A handsome dark-haired man, his neck tucked into his shoulders, walks around a museum gallery, scanning the art on the walls. A dozing guard fails to notice just how suspiciously this man is surveying the objects on view. The man, played by Josh O’Connor, snatches a Revolutionary War carving from a window case before exiting the museum with his two sons and wife (Alana Haim). This thief is a family man, and this petty crime paves the way for a much bigger one in Kelly Reichardt’s The Mastermind, which had its world premier at the Cannes Film Festival last month and will be released by Mubi later this year.

What heist O’Connor’s character, a carpenter nicknamed J.B., will be the mastermind is just part of the tension that binds together this quietly suspenseful movie. For much of the film, we know very little about J.B.; figuring out who he is and what drives him, becomes almost as important as knowing if he will get away with his master plan. At times, it seems like his motivation is simply boredom.  

The portrait of J.B. is revealed piecemeal, like a lens coming into focus. He seems to be an art aficionado, creating drawings based on four Arthur Dove paintings. When his accomplices start thrusting the artworks he’s been eyeing for months into the trunk of a stolen car, he orders them to be careful. He briefly displays them in his living room, taking a few seconds to observe them before storing them in a barn.

J.B.’s lack of purpose as well as his appreciation for art recall two characters from previous Reichardt movies. In Showing Up, which premiered at Cannes in 2022, Michelle Williams plays Lizzy, a sculptor and professor in Oregon who is preparing for a solo show. In Wendy and Lucy (2008), Williams is Wendy, an art school dropout strapped for cash who searches for her dog, Lucy. By contrast, J.B. appears at first to be determined and confident. He is quick on his feet and seemingly sure of himself as he plots the heist, but as the movie unfolds this facade begins to unravel.   

For The Mastermind, Reichardt drew inspiration from a 1972 robbery of the Worcester Art Museum in Massachusetts, in which two Gauguins, a Picasso, and a Rembrandt were stolen in broad daylight. The thieves were arrested and the paintings recovered days later.  (The film’s fictitious Framingham Art Museum is actually the I.M. Pei–designed, red brick Cleo Rogers Memorial Library in Columbus, Indiana.) At first, a Gauguin seems like it might be the object of J.B.’s theft, but instead he goes for Dove’s Tree Forms (1932), Willow Tree (1937), Tanks & Snowbanks (1938), and Yellow Blue Green Brown (1941). Reichardt has said that the choice of Dove, an American modernist known for his abstracted landscapes, points to J.B.’s lack of ambition.

Aesthetically, the 1970s of the Worcester heist weighs heavily on the film, from the influence of Stephen Shore and William Eggleston’s color photos of America during this era to the context of the Vietnam War. Special attention is also paid to each scene’s framing. The doors and windows, whether open or closed, seem to serve as a metaphor for J.B.’s potential escape or perhaps his incarceration. He is often shown through a door or window opening, giving the impression that we are spying on or tailing J.B.

At times, The Mastermind borders on comedy. The heist itself is hilarious: a couple of amateurs with nylon stockings over their heads are caught red-handed, not by the sleeping guard, but by a young girl who pretentiously describes the art on view in French—“ennuyeux”, “dépravé”, “factice” (boring, depraved, fake). They still manage to escape, though not without delays. Later, J.B.’s father, played by Bill Camp, observes, “It is inconceivable that those abstracts paintings would be worth that much trouble.” The Mastermind is a film where mystery, humor, and art gracefully interlock.

Over the past 40 years, German artist Katharina Grosse (b. 1961) has gained many fans for using an airless spray machine to make eye-catching, color-saturated, and immersive paintings. Many of her works have been shown in museums and galleries—one from 2004 involved spraying paint across the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston’s interiors, along with clothing, papers, eggs, and coins scattered across the floor—but she has also created site-specific installations for less conventional places, including an abandoned military building in New York’s Fort Tilden Park.

This week, Grosse will take on one of the biggest projects of her career: a monumental painting that will fill the Messeplatz in Basel during the Swiss edition of Art Basel. Titled CHOIR and curated by Natalia Graboska, the project will see her spray paint the entirety of this pedestrian precinct in shades of magenta.

ARTnews spoke with Grosse about the evolution of her practice and her plans for this year’s iteration of Art Basel.

ARTnews: You were introduced for the time to a spray gun in Marseille. What was so enticing about it? 

Katharina Grosse: I was in Marseille for half a year in the 1990s. It was a very anarchic place, much more so than it is now. I got to see people work with spray guns and other tools. I only tried out a spray gun a few years later. [The people in Marseille] saw themselves as outsiders. The atmosphere there definitely changed my approach to painting.

Edvard Munch experimented with spraying devices to paint during the 1890s. Was he one of your inspirations? 

I did not have this reference, no. However, I have always been attracted to Munch’s work, especially because he was doing unusual things with his paintings, taking them off stretchers and hanging them off a hook in the snow. His outdoor studio is fascinating to me. His works had no beginning no end, which I can relate to because, to me, a painted image is not limited to a canvas. I traveled to Norway around 1985 to see where Munch lived and the landscapes he drew inspiration from. I am currently preparing a show that will open in 2026 at the Munch museum in Oslo.

How has your technique evolved since you spray painted a corner of one of the Kunsthalle Bern’s galleries in green, then realizing that painting “could pass over architectural structures and borders”?

Untitled [a 1998 work that involved spraying acrylic paint directly onto the corner between two walls and a ceiling at the Kunsthalle Bern] was a key moment in my career. It made me understand the independence of painting, which doesn’t have to comply with spatial rules. It’s almost like an exterior agent that swoops in, flickers up, shows possibilities we hadn’t seen before, makes them more complex and then, all of a sudden, wears off and disappears. Another turning point for me was The Bedroom. In 2004, I painted over my bedroom, including personal objects—books, sheets, works that I had made in the past, pieces of furniture. It did not feel like a loss, but rather like a transformation. It gave me another perspective on my life. Now, when I’m invited to paint in a public space, I draw from that experience. I see it as a crossover. I put a painted image—which is a proposition, part of my imagination—on top of something that everybody knows.

The same kind of crossover will happen on Messeplatz, which Art Basel has commissioned you to paint entirely before the beginning of the fair.

It’s the first time that a painter has been invited to take over the 53,800-square-foot Messeplatz. The challenge with that piece is that I have to be up to that scale. My movement determines how the place is being perceived. The spray gun will help me expand my reach. With this tool, I can paint endlessly. Then, I will go over the whole square—into the water, over the water, over the roofs that are in front of the entrance.

Fair-goers are transient. Once they step into the Messeplatz, they will become part of the work. I really want to create a painting that is almost like a threshold between reality and fiction. It is a membrane: you can walk through it, step out of it at any time, or stay in it as much as you want.

How will you do that?

I want to make a visceral painting that gets into your system so fast that you don’t have to think about it. In that prospect, I’ve worked working with photographs, floor plans, models of various scales, but with a clear vision in mind. [The idea] popped into my head right away—which is not always the case.

The square is being protected by a very thin layer of asphalt that will be peeled off and recycled once the fair is over. I usually don’t paint on black, so we’ll have to create a white structure for me to paint over. I chose two tones of magenta for their high visibility. This is the color that lifeguards now use instead of orange.  

How do you feel about your work being ephemeral?  

I like the idea that my work will disappear after seven days, once Art Basel is over. You can’t buy it, you can’t own it. It defies the reality of the fair, which is mainly about transactions. There is beauty in that transience.

Your exhibition at the Deichtorhallen Hamburg features an installation and a selection of studio paintings, as well as drawings and sketch books. What does working indoors bring you that performing outdoors does not? And vice versa?  

Working outdoors is almost like swimming in the sea; and indoors, like swimming in a pool. There are two different ways to do it, and yet, you’re still in the water. In my studio, I can be working on 20 to 30 works at the same time. My approach to color is then more experimental. Otherwise, I use it to come into an area which escapes labels, definitions, and descriptions, to feel a direct resonance with a space I am connecting with.

You are known for embracing the events and incidents that arise as you work. What kind of incidents could occur during the creative process?

I don’t expect anything, and that’s the point. In my experience, I start with what I have envisioned, to get a sense of the space and atmosphere I am working with, but I am still aware that many things may impact my work—the wind, the weather, my team. After a while, you become part of the painting, which makes it easier to adapt and find solutions. You resonate with everything and everybody you work with, like an organism.

“Do remember they can’t cancel the spring,” artist David Hockney told the world in March 2020, just as lockdown for the Covid-19 pandemic began. That sentiment was in full swing, in the early days of spring now five years later, throughout the artist’s just-opened survey at the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris (on view through August 31). Spanning all four floors of the museum, the current exhibition is the largest ever devoted to the British artist, whose work was last surveyed in Paris at the Centre Pompidou eight years ago. The 11-room presentation consists of over 400 objects, from paintings and drawings to digital works (made via both computer and iPad) and even immersive video installations. Titled “David Hockney 25,” the show focuses on the last 25 years of his career, but also includes pieces from throughout his seven-decade career.

Upon entering, the exhibition you immediately notice its colorful display, full of brilliant greens, deep blues, and blazing yellows that suffuse the institution’s usually immaculate white walls. The Fondation Louis Vuitton’s artistic director Suzanne Pagé attributed this sensibility to Hockney himself. “He is the true curator of the exhibition. He called all the shots,” she said, adding that the artist worked closely with his partner and studio manager Jean-Pierre Gonçalves de Lima and assistant Jonathan Wilkinson.

The exhibition begins on the lower level, opening with his emblematic works from the 1950s to the ’70s, including Portrait of My Father (1955), the first painting Hockney ever sold and which he recently bought back. “When he visited the exhibition, you could tell he was not looking at the painting per se, but rather at his beloved father,” Pagé told ARTnews ahead of the show’s opening.

The adjacent gallery is home to 1967’s A Bigger Splash, Hockney’s iconic depiction of a Californian swimming pool just after an unseen figure has dived in, and his 1972 Portrait of An Artist (Pool with Two Figures), which sold to top collector Pierre Chen for $90.3 million at Christie’s in 2018. On either side of a door leading to a series of Yorkshire landscapes, from the ’90s to the early 2000s, hang two of his most famous double portraits: Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy (1968) and Mr. and Mrs. Clark and Percy (1970–71). (Mrs. Clark, or Celia Birtwell, is a frequent model of Hockney’s, appearing in a handful of paintings throughout the exhibition.)  

These double portraits hint at what’s upstairs, where the Fondation Louis Vuitton has assembled around 60 such works. Hockney is known for only painting people he knows: his assistants, his cook, his gardener, his siblings, and his friends, like Frank Gehry, the building’s architect. Hockney’s approach to portraiture speak to his painterly affection for his models, as seen in his depiction of Gonçalves de Lima with his head in his hands and his elbows on his knees, a pose he borrowed from van Gogh’s 1882 Sad Old Man (At Eternity’s Gate).

Hockney has always embraced the influence of his predecessors, and much like the van Gogh painting inspired a composition, Fra Angelico’s Annunciation (ca. 1440–45), with its emphasis on reverse perspective caused him to update previous works. Garrowby Hill (2017), for example, shows the twisty curves and angled plots of the Yorkshire landscape that he has depicted since the ’90s. And when he was stuck in Normandy during lockdown, he turned to the approach of painting en plein air favored by the Impressionists like Monet. Using his iPad, Hockney created luminous compositions in juxtaposed flat tints, but with pop accents, to capture the effects of light and climactic changes.

This part of exhibition closes with a handful of never-before-seen works, which Hockney himself refers to as being “more spiritual” than his previous ones. The enigmatic After Blake: Less Is Known Than People Think (2024), for example, echoes the illustrations that the Romantic poet William Blake made for Dante’s Divine Comedy, though Hockney’s version is a cheerier vision of the strata of heaven, hell, and Earth, replete with a Pointillist sky. Even more recent is Play Within a Play Within a Play and Me with a Cigarette (2024–25), featuring the painter in a patterned ochre suit, as he smokes and sketches out the very same scene that unfolds before the viewer’s eyes. On his checkered jacket a round sticker reads “End Bossiness Soon.” This tongue-in-cheek self-portrait recalls a 2004 interview he gave to BBC Newsnight: “I hate bossiness … I smoke for my mental health.”

The current exhibition highlights how Hockney has become a master in the art of blending tradition and innovation through his vibrant palette and his appetite for new technologies, like sketching with his iPad. His largest work in the show, Bigger Trees Near Warter Or/Ou Peinture sur le Motif pour le Nouvel Age Post-Photographique (2007), consists of 50 panels that had been digitally subdivided by Gonçalves de Lima in order to create this 15-foot-by-40-foot mammoth. Nearby are his nocturnal views of Normandy, which were exhibited last year at the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Rouen. So fluid is Hockney’s technique in both traditional and digital painting that it makes it almost impossible to tell the acrylics and the iPad works apart.

The Fondation’s top gallery, often called “the cathedral” for its high ceilings, has been transformed into a site-specific installation, made in collaboration with 59 Productions, that plunges visitors into Hockney’s work for the stage. On view are set designs, and some costumes, for Igor Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress (1975), Mozart’s The Magic Flute (1978) and Richard Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde (1987). Here visitors can sit back on a giant cushion, relax, and enjoy the wall projections, as well as their corresponding soundtracks.

In Ancient Greece, a mouseion was the temple of the Muses, the goddesses of inspiration. As long as I can remember, I have always felt inspired when visiting museums. They’ve often helped with writer’s block, reconnecting me with my creativity almost as soon as I entered any of the galleries of Paris’s famed institutions. I have spent many days and some evenings surrounded by beauty—but never a full night.

When I unexpectedly ran into Centre Pompidou president Laurent Le Bon while covering the opening of a museum in Italy last year, I told him of a dream of mine: to explore the Centre Pompidou by night. He agreed at once, telling me the proposal was part of his vision to experiment with the museum and how it operates.

As the Pompidou team would later explain, the museum had never before granted another reporter this opportunity; TV and movie crews usually leave by 1 am when filming after hours. A cheffe du groupe de sûreté, or head security officer, named Francine, who is the only woman to have been appointed to this high-level position at the Centre Pompidou and whom everyone affectionately calls “Tinker Bell,” would accompany me for the duration of the stay, guiding me into any room of my choosing. (The blockbuster “Surrealism” exhibition, however, was off limits for insurance reasons.) Having worked at the museum for almost 20 years, Francine knows the building intimately.

I arrived at 8 pm sharp on a frigid Monday in early December. Francine met me at a back entrance, and we went to a multipurpose space on the 6th floor, where I remembered Art Basel Paris held its 2024 press conference, while we waited for the museum to close. This would be where I could rest. The Pompidou team had even left a sleeping bag on the couch for me, but I had already determined that I would not fall asleep that night. Afterall the 1977 Piano & Rogers–designed building measures 80,700 square feet across five floors—that’s a lot of ground to cover.

At 8:45 pm, a recorded voiceover announcing the museum’s closure in 15 minutes started the drawn-out evacuation of the galleries, and an hour later, a similar ritual occurs with the clearing of the third-floor Bibliothèque Publique d’Information, the famed public library. Regulars with nicknames like Barracuda, Jesus, Banana, or the Writer, tend to linger, the building being a second home to them. At 11:30 pm, the ground-floor Forum was finally empty. The lights went off, according to a timer, and Francine and I were alone at the Centre Pompidou, a prelude to its planned five-year closure this summer.

Just before midnight, Francine escorted me back to the fifth floor to meet French photographer Antoine d’Agata, a member of Magnum Photos since 2008 who is known for his images on addiction, prostitution, international conflicts. Le Bon had invited him to make Room 21B, a former screening room, his studio for almost five months. The framework of this unusual residency, titled “Méthode,” was meant to offer the artist a period of contemplation and fixedness, accessible to the public for the first time in his career. Along the gallery’s black-painted walls, d’Agata has installed a metal structure, filling it with photographs, cameras, and film rolls, as well as laying out all the proofs for a book of his work he is editing.

D’Agata explained that he opted for this residency, as opposed to a traditional exhibition because “I wanted a place to go through and store all my personal archive and belongings. … I had so many new ideas and so many unfinished projects trotting in my head that I felt trapped. I needed closure, to find some peace of mind and recover my freedom of movement.”

He added, “I am not even sure whether photography will be part of my future.”

After two hours of intense conversation, our paths parted at 2 am, when the museum’s rooftop Restaurant Georges closes, as d’Agata was not authorized to stay until morning. I then turned my attention to the Pompidou’s permanent collection galleries on the fifth and sixth floors, displaying about 2,000 pieces of its more than 140,000 works, the largest collection of modern and contemporary art in Europe, second only to that of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Because the lights in the Forum went off at night, I expected the galleries to be completely dark and for Francine to have to turn them on individually; however, the lights at the Pompidou stay on in the galleries long after everyone’s gone.  

In the still of night, with no one and no sound around, I began to see the Pompidou’s treasured works anew. Sonia and Robert Delaunay’s explosively colorful abstract paintings had never appeared to me so clearly. I was drawn to a double-sided painting featuring an unfinished, yet captivating, self-portrait (of Robert), on one side and a hypnotic landscape on the other. I walked over an untitled 1962 painting by Karl Godeg, featuring a golden shape standing out against a dark background, like the moon in the night sky. The painting is among Godeg’s finest, coming right at the start of when he began using gold paint to depict anthropomorphic figures. Next, I headed to the Marc Chagall gallery, where I laid down right under Les mariés et la tour Eiffel (1938–39). Though I didn’t fall asleep, I felt like the newlyweds in the painting, flying over Paris on the back of an imposing white cockerel.

A gallery with crimson-painted walls then caught my eyes. During my visit, the intriguing space was home to “Everytime A Knot is Undone, A God is Released,” an eight-venue exhibition across Paris for the monumental sculptures of Barbara Chase-Riboud. The combination of textile and bronze; rope and silk; black, red and gold in the five works on view gave me a thrill. It occurred to me that I hadn’t considered whether the Centre Pompidou might be haunted. “I don’t know about ghosts, but there is a definitely a presence,” Francine said, reminding me that the piazza below was once a cour des miracles (court of miracles), the Parisian slums of pre-modern Paris that served as the inspiration for Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables.

At 3 am, we descended to “floor 21,” the museum’s second below-ground level, exploring the tunnels that connect the Pompidou with the Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique, a French institute devoted to the research of music and sound. (Piano & Rogers also designed this underground structure, on the south side of the piazza.) This secret tunnel isn’t normally accessible to the public and was fascinating to navigate.

At this point, it was time for a coffee break. As Francine and I chatted, a man suddenly stepped out of a room with a sleeping bag under his arm. (Researchers are allowed to pull all-nighters at IRCAM.) As we left, for fear of disturbing anyone else’s sleep, we noticed a woman was already sitting at the reception desk. It was almost 6 am!

Back inside the Centre Pompidou, we happened upon members of the cleaning staff who were already at work. They tried to teach me their special technique to dusting the floors efficiently—to no avail. Some were listening to the radio which made their routine look even more like a dance. Francine and I were waiting for restorers to arrive. Tuesday is the best day for them to go over the museum collections. They were a bit delayed, so I didn’t get to witness the conservation work. I wish I could have spent the entire day with them but, before I knew it, it was 10 am. The library was about to open, and the Centre Pompidou would welcome visitors in an hour, but it was time for me to go home.