The Persistence of Memory (La persistencia de la memoria) (1931) is a trifecta of superlatives: Surrealism’s most famous painting, created by its most famous artist, featuring its most famous motif. The painter, of course, is Salvador Dalí, and his iconic rendering of melted pocket watches is instantly recognizable to nearly everyone, even those with little or no interest in art.
Dalí painted The Persistence of Memory when he was 28. By that time, he was already a well-established member of the Surrealist circle, having moved to their base of operation in Paris five years earlier. His reputation preceded his arrival thanks to his fellow Catalan artist Joan Miró, a Surrealist OG whose work inspired Dalí’s own. Miró introduced Dalí to André Breton, Surrealism’s founder and ideological enforcer, who welcomed Dalí into the movement—though in time, the latter’s penchant for flamboyance and self-promotion, as well as his sympathy for fascism, would lead to a very public rupture with Breton.
Nevertheless, The Persistence of Memory, and Dalí’s work in general, represented the epitome of Breton’s call to “resolve the previously contradictory conditions of dream and reality into an absolute reality, a super-reality.” Moreover, Dalí’s thinking, like Breton’s, was deeply indebted to the writings of Sigmund Freud and his belief that the mind could be unlocked through psychoanalytical methods such as the interpretation of dreams.
Dalí added his own peculiar twists to Surrealist ideology as well. For example, when artists of varying stripe began to flock to Breton’s movement, he enlisted Dalí’s aid in coming up with a way of making art that could conceivably span the panoply of styles and aims sheltering under the Surrealist umbrella. As a response, Dalí offered the “Surrealist object,” a psychosexual spin, essentially, on Marcel Duchamp’s Readymade strategy of taking ordinary, functional items—a bicycle wheel, a bottle rack—out of their original mass-produced context and labeling them unique works of art. But instead of puckishly violating the boundaries between art and life or between high and low culture, as Duchamp did, Surrealist objects would dredge up repressed thoughts and feelings. Dalí based the idea on Freud’s theory of fetishism, which explored the erotic fixation on shoes and other items associated with particular body parts. (Dalí’s own contributions in this regard included 1938’s Lobster Telephone, a handset sheathed in a crustacean carapace.)
More relevantly for The Persistence of Memory, though, was another concept Dalí formulated the year before he painted it, which he called the “paranoiac critical” method. Based on the notion that paranoiacs perceive things that aren’t there, Dalí’s “method” secreted phantom pictures within his compositions as a kind of stream-of-consciousness Rorschach test for viewers. Dalí called this strategy a “spontaneous method of irrational knowledge based on the critical and systematic objectivity of the associations and interpretations of delirious phenomena.” In other words, Dalí was asserting that insanity provided him a model for pictorial organization—though, as he drily noted, “the only difference between me and a madman is that I’m not mad.”
For his part, Breton embraced the paranoiac critical as an “instrument of primary importance”—until he didn’t: In 1939, after Dalí expressed his admiration for Hitler (saying, for example, that he often dreamed of the fürher as a woman whose “flesh, which I had imagined whiter than white, ravished me”), Breton finally managed to engineer Dalí’s expulsion from the Surrealist group, something he’d tried and failed to do in 1934 after Dalí threw his support to the Fascists during the Spanish Civil War. He accused Dalí of espousing race war and denounced the paranoiac critical method as reactionary.
The Persistence of Memory was first exhibited in 1932 in a group show of Surrealist art at the Julien Levy Gallery in New York City. Levy had acquired the painting on a trip to Paris, and it immediately became a media sensation—the first for a work of art in New York, perhaps, since Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase rocked the Armory Show in 1913. It entered the collection of the Museum of Modern Art two years later.
Dalí’s approach was notable for its almost hyperrealistic attention to detail, all with the aim of creating “hand-painted dream photographs,” as he put it. His otherworldly precisionism owed a lot to the polished biomorphic abstractions of fellow Surrealist Yves Tanguy, so much so that Dalí allegedly told Tanguy’s niece, “I pinched everything from your uncle.”
Dalí’s composition is, above all, a landscape that references geographic landmarks recalling his childhood in his native Catalonia, including Cap de Creus, a peninsula near Spain’s northeastern border with France, and Puig Pení, a mountain in the same region. Both take up the scene’s background, while its foreground is dominated by an ectoplasmic turkey-necked form that many take as a hidden self-portrait in profile. But it was also modeled after an anthropomorphic rock within Hieronymus Bosch’s dizzying medieval masterpiece, The Garden of Earthly Delights. (Much of Bosch’s works provided a template for Dalí.)
As for the liquefying timepieces, there are three in all, draped respectively across the aforementioned figure, the branch of a barren tree to its left, and an oblong box or bench jutting in sharply from the left border of the work to serve as a pedestal of sorts for the tree. A fourth pocket watch is also perched there, limned in orange, and though its shape is solid, it features ants converging in radiating lines toward a hole in the middle.
By Dalí’s own admission, ants represent his obsession with decay, but the melting watches have proved a bit more resistant to interpretation. Obviously they evoke time, though some have also suggested a connection to Einstein’s theory of relativity. For his part, Dalí described the watches as the “camembert of time and space,” as he’d gotten the idea for them by observing a plate of the cheese softening in the sun.
As with all things Dalí, including the maestro himself, The Persistence of Memory remains something of a mystery but is no less indelible for it. Indeed, one could almost say that Dalí’s title is a self-fulfilling prophecy as the painting tenaciously holds a place in our collective storehouse of imagery to this day.
Diego Velázquez’s 1656 portrayal of a Spanish princess and her entourage is one of the most important paintings in Western art history, if not the most conceptually complex by an old master. A deconstruction of the relationship between viewer and viewed, depiction and depicted, Las Meninas comprises a nesting doll of paradoxes that play with pictorial space to ask, Just what is it you think you’re looking at?
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Las Meninas (The Maids of Honor), was part of a broader backlash against the perfectionism of Renaissance art, which began with the revival of the classical aesthetics a millennium after the fall of Rome. Renaissance painters exalted truth to nature, even in religious art, using perspective, both in its geometric and atmospheric variants, as well as the modeling of form through gradations of light, to create the illusion of three-dimensionality on a two-dimensional surface. They also adopted the use of oil paint, which, along with glazes and varnishes, allowed light to penetrate layers of color, while keeping the evidence of brushwork to a minimum. Together, these tropes heightened the semblance of verisimilitude, opening a metaphorical window that was taken for reality, albeit one created as a Platonic ideal.
This pursuit of quintessence created constraints that began to chafe, compelling artists to react against them as the 16th century wore on. Paintings such as Madonna with the Long Neck (1535–40) by Italian Mannerist Parmigianino were exemplary in this regard, deliberately distorting figure and foreshortening to highlight the artifice of painting. Instead of Renaissance equilibrium, Parmigianino offers a vision of the Virgin Mother with an impossibly extended torso holding a giant Christ child; her own hand, and the eponymous feature supporting her head, are likewise elongated beyond natural proportions. The figure of St. Jerome stands in the background at lower right, but rather than receding according to the dictates of perspective, he’s pushed up against the picture plane, resembling a Hummel figurine dwarfed by Mary.
With the dawn of the 17th century, artists continued to diverge from orthodoxy in a number of different ways. Caravaggio eschewed the naturalistic, ambient illumination typical of the High Renaissance in favor of spotlight-like effects that picked subjects out of shallow, murky settings, giving them a cinematic presence avant la lettre. El Greco anticipated 20th-century Expressionism by rendering attenuated figures with broad and clearly visible brush marks, creating images that were miles away from the sublime sfumato of Leonardo’s Mona Lisa.
Las Meninas likewise bucked tradition, though not necessarily at first glance. For example, Velázquez’s facture shared some characteristics with El Greco’s, though he pushed pigment around in his canvases to subtler effect. This was true of Las Meninas, as was its adherence the laws of illusionism. But overall, it subverted the rules by adhering to them, creating spatial tensions that confused the dynamics between subject and object.
Las Meninas presents an ensemble gathered in a high-ceilinged chamber in what’s believed to be the Royal Alcázar, the palace-fortress in Madrid that was the seat of the Spanish Empire. They’re gathered around the doll-like figure of Infanta Margaret Theresa, eldest daughter of King Philip IV—who, besides presiding over Spain’s involvement in the Thirty Years’ War, was Velázquez’s principal benefactor.
The all-female retinue that surrounds the Infanta includes two little people on the right. (It is an odd aspect of court life at this time that servants with achondroplasia were commonly included as part of the household, apparently to make the monarch look bigger at ceremonies.)
Looking straight at us, the princess serves as the scene’s radiant centerpiece, attired in a silken dress with a voluminous hoop skirt tenting the lower half of her body. One might suppose that Las Meninas is an elaborate portrayal of a child potentate cocooned within the accoutrements of dominion. If so, these might include Velázquez himself, as he’s placed himself to her left, peering around the back of an enormous canvas on which he’s rendering his subject. But considering her position relative to the artist’s, it’s certainly not the Infanta. Who, then, is it?
An answer lies at the rear of the room delineated by the orthogonal progression of the ceiling and the window on the right. There, an image of Philip IV and Mariana of Austria, his consort and mother of Margaret Theresa, hangs amid an arrangement of other paintings. It appears to be a double likeness of the couple seen from the waist up, but it’s actually their reflection in a small mirror. What we’ve been seeing all along is their point of view from outside the picture, one that happens to correspond with our own. In essence, Velázquez has removed the fourth wall of Renaissance painting, extending it beyond the realm of imagination into the world of the concrete.
Other conundrums abound as well. A narrow door in the back wall is open to reveal a figure paused at the bottom of a flight of stairs, his body in profile while he turns his gaze outward. The man is Don José Nieto Velázquez, the queen’s chamberlain and head of the royal tapestry works (and perhaps a relative of the artist). He stands on the steps with one foot higher than the other, but whether he’s ascending, or descending, we’ll never know.
More concrete, though, is the position of the artist, who, somewhat astonishingly, privileges his presence above the monarch’s. This gesture speaks to the ambitions man who rose from humble beginnings (his father was a notary) to become the King’s official painter and curator of the royal collection. It also suggests that the soft power of art is greater than the bare-knuckle business of ruling.
Other discussions around Las Meninas have gone deeper into the weeds—that the image of Philip and Mariana wasn’t a reflection of them in the room, but rather of them in the painting Velázquez was working on, or that the composition as a whole exists within a mirror. What can be said for sure is that the painting was larger than it currently is: It was trimmed down on both the left and right sides, after sustaining damage during a fire that destroyed the Alcázar in 1734. The Infanta’s face also needed repainting.
Whatever its current condition, however, Las Meninas remains what it has always been: a triumphant puzzle that resists resolution.
Pride celebrations in 2024 were clouded by a presidential election campaign in which Donald Trump espoused anti-LBGTQ+ sentiments. Since his victory, threats that were once hypothetical have become reality. Trump has menaced Maine’s governor for allowing trans participation in women’s sports, the State Department has revoked trans identity on passports, and the same forces that overturned Roe v. Wade are gunning for marriage equality. It’s no better overseas, where Hungary has banned all open LGBTQ+ events and the United Kingdom’s Supreme Court has ruled that trans women aren’t legally women. Still, the LGBTQ+ community soldiers on, especially in the visual arts, where expression of LGBTQ+ themes are more vital than ever. Below, we offer our recommendations for the best shows of LGBTQ+ artists during this year’s Pride celebrations.
Read more of our Pride Month coverage here.
Pablo Picasso was something of a latecomer to political activism, having embraced it only after reaching his 50s. Prior to that, his sole dedication was to himself, and the belief that his genius excused him from adhering to the rules that others were obliged to follow, whether that involved art or personal relationships. (His bad behavior, which included his overweening sexism, continued long after he became a man of the Left).
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Likewise, his penchant for self-promotion colored his embrace of politics. He made a public show of joining the French Communist Party in 1944, publishing a manifesto about his decision in a 1945 edition of the American Marxist publication, The New Masses. “I have become a Communist,” Picasso wrote, “because our party strives … to make men … free and more happy;” somehow the fact that Stalin didn’t share these sentiments escaped him.
While some of his contemporaries refused to take his conversion seriously (Salvador Dalí once quipped, “Picasso is a Communist and neither am I”), Picasso remained an advocate for world peace and became a fierce opponent of both the Korean and Vietnam Wars. Asked about the role of art in politics, he once replied, “painting is not made to decorate apartments. It’s an offensive and defensive weapon against the enemy.”
However late Picasso’s political awakening may have come, its catalyst was the Spanish Civil War, and the singular atrocity that defined it—the bombing of the Basque city Guernica, to which Picasso responded with a painting. The most recognizable of his works alongside Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, Guernica became the most famous antiwar statement in art history.
Ongoing from 1936 to 1939, the Spanish Civil War has long been considered a rehearsal for World War II. The conflict began when the Popular Front, a coalition of Leftist parties, was elected in January 1936 to govern the Second Spanish Republic. In July of that year, a faction of Army generals representing ultraconservative forces within the country (including the Catholic Church), staged a failed coup, precipitating conflict between supporters of the government, the Republicans, and their opponents, the Nationalists. The latter were aided and abetted by Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, who provided arms, troops, and most relevant for the genesis of Picasso’s cri de coeur, air support.
The attack on Guernica began around 4:30 in the afternoon on April 26, 1937, when bombers from two squadrons, the Nazi Luftwaffe’s Condor Legion and the Fascist Italian Aviazione Legionaria, among others—perhaps as many as 59 planes in total—dropped 22 tons of ordnance in a succession of raids lasting several hours. After the operation, much of Guernica lay in ruins. Estimates of civilian casualties varied from less than 200 to more than 1,000 out of a total population of 7,000.
Picasso had been commissioned prior to the tragedy to create a large mural for the Spanish pavilion at the 1937 World’s Fair in Paris. He’d chosen the subject of the artist’s studio before news of Guernica’s destruction broke. At the urging of Spanish poet Juan Larrea, Picasso switched direction, referencing the attack instead.
He started work on Guernica in late April or early May, and finished on June 4. Picasso was assisted by American artist John Ferren, while Dora Maar, Picasso’s mistress at the time, took photos of the work in progress. (Maar was also key in encouraging Picasso’s thematic pivot.) Picasso dropped his usual policy of not admitting visitors to his studio while he worked on the piece, making the exception to allow influential people to see him in action in the hope of promoting support for the Republican cause.
Rendered almost entirely in grisaille, Guernica is huge, measuring 11 feet 5 inches by 25 feet 6 inches. Picasso set the scene in a manger where animals and people are seen in a frenzy of anguish. Four women in different stages of agony dominate the composition (“Women are machines for suffering,” Picasso would later tell Françoise Gilot, another of his mistresses who eventually became his biographer). A fire rages on the canvas at right, consuming a women, while a mother on the left side keens for her dead child as a ghostly bull looms over them. A terrified horse in chain-mail armor occupies the center of the painting; run through with a lance, he tramples a figure grasping at a broken sword just beyond reach—presumably a knight thrown from a steed in the heat of battle. An eye-shaped ceiling fixture eerily lights what is essentially a modernist vision of hell.
While Guernica is obviously allegorical, Picasso refused to discuss its meaning, though the combination of references to Jesus’s birth (the manger setting) and death (stigmata piercing the soldier’s outstretched hand) suggests that the city’s bombing represents a kind of collective passion of the populace.
Controversy surrounded Guernica from the start. Some on the Left faulted it for being apolitical, though its renown grew over a succession of tours through Europe and America between 1938 and 1940. It also became the center of attention for headline-grabbing stories. In 1975 artist Tony Shafrazi spray-painted kill lies all across its surface, for reasons that were hazy but ostensibly about Vietnam; the painting was easily restored and Shafrazi was let off, becoming a high-profile gallery dealer in the ensuing years. In 2003 a tapestry replica of Guernica at the United Nations was covered up when then United States Secretary of State Colin Powell addressed the General Assembly in a bid to justify America’s invasion of Iraq, sparking an outcry.
When World War II broke out, Picasso entrusted New York’s Museum of Modern Art with the painting’s safekeeping with the proviso that it could not be returned to Spain until democracy was restored there. With Franco’s death in 1975, the stage was set for the painting’s repatriation, though it took another six years because of MoMA’s reluctance to part with it. Finally, under pressure by critics and others, MoMA relented; it now hangs in Madrid’s Reina Sofía Museum.
As an expression of political art, Guernica is hardly alone, but no one mobilized modernism in the fight against the forces of darkness quite the way Picasso did. Today, with the specter of authoritarianism newly ascendant, Guernica remains as relevant as ever.
Calling Michelangelo’s David iconic is something of an understatement: A monument of art history both literally and figuratively, it is undoubtedly the world’s most famous sculpture—and, with a height of nearly 14 feet and a weight of more than six tons, impossible to ignore.
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Fashioned from white Carrara marble and depicting its subject completely nude, David (1501–1504) represented a high-water mark of the Florentine Renaissance, a paragon of the revival of classicism that marked Europe’s emergence out of the medieval period. “It cannot be denied that this work has carried off the palm from all other statues, modern or ancient, Greek or Latin,” Giorgio Vasari would later write in The Lives of the Artists, first published in 1550, “No other artwork is equal to it in any respect.”
Indeed, the acclaim it met upon its unveiling was such that when a committee of artists discussed where exactly David should be installed, an envious Leonardo Da Vinci suggested an out-of-the-way location. Instead the piece received pride of place in front of the Palazzo Vecchio, Florence’s seat of power, on the Piazza della Signoria (though it had been originally intended for the roof of the city’s cathedral, the Duomo).
The figure of David—the shepherd boy and future king of Israel who brought low the gargantuan Philistine champion, Goliath, with a slingshot—had already been a subject for other Florentine artists years before Michelangelo. During the 1440s, for instance, Donatello fashioned a bronze version of the biblical hero (also naked), depicting him in a rather louche pose with one hand on his hip and the other holding a sword as he steps on Goliath’s severed head.
David, then, was something of a civic symbol, but Florence’s identification with him intensified when France’s King Charles VIII invaded Italy in 1494. Florence’s ruling Medici family, accused of compromising the city’s independence from the French, was expelled, followed by the establishment of a new republic (which started inauspiciously with the two-year reign of the theocratic Dominican friar Girolamo Savonarola). Confronted by adversaries that included the Medici plotting a return to power, Florence embraced David as the embodiment of heroic resistance, ultimately leading to the creation of Michelangelo’s masterpiece.
Technically, Michelangelo was taking over a commission that had been in progress for decades. The Opera di Santa Maria del Fiore, the organization charged with the construction and maintenance of the Duomo, had initially awarded the grant to Donatello’s protégé, Agostino di Duccio, in 1463. It was assumed that the David would be carved from multiple pieces of marble, but when Agostino went to the quarry at Carrara to select the material, he chose a single, massive block of bianco ordinario, a lesser grade of rock that would eventually prove problematic. Agostino roughed out the torso, legs, and feet of David before abandoning the work upon the death of his master in 1466. Ten years later, another student of Donatello, Antonio Rossellino, was hired to resume the effort, but he immediately withdrew from the contract, citing the poor quality of the stone. The block, which became known as Il Gigante (The Giant), lay outdoors on its side in the Duomo’s courtyard for 25 years before Michelangelo entered the picture in 1500.
The Opera had already raised Il Gigante upright and built a scaffold around it when Michelangelo commenced carving on September 13, 1501. He worked in secret in the courtyard, exposed to the elements, demonstrating a talent for laboring under difficult conditions that would become mythologized with his work on the Sistine ceiling.
Once Michelangelo had finished, it became clear that there was no way to hoist the sculpture to the top of the Duomo as planned, and the aforementioned committee was convened to determine a suitable alternative location. Among the suggestions was a spot in front of the cathedral, which Sandro Botticelli endorsed. Others thought that, given the imperfections in the marble, it should be placed under the roof of the Loggia dei Lanzi on the Piazza della Signoria to protect it from the rain. The committee ultimately decided on putting David in front of the Palazzo Vecchio, where it served as a totem of defiance against Florence’s enemies.
Packed in a wooden crate, David was transported the half mile from the cathedral to the Piazza della Signoria in June 1504. It took 40 men more than four days to roll the sculpture along greased logs to its final destination. Michelangelo continued to add finishing touches to the statue once it was installed, and gold leaf was later applied to parts of the figure, a long-forgotten addition that wore off over time.
Michelangelo’s rendering of David was unlike any previous iteration. Whereas the subject had usually been presented in triumph over his defeated foe, Michelangelo chose the moment before the confrontation. David is presented with one hand raised, holding a sling draped over his shoulder, with the other hand hanging by his side, clenching the rock he’d soon let fly. His body is relaxed yet coiled for action, his countenance wary and alert as his eyes size up his target with a penetrating glare. His hands are huge, suggesting massive batteries ready to discharge their deadly energy. The power and subtlety with which Michelangelo conveys David’s inherent tension through musculature and facial expression are indeed unmatched, as Vasari stated, by any work before or since.
After cracks were discovered in the statue’s left leg, it was moved to the Gallery of the Academy of Florence during the 1870s. In 1882 it was moved again to a purpose-built alcove within the Academy, where it sits under a domed skylight. In 1910 a replica was placed in the statue’s former spot on the Piazza della Signoria.
Over the years, David has attracted millions of visitors, and on one occasion in 1991, the unwanted attention of a deranged artist named Piero Cannata, who attacked the sculpture with a hammer, breaking off the second toe on the left foot. He was detained, along with tourists attempting to make off with the pieces. But repairs were successfully made to David, renewing its role as a testament to human achievement.
The world loves few things better than a controversy involving an artist. Such brouhahas are nothing new; Caravaggio’s Death of the Virgin (c. 1605–06), for instance, was rejected by the Church fathers who commissioned it for the chapel of Santa Maria Della Scala in Rome because of its brutally realistic depiction of Mary—for whom a prostitute served as model, according to some sources. Clashes became more regular during the 19th century, when épater les bourgeois became a rallying cry. The stark nudity of Édouard Manet’s Olympia (1863) and Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe (1862–63) shook up the Parisian public, while Gustave Courbet’s L’Origine du monde (1866)—a closeup of a woman’s anatomy between spread thighs—continues to startle to this day.
The trend only accelerated with the accession of modernism during the 20th century, when the avant-garde transformed the shock of the new into a feature instead of a bug. Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907), with its angular, Africanized prostitutes in a brothel, parading their wares, appalled viewers and critics alike; it even gave Henri Matisse pause when he first saw it. The Futurists went out of their way to instigate riots by insulting crowds during evenings of performances and readings, while Marcel Duchamp challenged decorum, the line between mass production and fine art, and a propensity for censorship among artists by entering a urinal (Fountain, 1917) under an assumed name for an exhibition by the Society of Independent Artists.
Since the turn of the millennium, however, one could argue that generating controversy has become something of a commodity rewarded by the art market and by an attention economy looking for content, though there are exceptions where the stakes are real. Our list of 10 contemporary art controversies provides examples of each, as it examines the efficacy of boundary-pushing in the 21st century.
Read more about “Art in the 21st Century” here.
Most people have heard of Cubism and probably even have a fair idea of what a Cubist painting looks like. And they are certainly familiar with Cubism’s most famous figure, Pablo Picasso—an artist who, despite his misogyny, sexual predation, and generally poor treatment of the women in his life, remains synonymous with the idea of artistic genius.
But while obvious to most that, say, Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon looks drastically different from Leonardo’s Mona Lisa, the non-artgoing public has a limited understanding of the extent of Cubism’s revolutionary transformation of the Western tradition in art—which is to say, the specific canon that evolved in Europe over a 500-year period starting in the 15th century.
Cubism’s emergence in the early 1900s signaled a seismic break with artistic tenets that had held sway since the revival of Greco-Roman art during the Renaissance. While those conventions had been under assault for much of the 19th century, Cubism delivered the final blow, paving the way for the avant-garde movements that followed.
But Cubism was also a harbinger larger historical developments to come. Its shattering of form, composition, and pictorial space seems in hindsight to have visually foreshadowed the epochal collapse of a political order that had governed the Continent since the defeat of Napoleon in 1815. Indeed, Cubism’s explosive break with tradition would soon echo through the carnage of World War I and the end of the monarchist regimes that started it. On can make an argument then, that understanding the 20th century begins with understanding Cubism.
Georges Seurat’s most famous painting, A Sunday on La Grande Jatte (1884), hangs at the Art Institute of Chicago, where visitors jostle forward and back to observe the composition as a whole before moving in to the study the technique—pointillism—that’s made this work an art historical icon.
It’s well known that Seurat used dabs of separate hues that coalesced to create images when viewed from afar while dematerializing into abstract patterns upon close inspection. But the crowd around La Grande Jatte may also become aware that they’re being mirrored by those within it, a cross section of Parisians enjoying the views on the island in the Seine from which the painting takes its name. Other museumgoers may register the contrast between their own constantly shifting selves and the scene’s nearly total absence of movement, a preternatural stillness designed to recall the decorated walls of temples and tombs. “I want to make modern people, in their essential traits, move about as they do on those friezes,” Seurat once wrote, “and place them on canvases organized by harmonies of color.” Yet Seurat’s stated wish to fix transient moments for eternity obscures the radical nature of both the painting and Seurat’s art in general.
Seurat was hardly alone in painting contemporary life during la belle epoque, as the examples of Manet, Renoir, and Caillebotte attest. But while the Impressionists tended to gravitate toward the “new” Paris of boulevards plowed through its old medieval clutter, Seurat often used the city’s industrialized suburbs as a backdrop. He leveraged the era’s studies on optics to suffuse his subjects within clouds of dots lofted by the larger social and technological transformations of the late 19th century (echoing, for example, the color-separation process of chromolithography, the most advanced form of commercial printing in his day). And he atomized the continuity of the picture plane, a move exceeding anything his coevals attempted.
Sitting on the Flemish coast, the city of Ostend in Belgium overlooks the English Channel, its miles of beaches making it a popular seaside resort since the first half of the 19th century. It’s also known for a yearly carnival attracting masked revelers whose presence lends a macabre air to Ostend’s otherwise picturesque character—which, in any case, conceals an oft violent past.
Originally settled in the early Middle Ages, Ostend became a fortified stronghold during the 15th century thanks to a vital maritime location that made it a flash point of conflict. Between 1601 and 1604, the town was besieged by Spain during Holland’s rebellion against the Hapsburg crown, with cannonades hurled daily against its walls. The dead on both sides totaled six figures, leaving human remains that were still being discovered well into the 20th century.
Adding to the body count, an explosion at a local ammunition dump in 1827 left dozens of casualties. During World War I a German U-boat base in Ostend was assaulted by the Royal Navy, and in World War II Britain rained incendiary bombs on the city when it was once again occupied by Germany.
It wouldn’t be an exaggeration, then, to say that Ostend has been a stately bourgeois pleasure dome haunted by the dead, its dark undercurrent very much suffusing the art of its most illustrious son, the painter James Ensor (1860–1949).
A contemporary of both the Post-Impressionists and the Symbolists, Ensor didn’t fit into either category, being instead a precursor of two of the 20th-century’s most important and influential movements: Expressionism and Surrealism. Ensor transformed Charles Baudelaire’s call to paint modern life into a kind of Twilight Zone of the Belle Epoque, where corruptions of spirit and flesh, imminent mortality, and eschatological forebodings of the future were ever present.
One can see as much in Ensor’s sardonic 1888 etching My Portrait in 1960, in which he depicts himself as a supine skeleton, moldering on the ground on the centenary of his birth. While he called the image a “simple anticipation” of his ultimate destiny, it seems more than serendipitous that the date corresponds to the height of cold war fears about nuclear Armageddon. In this piece Ensor could be said to be both literally and figuratively ahead of his time, and the same was true of the rest of his oeuvre.
This year marks 75 years since the artist’s death at 89, an anniversary being celebrated by several Ensor exhibitions, including a major survey that recently opened at the Royal Museum of Fine Arts in Antwerp (through January 19, 2025). Given the occasion, the time is ripe to revisit Ensor’s place in art history and the ways in which he shaped it.
ENSOR 2024 shows this fall:
“Ostend, Ensor’s Imaginary Paradise,” the Venetian Galleries, Ostend, through October 27, 2024.
“James Ensor: Satire, Parody, Pastiche,” James Ensor House, Ostend, through January 12, 2025.
“Ensor’s Wildest Dreams,” KMSKA, Antwerp, through January 18, 2025
“Masquerade, Makeup & Ensor,” MoMu, Antwerp, through February 2, 2025
“Cindy Sherman: Anti-Fashion” FOMU, Antwerp, through February 2, 2025
The story goes that after leaving a recording session on November 8, 1966, John Lennon of the Beatles strolled into an installation in progress at the Indica Gallery in the Mayfair section of London. He was familiar with the place through his bandmate Paul McCartney and other acquaintances that included musician-producer Peter Asher, who co-owned the gallery with John Dunbar (husband of pop chanteuse Marianne Faithfull) and a third partner. Making his way around the space, Lennon perused such works as a ladder leading up to a painting fixed to the ceiling, where one could find a magnifying glass dangling on a chain. Viewers were encouraged to climb up and peer through the lens to find the word YES written on the canvas in tiny letters. (Speaking years later, Lennon said he was relieved to find that it didn’t say NO after the effort of seeing it.)
Dunbar introduced the artist to Lennon, who then examined another piece instructing gallerygoers to hammer a nail into it. When Lennon asked if he could give it a try, the artist initially demurred, preferring that the object remain untouched until the opening the next day, but then relented, saying that Lennon could proceed for a fee of five shillings. Lennon replied “Well, I’ll give you an imaginary five shillings and hammer an imaginary nail in.” Thus, one of the most famous romances in rock-and-roll history was born.
The artist in question was Yoko Ono, and it is no surprise that her story’s intertwining with Lennon’s made her one of a handful of artists whose pop cultural reputations were commensurate with their oeuvres. But unlike her peers in this respect—Frida Kahlo, Andy Warhol, Salvador Dalí, and Pablo Picasso, for example—Ono’s notoriety overshadowed her practice to the point of displacing it, thanks to her misogynistically conferred reputation as the woman who broke up the Beatles. Seen as little more than a character in a real-life soap opera, Ono was transformed from an artist into an artifact in the public imagination.
But Ono had already been a well-established figure in the postwar avant-garde by the time she met Lennon, due to her association with the Fluxus movement. Interdisciplinary and international in scope, Fluxus focused on process over product, becoming foundational to the development of the performance, conceptual, and video art that followed. Whatever else he might have thought of them, the works that Lennon encountered comported with the Fluxus ideology of merging art and life.
In the decades since Lennon’s 1980 murder at the hands of a delusional fan, Ono (as author, filmmaker, and musician as well as visual artist) has enjoyed a renewed admiration within the art world and beyond. The first significant Ono revival, for instance, occurred in 2000 with “YES,” a show at the Japan Society in New York that subsequently traveled to the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, among other venues. In 2015 MoMA presented a survey of Ono’s work between 1960 and her “unofficial” MoMA debut in 1971: an unsanctioned one-woman show in which she released hundreds of perfume-soaked flies inside the museum, inviting visitors to follow them. This year London’s Tate Modern has mounted a major monograph spanning her practice from the mid 1950s to the present.
Welcome as these encomiums were, however, they often created the impression that her time with Lennon represented an interruption of her career, but nothing could be farther from the truth. As her 1971 intervention at MoMA makes clear, Ono pursued projects well after meeting Lennon. Moreover, he became her partner for various collaborations in which she took the lead (though some regard these efforts as celebrity hijinks). For these reasons, it’s worth taking another look at Ono’s life and art.