrived on the edge of conflict zones—as it did in Kosovo until it was banned in 2022—where political instability combined with formerly socialist infrastructure contributed to cheap energy that could immediately be put into mining. All this energy must come from somewhere: Earth itself pays the cost.

The cheap labor essential to “artificial intelligence” feeds on the exploitative conditions generated by political and economic instability. Steyerl highlights the example of Kurdish women workers in northern Iraq, who are hired to do ghost work tagging images for self-driving cars. Women often take these jobs because the work can be done from home; for some of them, home is a refugee camp where they have lived for 10 years. The irony, Steyerl points out, is that “self-driving cars were being trained by people who, in many cases, had difficulties accessing affordable transport anywhere—let alone enjoying freedom of movement across borders.”

These critiques aren’t necessarily new, but they are urgent; many opponents of AI—or rather, of its unrestricted and irresponsible use—have cited its exploitation of microworkers and its environmental harm. Steyerl makes a more novel, if subtler point when she describes how crypto art is responsible for “onboarding” people to Web3, its infrastructure “creating a new stage of financialization defined by massive waste of energy and an enormous carbon footprint.”

The NFT bubble has popped, of course. But many people have bought into this new technological environment, with crypto wallets and ChatGPT on their phones. The end result, Steyerl speculates, probably won’t be the singularity, but something much less interesting: newer and more invasive ways of getting ripped off by tech companies. For now, many AI services—Google search summaries, ChatGPT—are free. But what will happen when users become dependent on them? They’ll likely charge for subscriptions, scraping consumers’ data only to sell it back to them.
All, of course, as the world burns.

The rapid rollout of various generative AI apps—like DALL-E, Midjourney, Stable Diffusion, and Sora—has been accompanied by a hype cycle of publicity. Artists, of course, know that generative AI isn’t worth the hype: The images these tools create are universally shitty slop, scraped together from previously existing internet detritus. Yet, Steyerl argues, the breathless publicity around generative AI and its so-called creative applications masks its true, and perhaps only, utility: as a tool of dominance and warfare. Autonomous weapons and AI-driven targeting have been part of the global war playbook since at least 2021, with both Ukraine and Gaza becoming, she writes, “laboratories for testing AI warfare, very often by Western arms makers looking for a robust and regulation-free R&D environment.”

AS IN NEARLY ALL Steyerl’s work, Medium Hot is concerned with what happens in conflict regions. The book cites interviews with Kurdish workers in refugee camps, as well as conversations with recent immigrants to Germany; she mentions both the wars happening in Gaza and Ukraine. Yet, for a writer so interested in the systemic causes of exploitation and suffering, she refrains here from expressing a stance on any given global conflict, an omission that creates a strange lacuna—a kind of weightlessness that destabilizes the text.

Calling wars and genocides “conflicts”—a word that appears 21 times in the book—makes it easier to talk about their roles in systems, but it also has an alienating effect. Shouldn’t one care about the causes and conditions of those conflicts? They are not inexorable acts of machinery, their conclusions already forgone.

Perhaps Steyerl’s avoidance of taking sides originates from a formative experience. Two decades ago, she made a short documentary titled November (2004) that features clips from a shoot-’em-up Western film Steyerl made with her close friend, Andrea Wolf, when they were both 17. Only the men, the bad guys, draw weapons in the film; the women fight with their bare hands. These clips of fake violence are juxtaposed against found footage: In the 1990s, Wolf went underground to join the Kurdish Worker’s Party, or PKK. She was killed in 1998, possibly executed by the Turkish government. Wolf was made a martyr; November includes footage of protesters on the street carrying posters depicting her face.

The film, like the rest of Steyerl’s work, avoids neat narrative, yet it is profoundly about disillusionment—with armed resistance, with the hero’s righteous violence. The revolutionary desire that led Wolf to join
the PKK ended with her lying dead on a dusty road, though according to the German government, she is not dead—but merely disappeared. Steyerl acknowledges Germany’s support of the Turkish army; in her narration, she also notes that the PKK itself has committed violent crimes, including killing civilians. Clips show pro-Kurdish protests in Germany, one scene featuring a man declaring via microphone: “It is German tanks that are bulldozing Kurdish villages.”

In 2019 Steyerl protested in solidarity with Kurdish liberation, staging a performance, Women for Rojava, with three other artists. She called for Germany to stop show-ing her work “as part of its external cultural diplomacy,” continuing, “I am sick of my work being deployed to detract attention from the German state’s tacit agreement with displacement, ethnic cleansing, and warfare, and to lend it an aura of tolerance and inclusivity.” It’s impossible not to draw parallels between then and now, as US-made and German arms rain down on Palestinian refugee camps.

But Steyerl doesn’t. Though she has consistently—if with some affective distance—positioned herself as a champion of class solidarity and of the oppressed and exploited, she spoke scathingly last spring of pro-Palestinian activists who have been critical of Israel, whom she accused of enlisting “art as social media performance.” She has also critiqued the “English-language academic bubble” for, in her eyes, failing to fully comprehend Germany’s history and its commitment to defend against what it perceives to be anti-Semitism. Is Steyerl’s curious lacuna, as the deep ambivalence of November may indicate, a somewhat stifled call for nonviolence? Is it an act of self-preservation amid an increasingly bitter divide in the German art world? Or is it a stance of neutrality

Neutrality, after all, pervades Medium Hot, which, as its title suggests, frequently returns to the imagery of heat. There’s the effect of AI’s energy use on the climate, with Steyerl’s concern for the planet thrumming behind the text. It addresses as well the output of generative AI through temperature, describing how the process of statistical image rendering sees a clear image as “cool,” while adding noise creates “heat.” A new image is created by removing that noise, and therefore, Steyerl argues, these images have nothing at all to do with what is indexically “seen” by an eye, but rather what the AI model detects as hot and cold. In other words, these images are a “medium hot.” According to the laws of thermodynamics, energy is only possible when there exist regions of both hot and cold. The heat death of the universe thus occurs when neutrality has been achieved—when all temperatures are the same: when zones cannot be differentiated.

Near the end of the book, Steyerl references Roko’s Basilisk, a thought experiment from the early days of AI speculation. The question posed is: If you knew a superintelligent AI would eventually dominate the earth, would you support it now, or wait until you had no choice? But Steyerl knows the question is wrong, because it supposes too narrow, too dismal a future. “Maybe the thing that really exists in the future is not an autocratic, bullying basilisk but a commune or cooperative of red hackers who have finally realized a sustainable and fair economy,” Steyerl writes. “One might be bullied and threatened … but if anyone tells you that you have no choice, then you should say no.” If only she would.  

David Hammons arrived at my door thick with promise and pages. It is a “post-exhibition catalogue,” per Hauser & Wirth, who released the book about six years after the artist’s 2019 show at the gallery’s Downtown Los Angeles location. As a self-professed book lover and exhibition catalog collector, I was nearly beside myself to receive such a gift. Removing it from its wrapping, I let the book fall on my dining table with a satisfying thud, before running my hands across the smooth hard cover. The 12-by-12-inch tome weighs just under 7 pounds and features a countless number of pages—countless, because there are no page numbers to count.

I did not experience the 2019 Hammons show in LA, billed as the largest comprehensive survey of the artist’s work to date, and this catalog, I assumed, would offer unique perspective on his six-decades-long enigmatic practice. I opened the book and quickly discovered that there was no text. The title page flips to reveal a full-page color image with no title or year. Imagine my fervent page-turning as I opened the book to find no table of contents, no section headings, no exhibition text, no timeline, no bibliography, and no essays. No essays. Just a humble colophon and the artist’s name. Assuming does indeed make an ass out of you and me.

As a catalog—a book form traditionally intended to document an exhibition—David Hammons disappoints. This genre of book typically provides context for the art, the artist, and an exhibition; this book does not do that work. It offers hundreds of beautiful images—gallery install shots, artwork reproductions, ephemera—with no titles, no dates, no material lists, organized in no discernable order. It can be assumed that the catalog encompasses the breadth of the 2019 exhibition because that is the occasion on which it was published, but it leaves little for the hungry viewer to contend with beyond the art itself, presented in a raw and unapologetic series of images.

It would be easy to dismiss this “post-exhibition catalogue” as a mislabeled coffee table book, beautiful and easily consumed, or as a response to the anti-intellectual wave in our culture that is drastically impacting the production and publication of the research that undergirds our field. This book, I would argue, is doing the clever work of making itself inaccessible—not to the wider public, but to art historians, curators, and scholars who might seek to express some authority over Hammons’s work or his life. Thumbing intuitively, about halfway through the pages, you’ll find a series of incredible install shots of a past Hammons exhibition where his works are presented together against white walls. With no text to offer context and no dates to anchor us in time, each featured work is left to be contended with via eyesight alone.

David Hammons doesn’t function like an exhibition catalog; it functions like an artist’s book and, more significantly, like a work of art itself. After turning a few pages, readers will come across documentation of the collaborative 2011 installation of fur coats by David and Chie Hammons, made for L&M Arts in the Upper East Side neighborhood of New York City. The images show the pristine frontal views of floor-length winter coats beside views of the altered backs, which the artists used much like canvas, applying various paints, char, and detritus. Those familiar with these works may know of their apt critique of class and class performance, a persistent critique for Hammons. For those who don’t, the work has been removed from the context of the gallery, making it seem as if the coats were seen spontaneously on the city street, which is where he often sources his materials.

The press release for the book states that David Hammons is a “singular book created entirely under the artist’s direction.” Hammons has been labeled “elusive” for his rejection of the institutional structures of the art world and its highly sought forms of validation. Why should his book be any different? Without an authoritative curatorial voice, the images are left to assert the artist’s voice above all others. The result is a rhythmic, almost stream-of-consciousness flow of vivid images that inform each other. There are no references to the art historical canon, no comparisons to other artistic expressions of Blackness. The works become nearly impossible to historicize, let alone identify without strong previous knowledge of Hammons’s career. In other words, Hammons said what he said already; this book of images enables him to say it again and again and again.

Here, I found myself questioning my desire for this book to be legible, conventional, and useful. Is he challenging me, scolding me, or flirting with me? His refusal to make it easy to intellectualize his work feels like an invitation to a wider audience to exercise a different set of skills: he is inviting us to see as he sees while making room for our own responses and interpretations. It is evident through the book’s images that so much of Hammons’s work is made possible by everyday audiences, whether that audience is indulgently purchasing ephemeral artworks or simply taking time to witness the sublime in the mundane. You travel through the pages and experience what compels you. It may be wholly cliché to say, but the book reads much like jazz—there is a rhythm, but it is not consistent. It lingers here or there, it gets loud and hot before lulling to a confident hum.

Looking, as this textless catalog demands, may be the prevailing lesson. The value of the book comes not only from the information it documents, but also from the experience and endurance required to consume it. Many contemporary artists owe their careers to Hammons, and as you flip through the pages it becomes increasingly clear that his practice—not a singular work, but the methods and means by which he makes—have come to define contemporary art. His use of found materials, his iconoclastic appropriation of cultural symbols, his experimentation with temporality, and his reverence for the detritus of life have all shifted and expanded the perimeters of painting, sculpture, and performance as we have come to understand them. Perhaps this is why his name is the only necessary citation—everything you need to know is right there on the title page.

We look to history to chart the future.

I came to this basic reaffirmation while reading J. Hoberman’s latest, addicting, grand cultural history, Everything Is Now: The 1960s New York Avant-Garde—Primal Happenings, Underground Movies, Radical Pop. The snake of a title promises a lot to chew on—and the book delivers. But while in the throes of its semi-nostalgic, breathless invocation of the exciting art times of the 1960s, I couldn’t help but reflect on those first three titular words in the Now when this book greets us, on how then might become now.

Hoberman has gifted us scintillating analyses of various art epochs in his books on the culture of midnight movies, the paranoid 1960s, or the milquetoast movies of Reagan’s 1980s. The protagonist stalking his latest New York Now is Jonas Mekas, a mentor of Hoberman’s, the grand doyen of the city’s experimental cinema, and a self-styled poet who found beauty in what others had so unimaginatively dismissed as pornography (Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures), celebrity navel-gazing (Yoko Ono’s still-underrated films), or a waste of space and time (Andy Warhol’s Empire).

Mekas also co-founded New York’s Anthology Film Archives, where J. Hoberman will, in June, present a selection of shorts that he discusses in Everything Is Now. The book, indeed the era, is lined by films that offered up-to-date reflections of the period back to its people: Shirley Clarke’s portrait of the Black gay gigolo Jason; Jack Smith’s and Paul Morrissey’s mordant, hilarious send-ups of cheap-o B-Hollywood glamour; Mekas and Robert Frank’s diaristic films of their friends, shot as if the camera were at last a pencil. There were also the attention-frizzing “Happenings,” wild strobe and light shows, music chaotically blaring out the guitars of the Velvet Underground or Goldie and the Gingerbreads, partygoers doing the Frug as home movies of hot people were projected upon dancing bodies. The key thing here is proximity, the Manhattan jamming of hip-to-hip, café-to-dance-hall, making life in the city so chaotically synchronous. Amid the mishmash of the 1960s, ideas for alternative futures flowed.

Reading Everything Is Now is like facing a rolling avalanche that doesn’t care whether you live(d) or die(d): outrageous events in the downtown diaspora are strung one after the other, popcorn-string-style, with little commentary or judgement from the author. An uprising in Harlem coincides with a run of the Harlem-set Cool World (1963) by Shirley Clarke and produced by Frederick Wiseman; a week later, Warhol and Mekas sit in a building all night filming Empire, the ultimate American film: eight hours of the phallic Empire State Building shrouded in dark, then illumined by dawn.

Downtown a smidge, in 1968, a black-leather-clad Diane Arbus floats out of her 120 East 10th Street apartment to sit in a park with Linda Eastman, the future Mrs. Paul McCartney, where they discuss f-stops. At the Five Spot Café, Harry Smith attracts the attention of Allen Ginsberg as they listen to Thelonious Monk, Smith taking copious notes on how ahead or behind the beat Monk’s piano clumps were. Having befriended one another some earlier toke-filled night, Smith soon plays Ginsberg one of his hieroglyph-strewn films, which compels Ginsberg to convince acid king Timothy Leary, movie goddess Elizabeth Taylor, and a supermarket heiress to invest in Smith’s animated take on The Wizard of Oz. But the project collapses after to the suicide of the fourth and biggest backer, the millionaire son of a horse breeder. C’est comme ça. The failed ’68 assassination of the scene’s Svengali, Uncle Andy, is upstaged by the successful assassination of yet another Kennedy, and Hoberman reports that “Ray Johnson saw the next morning’s Daily News headline ACTRESS SHOOTS ANDY WARHOL, was mugged at knife point, and left New York City never to return.” It is a credit to Hoberman’s phlegmatic wit as a storyteller that he makes hundreds of similarly crazy events in 1960s New York roll along like it’s just the way of all things.

You will want to keep a notebook handy to jot down which of the book’s myriad cultural items you’ll want to discover or revisit. Hoberman correctly identifies the visionary LP Yoko Ono/Plastic Ono Band (1970) as “the culmination of Ono’s long and winding road from John Cage’s class to Chamber Street loft concerts through Fluxus notoriety to countercultural stardom,” and considers Ono’s and John Lennon’s billboards reading “WAR IS OVER! / if you want it / HAPPY CHRISTMAS FROM JOHN AND YOKO” as the ’60s’ “quintessential artwork”—a casual intermingling of the popular, the artistic, and the political that befits the Beatles’ famed 3-part harmony.

Elsewhere, the author revisits the jazz/rock debate by compiling critical hosannas and takedowns of the late-1960s flirtations with R&B and more “commercial” 4/4 beats from jazz artists Miles Davis (In a Silent Way, Bitches Brew) and Albert Ayler (New Grass). In particular, Hoberman made me finally listen to the much-travestied last three albums of Ayler’s too-short life, and I found myself in surprising agreement with the music critic Robert Christgau, who praises Ayler’s later revival of “the funky tenor breaks that filled out early R&B” which so angered jazz purists, then and now. This debate is of no matter to Hoberman, whose taste and encyclopedic glean on US culture is inspiringly omnivorous.

Above all, Hoberman demonstrates the natural fluidity of art, film, music, and writing, which all remain perplexingly siloed from each other to the detrimental of all. It has been nearly 50 years since the great painter-critic Manny Farber opined on the difference between painting and criticism in the pages of Film Comment: “The brutal fact is that they’re exactly the same thing.” He went on to castigate “provincial” US criticism, which, in Farber’s eyes, “doesn’t take cognizance of the crossover of arts… as if there were a law in film criticism that you’re not supposed to get involved in the other art forms.” The status quo remains. Yet ever since his landmark collection Vulgar Modernism, Hoberman has shown that this roping-off is ahistorical. Without cross-pollination, nothing would bloom.

With the final line of the book, Hoberman hauntingly clarifies what he has written: “a memoir, although not mine.” The book charts the unconscious of the shuttered East Village Other and the Village Voice, of Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitables and Jerry Schatzberg’s legendary loft parties, of a propulsive youth-led hope that one could conceivably escape the US Cold War situation, of cold-water apartments and splinter-filled SoHo floors before dreary gentrification, of late nights at the Bleecker, of Dan Talbot’s New Yorker Films, and of the Film-Maker’s Cooperative. I, at 28, have never personally experienced any of that, but the cinematic-novelistic glory of Hoberman’s historical writing evokes them so convincingly as to let me feel as if I had.

Pictures shot dead-on and then arranged in rows or grids comprise almost every contribution to “Typologien,” a survey of 20th-century German photography at the Fondazione Prada in Milan. No horizon line is even mildly crooked, and all fall where they ought to—in the picture’s bottom third—or else are eliminated by way of a backdrop or an aerial view.

That’s not surprising; Germans are famous for their love of rules, plenty of which, when it comes to photography, they invented themselves. But the show, curated by Suzanne Pfeffer of Frankfurt’s Museum für Moderne Kunst (MMK), emphasizes the beliefs underpinning these rules and the motivation behind the formal decision-making. It’s a refreshing return to form at a moment when photography criticism and exhibitions are placing outsized emphasis on content, a healthy reminder that ethics and aesthetics have long been seen as one and the same.

The show begins with plant pictures by Karl Blossfeldt, Lotte Jacobi, and Hilla Becher; these continue the work of German Naturalists who, in the 18th century, saw art and science as one. Right off the bat we see one of the problems inherent in typologizing: Becher’s black backgrounds, incongruous with the uneven light on her flowers and leaves, are so dark and flat that it’s obvious they were manipulated in the darkroom. Her attempt at “objectivity” privileges perfect pictures over naturalistic ones, ideal specimens over ones randomly chosen. Efforts to remove the human hand from pictures can often mean more manipulation, not less.

Amid so many perfect plant pictures, Thomas Struth’s photo of a sunflower just beginning to unfurl stands out with its awkwardly clenched petals. Its more conventionally beautiful stem-mate is blurry and cut off by a corner. Titled Small Closed Sunflower-No° 18 (1992), the photo invites more looking than the other flowers in Struth’s row, which, with their dew drops and use of a macro lens, feel a lot like screensavers: boring in their beauty.

Andreas Gursky offers this section’s grand floral finale with Untitled XVIII (2015), an aerial view of flowers planted in astonishingly neat rows. The print is so large that the subject is defamiliarized, looking more like a painting than a photograph. Gursky’s photography doesn’t render a subject more understandable but, rather, more enigmatic.

Gursky and Struth, like several artists in the show, studied with Bernd Becher at the Düsseldorf Art Academy. (Hilla, his wife, was not officially employed there, but tellingly, many artists describe themselves as students of “the Bechers.”) The show borrows its title, “Typologien,” from the couple’s major series, shown in the exhibition’s center. It comprises grids of images of water towers and buildings shot from multiple angles. Each view is carefully calculated and evenly spaced, the building always dead-center in the frame.

Unsurprisingly, the work of the Bechers’ students betrays both influence and rebellion. Sybille Bergmann cleverly used her teachers’ approach on a building’s interior, photographing every living room in one apartment complex. Each room has the same layout, each picture the same lighting from the same window; what stands out amid the monotony are the personal touches that make a house a home. On view opposite the Bechers’ “Typologien” series, Bergmann’s photos exude warm humanity—no small feat for a gray grid.

On the same wall, Candida Höfer takes on specimens like her forebearers, but emphasizes their context instead of burning it black. Her photos of lone animals in zoos emphasize the solitude and squalor any organism might endure when displaced from its habitat for human study. Höfer includes a giraffe—its neck looming among painted clouds—and a mournful Moo Deng doppelganger: a baby hippo all shiny and sad. The artist had never especially excited me before, but contextualized here, it was evident that her retort to all the typologizing was essential.

Essential because in Germany, of all places, typologizing had horrendous consequences. On view in a smaller gallery upstairs is a major series of portraits by August Sander, who set out to photograph every “type” of person in the Weimar Republic in the 20th century, beginning in 1911. His project is the show’s largest in volume and impact—the Bechers drew much influence from him—though he never finished the 600 portraits he set out to take, and lost plenty to fires and Nazis. Sander was interested in physiognomy—what the structure of a face might reveal about a person’s character—which might seem a foreboding progenitor of Nazi eugenics. But the Nazis banned Sander’s project, arresting his son Erich, who died in prison, and drafting his other son Gunther, who fought for the wrong side of history. For many artists, the World Wars would destroy any faith in rationality, but Sander clung to his belief in photography’s neutrality and the importance of documents, continuing to photograph rich and poor, oppressor and oppressed.

Amid his many portraits—each exuding pathos and individuality, all hard to typologize without the aid of captions—I found myself tiptoeing around every corner, wondering if I’d see a Nazi, and if I’d recognize him when I did. First I wondered this of the art and then of life, past and then present.

From Sander, the show manages to gently ease us to lighter, even funny work, first with pictures from the 1980s by Christian Borchert, showing East German families full of character posing in their living rooms. Adjacent to those are Struth’s big color pictures of fancy families that feel considerably more lifeless and staged, among them Gerhard Richter’s quartet. Next is a row of ears that Isa Genzken photographed, then blew up; big and headless, they look positively strange. And then a big laugh before things get dark again: Rosemarie Trockel, the funniest German, tries the Bechers’ many-angle move on a few dogs who, sitting and even smiling for her camera, must have been very good boys.

The last room is devoted to work by Richter, ominously enclosed. Inside is part of his famed “Atlas” series (begun in the 1960s), with a selection focused on harrowing scenes from the Holocaust. Richter grouped and arranged these images on large sheets, emphasizing the sheer quantity of them; there is more awfulness on view than one can take.

I happened to enter the room as two children, speaking Italian, were seeing these images seemingly for the first time. They had many questions. Linguistically, I could only kind of follow, but on another level, I understood.

It made me want to say this: photography, as an art form, seems stuck right now, left adrift in the wake of abundant criticism that the camera is inherently violent and extractive, burdened by uneven power dynamics—all of which is true. Pictures of mass graves and death camps in “Typologien” are no exception; looking at them feels kind of wrong, very uncomfortable. But I’m glad those kids saw them, despite the knot in my stomach while watching them see, a knot that has returned as I write. I think now of pictures of Gaza and the way they show us what colonialism has probably always looked like, only much of it took place before photography was invented. Would pictures have helped then? It’s hard to know, but it does seem certain that metaphoric violence has nothing on the real thing.

Artemisia Gentileschi’s empathic and heroic portrayals of women have made her a protofeminist icon. Her works—most famously Judith Slaying Holofernes (c. 1612)—do more than transform her passive objects into active subjects; they endow them with the power to enact righteous, even vengeful violence.

Such scenes are inseparable from Artemisia’s own biography, according to Patrizia Cavazzini, co-curator of “Artemisia, Heroine of Art,” a major retrospective currently on view at the Musée Jacquemart-André in Paris. Yes, Gentileschi asserted autonomy, both in her technical mastery and in her strategic self-portraiture. But above all, she rejected the confining ideal of the “virtuous woman artist” that dominated 17th-century Italian debates over the role of women in art and society.

Born in Rome in 1593, Artemisia was the eldest of four children and the only daughter in a household headed by the painter Orazio Gentileschi. A central thread in the exhibition is the evolving relationship between Artemisia and her father. In an era when most women were denied access to artistic training, Artemisia not only received instruction and studio privileges from Orazio but was actively encouraged to paint. Her early masterpiece, Susanna and the Elders (1610), painted when she was just 17, bears only her signature—despite evidence of her father’s involvement—underscoring Orazio’s commitment to promoting her career.

Artemisia’s feminist attitudes of assertion and defiance come through in Susanna and the Elders. Drawn from the biblical story where two old men blackmail Suzanna to sleep with them, Artemisia and Orazio’s version of this oft-depicted scene groups the three figures into a tight frame. This framing effectively conveys the uncomfortable claustrophobia of sexual harassment while keeping with Caravaggesque conventions—naturalistic renderings of live models, neutral backgrounds, and stark chiaroscuro.

Two men leer at her over a stone railing; meanwhile, the painting’s nude heroine shies away, her hands raised in a gesture of protective revulsion. Scholars have argued that the scene captures something of Artemisia’s feminine perspective, pointing to Susanna’s expressive gestures and posture as convincingly portraying the discomfort of sexual aggression—as if Artemesia were painting from experience rather than imagination.

The exhibition juxtaposes Orazio’s (ca. 1612) and Artemisia’s (ca. 1615) Judith and Her Maidservant paintings. Both works capture a tense moment following Judith’s decapitation of Holofernes, but Artemisia’s version offers a more forceful heroine, richer textiles, and a gesture of solidarity between Judith and her servant that her father’s painting lacks. It marks the emergence of Artemisia’s own sensibility, one more intimate, more psychologically charged, and often more brutal than her father’s.

Judith recurs throughout Artemisia’s oeuvre, along with Esther and Jael, other biblical heroines displaying cunning, strength, and moral ambiguity. Her most famous work is Judith Slaying Holoferenes (c. 1612)—mid- rather than post-decapitation—thanks to Mary Garrard’s 1989 interpretation of this image as a psychological purging of Artemisia’s rape, perpetrated by her father’s colleague Agonstino Tassi. The exhibition features not Gentileschi’s original but a 17th-century copy from Bologna, testifying to the image’s influence and proliferation.

This rape figures prominently in narratives of Gentileschi’s life, in part because there is a historical record of it. Orazio brought charges, and the trial became a public spectacle. Artemisia was tortured with thumbscrews to verify her testimony; Tassi was convicted, not for rape—which wasn’t considered a crime unto itself—but for failing to marry her afterward. Protected by patrons like Cardinal Scipione Borghese, Tassi served only a few months in exile before returning to Rome.

Artemisia later married the painter Pierantonio Stiattesi and settled in Florence, where she entered the intellectual circles of the Medici court and the Buonarroti family. Florence was where Artemisia rebuilt and grew, both artistically and psychologically. She learned to read and write, studied music, and painted self-portraits. In Self-Portrait as a Lute Player (1614–15) and others from the 1620s, Artemisia exudes confidence, sensuality, self-possession, and above all, mastery— over both her image and her medium.

Her portraits of others—knights, noblemen, scholars—cemented her place within Florence’s and later Rome’s elite, where she returned in 1620. In the Eternal City, her circle included expatriate artists like Leonaert Bramer, who playfully sketched her in drag. Far from ridicule, it was a gesture of camaraderie. She became “one of the boys” to her credit rather than to her detriment. Artemisia was affiliated with the Bentvueghels, a group of rebellious artists in Rome known for their irreverence, drunkenness, and disdain for the academic establishment. She was reportedly their only female member and the only Italian—an iconoclast even among iconoclasts.

The exhibition excels in narrating the artist’s fascinating biography, but its final sections, focused on mythology and allegory, feel weaker by comparison. These galleries feature recently attributed works and paintings from private collections that are rarely seen, though not all of them are great. One such example, John the Baptist in the Desert (1630s), is sober, almost mannerist and, in my opinion, strays too far from the visceral naturalism of the Caravaggesque tradition and from the populist energy that animates her most powerful work. More compelling is the Penitent Magdalene (c. 1625) from the Cathedral of Seville, a portrait of luminous restraint, boasting soft, flushed skin and contemplative melancholy rendered with unusual precision. In contrast to other works characterized by overworked sfumato and melodrama, Magdalene’s tranquil clarity and precision is refreshing.

Artemisia’s story offers revealing clues not only with regard to the past but to the contradictions of the present. The exhibition reflects both a cultural hunger for feminist recovery and an art market eager to capitalize on narratives of resistance and rediscovery. Yet it raises a pressing question: can a private institution like the Jacquemart-André, steeped in bourgeois refinement, do justice to a figure as uncompromising as Artemisia? Does displaying her work in plush interiors aestheticize her trauma, blunt her sharp edges? The tension between institutional politeness and feminist rage hums faintly, just beneath the surface. Artemisia’s legacy lies not merely in her biography or technical mastery, but in her confrontational refusal to flinch.

Caravaggio (b. 1571) is among the newest of the Old Masters. Though in one contemporary’s estimation he was egregius in urbe pictor, the outstanding painter in Rome, he fell out of fashion a few decades after his death; by 1660, Poussin would say that Caravaggio “had come into the world to destroy painting.” It wasn’t until a sustained rehabilitation effort by the Italian art historian Roberto Longhi after the Second World War that Caravaggio really came back into the public eye. But since then we’ve never stopped looking away.

“Caravaggio 2025,” at Rome’s Palazzo Barberini, draws on Italian and international collections to assemble two dozen of the painter’s sixty or so known works. The paintings date from around the artist’s arrival in Rome in 1595 (a few years later than once thought) until his death, in 1610, aged just 38. Like his posthumous reputation, Caravaggio’s catalogue keeps growing as paintings are rediscovered; one canvas here (Ecce Homo, c. 1606–1607) only came to light in 2021, at a Spanish auction, and another (the lesser of two portraits of Maffeo Barberini, c. 1595), remains merely attributed. If you factor in the fourteen other works in other churches and museums, and the ceiling now accessible in the Casino Boncompagni Ludovisi, you can now see nearly two-thirds of the painter’s production in a single trip to Rome, now through July 6.

Caravaggio’s scandalous biography is certainly part of his continued appeal: Michelangelo Merisi, as he was known before taking on the name of the Lombard village where his father worked for a nobleman, became as well known in Rome for his misbehavior as for his astonishing paintings. He carried a sword without a permit, and was once arrested for casting a plate of artichokes (and probably aspersions) at a waiter. The artist eventually fled the city after killing a small-time gangster in a duel that broke out over a tennis match, of all things, for which the artist was sentenced to death. He shuttled from Naples (and the protection of the Colonna family), to Malta (where his membership of the Knights of Malta ended with imprisonment and escape by rappelling down a cliff to a waiting boat), to Sicily, and back to Naples (where a surprise attack in an inn left his face disfigured “beyond recognition”). He would die of malaria, alone, on his way back to Rome.

Caravaggio clearly had a lot going on, and his work—though rarely autobiographical—shows it. Few oeuvres are seeded with as many subtle self-portraits. Around the time he was seeking pardon for the après tennis murder, he would use his own face for the ghastly severed head in David with the Head of Goliath (c.1606)—an image of the artist offering himself, and his painting, to the viewer, as if a premonition of his own mutilation.

But more than biography, it’s Caravaggio’s style that gets somehow fresher with age. He evokes intense and particular human presences, but at the same time a mirror world that is pure image, pure representation: a rapt Narcissus (1597–1598) fittingly opens the show. His paintings are so technically fine as to be both compelling and suspicious, raising more questions than they answer. In the context of mannerist Rome, where imagined Beauty was the ideal, Caravaggio insisted, polemically, on painting from life.

Naturalism is one thing when you’re making secular images, presumably designed as tours de force to be displayed on easels, like, say, The Cardsharps (1596-97),where we observe dapper young men locked into their card game. Or in the three remarkable portraits in the show, including the second, firmly attributed likeness of Maffeo Barberini, one of Caravaggio’s keen aristocratic patrons later known as Pope Urban VII, whose sumptuous greens are being shown to the public for the first time since it was painted in 1598–99.  Along with several other paintings in the show, it now returns home to the palazzo that belonged to Barberini’s family.

But commitment to the worldly body is quite another matter when it comes to the sacred, which increasingly occupied Caravaggio as his life became more violent. Whereas the earlier paintings in the show’s first room are lit like studio photographs, the bodies of later paintings are like shots from a detective noir, cast more in shadow than light, giving you the sense that a moral struggle (good versus evil, the divine versus the all too human) is at work beneath their refined surfaces.

Caravaggio almost baits you with the beauty of his holy subjects, as in the three, increasingly sexy evocations of Saint John the Baptist (the last, from 1610, is basically a Venus), or in the paintings modeled by a beguiling Sienese prostitute named Fillide Melandroni, hung together in the show’s second room. She shines as the stately Saint Catherine of Alexandria (1598-99), considered the transition point to Caravaggio’s dusky mature style; as Magdalene standing by a symbolically loaded convex mirror in  Martha and Mary Magdalene (1598-99); and as Judith in the iconic Judith and Holofernes (1599-1600), a drama of furrowed brows in which the Babylonian general pays the price for being duped by appearances.

At times, we might fear being fooled ourselves: looking at these absorbing paintings, just like looking in them, is always a fraught affair. Yet it is the very realism of Caravaggio’s bodies—their complicated expressions, their palpable flesh—that renders the sacred paintings truly sacred. In art but also in life, his plunge ever deeper into worldliness seems to have led Caravaggio into otherworldly realms.  

Caravaggio reaches a high point with Taking of Christ (1603, from the National Gallery of Ireland). Christ is frozen in the precise second of the betrayal, his fingers still knitted in prayer as Judas plants his kiss; in a near cinematic narrative compression, Roman soldiers are already charging into the scene from the right, wearing their mirrorlike armor; behind Christ, at the far left of the canvas, a disciple, in yet another moment, screams into the black. Caravaggio himself stands in the jumbled crowd, holding up a lantern, straining to get a glimpse. It’s an ambiguous instant we would normally pass over on the way to the story’s inevitable conclusion. But Caravaggio keeps us suspended not in prolonged suffering, but in instantaneous sin.

The painter also lingers in the show’s final, haunting picture, the last one Caravaggio ever made: the Martyrdom of Saint Ursula (1610). He stands directly behind the ghostly white Ursula, just pierced by the arrow of the king of the Huns, whose offer of marriage she refuses; his mouth is open, face slack less with awe than what must be confusion—he’s looking at the king, and perhaps hasn’t even seen Ursula. He is staring out from the darkness. Where does the light come from?