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FALL 2025 FROM THE EDITOR
In this issue we look at various dialogues—with the past, with other mediums, with process—at work among contemporary painters. Our cover story considers Andy Warhol’s fascination with the silver screen, and with its pervasive influence on popular culture. Nathaniel Mary Quinn shares his affinity for the novels of Alice Walker. Harry Thorne considers music as a continual touchpoint in the work of Peter Doig. The meditative interiors of the turnof-the-twentieth-century Danish painter Vilhelm Hammershøi serve as a reference for a new body of work by Ed Ruscha. An exhibition in Florence celebrates the continuing influence of Fra Angelico, a devoted Catholic friar who broke new ground during the Renaissance.
We hear from artists John Currin, Jenny Saville, and Dana Schutz in a conversation, moderated by curator Cecilia Alemani, on the work and methods of Willem de Kooning, an endless source of inspiration for their respective practices. And Saville’s retrospective in London this summer leads her to speak with best-selling novelist Douglas
Stuart about their appreciation for each other’s work and about points where their inspirations have overlapped, including the city of Glasgow, which plays a prominent role both in Stuart’s writing and in Saville’s early studies.
Leaving the world of painting, Jordan Carter explores the role of Polaroids in the practice of the sculptor Cady Noland through a newly published book by the artist. And Michael Auping considers the early works of Bruce Nauman, Chris Burden, Maria Nordman, and Eric Orr as a “dark” form of the California Light and Space movement of the 1960s.
The critically acclaimed filmmaker Abel Ferrara speaks with Carlos Valladares about his recent experiences filming in Ukraine. The Japanese architect Kengo Kuma discusses the delicate balance between buildings and nature. Derek C. Blasberg talks fashion and art with Tory Burch. And for those passionate about collecting, Alison Castle tells us about Nicola Bulgari’s love of American cars.
Alison McDonald, Editor-in-chief
56
Cady Noland: Obscene
Jordan Carter, curator at Dia Art Foundation, engages with the new artist’s book Cady Noland: Polaroids 1986–2024
62
The Sound of Drums on the Surface of an Ocean: Music and the Art of Peter Doig
On the occasion of Peter Doig: House of Music at Serpentine, London, Harry Thorne addresses the practical and conceptual links between the visual art of Peter Doig and the work of various musicians. The exhibition opens on October 3, 2025.
68
Abel Ferrara
Carlos Valladares talks with filmmaker Abel Ferrara about Turn in the Wound , Ferrara’s recent documentary exploring the experience of art and the war in Ukraine. They discuss what the film means to him personally, whether or not the human drive to destruction is natural, and Ferrara’s response to modern chaos.
FALL 2025 TABLE OF CONTENTS
74
In Conversation: Jenny Saville and Douglas Stuart
Ahead of her exhibition over the summer at the National Portrait Gallery, London, Jenny Saville met with the novelist Douglas Stuart to discuss the city of Glasgow, the beauty and blemishes of bodies, and their respective creative processes.
82 At the Movies with Andy Warhol
Carlos Valladares tracks the artist’s engagements with Hollywood glamour, thinking through the ways in which the star system and its marketing engine informed his work.
88
The Dark Sides of Light and Space
Tracking works by Chris Burden, Bruce Nauman, Maria Nordman, and Eric Orr as outliers and outcroppings of the California Light and Space movement, Michael Auping argues that darkness—the absence of light and space—is a key element of the aesthetic.
94
Fra Angelico
This fall, the city of Florence will celebrate the work of Fra Angelico with a major retrospective—the city’s first on this artist in seventy years—at both the Palazzo Strozzi and the Museo di San Marco. For the occasion, Ben Street writes about the resonance of Fra Angelico’s work in modern and contemporary art.
100 Anna Weyant: Wait for It
Anna Weyant’s first solo museum show, at the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid, was curated by Guillermo Solana in close collaboration with the artist. Sydney Stutterheim considers the artist’s contemporary exploration of suspense, identity, concealment, and temporality.
108
Hans Ulrich Obrist’s Questionnaire
For the third installment of 2025, we are honored to present the architect Marina Tabassum.
110
Jean Schlumberger: Taking Flight
The jewelry designer Jean Schlumberger permanently changed the face of High Jewelry with his daring approach to source materials and techniques. Wyatt Allgeier explores his life, legacy, and the persistence of his studied yet whimsical work.
114
Fashion and Art, Part 23: Tory Burch
Tory Burch, chairman and chief creative officer at her namesake brand, which she launched in 2004, met with the Quarterly ’s Derek C. Blasberg this past June.
Christian House visits Copenhagen to consider the quiet and persistent power of Hammershøi’s art.
126
Festival de Cannes: Edges of the Frame
Miriam Bale reports from Cannes on the 2025 edition of the international film festival, highlighting three standout films.
140
Nathaniel Mary Quinn: What You See Is Grace
On the eve of an exhibition of new paintings at Gagosian, New York, Nathaniel Mary Quinn met with Ashley Stewart Rödder to discuss the genesis of the works he’s been creating, their literary origins, and his evolving approach to the practices— and intersections—of painting and drawing.
146
Willem de Kooning: Endless Painting
This past May, artists John Currin, Jenny Saville, and Dana Schutz joined curator Cecilia Alemani for a conversation in the exhibition Willem de Kooning: Endless Painting , a substantial presentation of paintings and sculptures at Gagosian, New York, organized by Alemani with the support of The Willem de Kooning Foundation.
154
A Foreign Language: Part Three
The third installment of a short story by Catherine Lacey.
164
Rudolf Stingel: Vineyard Paintings
Thomas Demand looks at Rudolf Stingel’s Vineyard Paintings
182 Choreographing Rhapsodies
Maximiliane Leuschner speaks with South Africa’s most-sought-after emerging choreographer, Mthuthuzeli November.
Previous spread, right: Bird on a Rock by Tiffany.
Photo: Fukio Emura, courtesy Tiffany & Co.
Above: UCCA Clay Museum, Yixing, China, 2024, designed by Kengo Kuma & Associates.
Photo: Eiichi Kano
Below: James Schuyler
170 Kengo Kuma
Despite having major museum and commercial projects under construction worldwide, the Japanese architect Kengo Kuma still makes time for experiment. Meeting him in London as he took a break from a global tour, Vicky Richardson asked him about a new relationship he sees between building and nature.
176
Olga de Amaral
Ekaterina Juskowski delves into six decades of Amaral’s life, work, and inspirations.
Alison Castle writes on the Italian collector’s quest to keep vintage cars alive.
192
The Art of Biography: James Schuyler
The celebrated New York School poet and Pulitzer Prize–winner James Schuyler is the subject of Nathan Kernan’s new biography, A Day like Any Other: The Life of James Schuyler. Here, Kernan speaks with Raymond Foye.
208
Game Changer: Brian Wilson
Brian Dillon celebrates the musician’s sonic revolutions.
Michael Auping
Michael Auping is an independent curator and art historian. Well-known as a curator and scholar of Abstract Expressionism, he has organized exhibitions of the work of Arshile Gorky, Philip Guston, and Clyfford Still. He has also organized major exhibitions of the work of Georg Baselitz, Anselm Kiefer, and Susan Rothenberg.
Vicky Richardson
Vicky Richardson is a curator, writer, and the former Head of Architecture at the Royal Academy of Arts, London. Architectural models feature strongly in the exhibitions she has curated, including Herzog & de Meuron (Royal Academy of Arts, 2023) and What Where (Roca London Gallery, 2019), which featured models of Flores & Prats’s Sala Beckett theater, Barcelona (2019).
FALL 2025 CONTRIBUTORS
Alison Castle
Alison Castle (seen here at the wheel of a 1940 DeSoto from Nicola Bulgari’s collection) is a writer, editor, and filmmaker. She holds a BA in philosophy from Columbia University and an MA in photography and film from New York University. She has edited and written many books on photography, film, and design for Taschen.
Miriam Bale
Miriam Bale is a writer and film programmer based in California.
Ekaterina Juskowski
Ekaterina Juskowski is an interdisciplinary curator, researcher, and photographer. Her practice brings together a range of topics from art history, social justice, gender, cultural heritage, and AI technologies. She is the founder of the art residency at the Old Carpet Factory, on the island of Hydra, Greece, and the author of the book The Warp of Time (2024).
Sydney Stutterheim
Sydney Stutterheim is a writer, curator, and art historian whose research focuses on postwar and contemporary art. She is the author of Artist, Audience, Accomplice: Ethics and Authorship in Art of the 1970s and 1980s (Duke University Press, 2024) and of the recent publication Richard Prince: Early Photography 1977–87 (Gagosian, 2025).
Ben Street
Ben Street is a freelance art historian and educator based in London. He is the author of How to Enjoy Art (Yale University Press, 2021) and of the award-winning children’s book How to Be an Art Rebel (Thames & Hudson, 2021). His research focuses on illuminating points of contact between historical and contemporary art. Photo: David Owens
Brian Dillon
Brian Dillon is an Irish writer based in London. His books include Affinities (2023), Suppose a Sentence (2020), In the Dark Room (2018), and Essayism (2017). His memoir Ambivalence: An Education will be published in 2026 by Fitzcarraldo Editions and New York Review Books.
Nathan Kernan
Nathan Kernan is a writer who lives in New York. He edited James Schuyler’s Diary, which was published by Black Sparrow Press in 1997, and has published his poetry and numerous art reviews, catalogue essays, and monographs. Poems , his collaboration with Joan Mitchell, was published by Tyler Graphics in 1992.
Raymond Foye
Raymond Foye is a contributing editor to the Brooklyn Rail . His most recent publication is Harry Smith: The Naropa Lectures 1989–1991 (2023). Photo: Amy Grantham
Jenny Saville
In her depictions of the human form, Jenny Saville transcends the boundaries of both classical figuration and modern abstraction. Applied in heavy layers, oil paint becomes as visceral as flesh itself, each painted mark maintaining a supple, mobile life of its own. As Saville pushes, smears, and scrapes her pigments over her large-scale canvases, the distinctions between living, breathing bodies and their painted representations begin to collapse. Photo: Paul Hansen/Getty Images
Douglas Stuart
Douglas Stuart is a Scottish-American author and fashion designer. His debut novel, Shuggie Bain , won the 2020 Booker Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Award. It won both the Debut of the Year and the overall Book of the Year at the British Book Awards. Shuggie Bain is to be translated into thirty-eight languages. In April 2022, Stuart published his second novel, Young Mungo. He is currently at work on new writing. His short stories “Found Wanting” and “The Englishman” were published in the New Yorker. His essay “Poverty, Anxiety, and Gender in Scottish Working-Class Literature” was published by Lit Hub.
Harry Thorne
Harry Thorne is a writer and editor at Gagosian. He lives in London.
Catherine Lacey
Catherine Lacey is the author of The Möbius Book (Macmillan, 2025), and of five other books, including Biography of X (2023). She has won a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Award, the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Fiction Award, the Brooklyn Library Prize, and a Lambda Literary Award, and her work has been translated into a dozen languages.
Christian House
Christian House worked as a proposals writer at Sotheby’s for a decade before a period as an obituarist for the Telegraph . He now writes on visual arts, literature, and history for such publications as the Financial Times , Canvas , and CNN Style
Maximiliane Leuschner
Maximiliane Leuschner is an art historian and writer with bylines in Artforum , the Brooklyn Rail , Burlington Contemporary, C Magazine , ESPACE art actuel , frieze , L’Essenziale Studio, Monopol , STIR , and Texte zur Kunst Photo: Sophie Davidson
Dana Schutz
Dana Schutz is a Brooklyn-based painter and sculptor who constructs complex visual narratives that engage the capacity of art to represent subjective experience. Often depicting figures in seemingly impossible, enigmatic, or invented situations, her works reveal the deeper complications, tensions, and ambiguities of contemporary life.
Photo: Jason Schmidt, courtesy the artist and David Zwirner
Cecilia Alemani
Cecilia Alemani is a curator based in New York. Since 2011 she has been the Donald R. Mullen, Jr. Director & Chief Curator of High Line Art, the publicart program presented by the High Line, New York. In 2022 she curated The Milk of Dreams at the 59th Venice Biennale; in 2018 she served as artistic director of the inaugural edition of Art Basel Cities, in Buenos Aires; and in 2017 she curated the Italian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. Over the past ten years Alemani has developed an expertise in commissioning and producing ambitious artworks for public spaces. Photo: Liz Ligon, courtesy the High Line
John Currin
John Currin’s ambitious paintings seduce, repel, surprise, and puzzle. His masterful technique is achieved through the scrutiny and emulation of the compositional devices, graphic rhythms, and refined surfaces of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Northern European painting, while his eroticized subjects exist at odds with the popular dialogue and politics of contemporary art. Photo: Richard Prince Mthuthuzeli November
Ashley Stewart Rödder joined Gagosian as a director in 2019 and is based in New York. She works with a number of the gallery’s artists, including Nathaniel Mary Quinn, Deana Lawson, and Stanley Whitney.
Derek C. Blasberg
Derek C. Blasberg is a writer, fashion editor, and New York Times best-selling author. He has been with Gagosian since 2014 and is the executive editor of Gagosian Quarterly
Carlos Valladares
Carlos Valladares is a writer and critic from Los Angeles. He studied film at Stanford University and began his PhD in History of Art and Film & Media Studies at Yale University in fall 2019. He contributes regularly to Art in America , n+1, and frieze He lives in New York. Photo: Jerry Schatzberg
Nathaniel Mary Quinn
In his composite portraits derived from sources both personal and found, Nathaniel Mary Quinn probes the relationship between visual memory and perception. Fragments of images taken from online sources, fashion magazines, and family photographs come together to form hybrid faces and figures that are at once Dadaesque and adamantly realist, evoking the intimacy and intensity of a face-to-face encounter. Photo: Maris Hutchinson
Tory Burch
Tory Burch is the executive chairman and chief creative officer of Tory Burch LLC. She launched her company in 2004 with a boutique in New York and an e-commerce site; there are now 400 stores and 13 e-commerce sites globally. Designed in her New York atelier, the collection includes ready-to-wear, handbags, shoes, accessories, beauty, and home. In 2009, Burch established the Tory Burch Foundation to provide women entrepreneurs in the United States with capital, education, and community. She has been recognized with numerous awards and honors, including the 2024 Time 100, Harper’s Bazaar ’s Designer of the Year, and Forbes ’s Most Powerful Women in the World, and her designs have been featured in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute. Photo: Patrick Demarchelier
Thomas Demand
Thomas Demand is one of the foremost contemporary German artists. His singular oeuvre merges sculpture and photography and usually relies on found images. The artist, who lives in Berlin, painstakingly reconstructs the found photographs as three-dimensional, usually life-size models made of paper and cardboard before expertly lighting and photographing them with a large-format camera. The models are destroyed once the work process is complete. The result is an uncanny, hybrid image, both a document of the artist’s process and a reconstruction of a preexisting reality.
Bartolomeo Sala
Bartolomeo Sala is an Italian freelance writer and editor based in London. His writing has appeared in FT Magazine , the Sunday Times , the Brooklyn Rail , and elsewhere. He works as a coeditor for the magazine Translator Mag . Before going freelance he worked as a book-to-film scout.
Wyatt Allgeier
Wyatt Allgeier is a writer and an editor for Gagosian Quarterly. He lives and works in New York City.
Jordan Carter
Jordan Carter joined Dia Art Foundation as curator and co-department head in 2021. This year he curated Renée Green: The Equator Has Moved at Dia Beacon and Amy Sillman: Alternate Side (Permutations #1–32) at Dia Bridgehampton. His forthcoming projects include presentations of the work of Agnes Martin and major new commissions by D Harding, Fujiko Nakaya, and Haegue Yang.
Marina Tabassum
Marina Tabassum is an acclaimed architect and educator who has received numerous international recognitions for her contributions in the field of architecture. Before founding Marina Tabassum Architects (MTA), Dhaka, Bangladesh, in 2005, Tabassum was a founding partner, with Kashef Chowdhury, of the Dhaka-based firm urbana between 1995 and 2005. Her practice remains consciously contained in size, undertaking a limited number of projects annually and prioritizing climate, context, culture, and history. Tabassum is a professor at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands. She held the Norman Foster Chair at Yale University in 2023 and has taught as a visiting professor at numerous universities. In 2024, Tabassum was included in Time magazine’s “100 Most Influential People.”
Hans Ulrich Obrist
Hans Ulrich Obrist is artistic director of Serpentine, London. He was previously the curator of the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. Since his first show, World Soup (The Kitchen Show), in Switzerland in 1991, he has curated more than 350 exhibitions. Photo: Tyler Mitchell
Abel Ferrara
Abel Ferrara is a visionary American filmmaker whose raw, uncompromising cinema explores violence, spirituality, and urban life. Raised in a Roman Catholic Italian-American household, he began making Super 8 films with longtime collaborators Nicholas St. John and Jack McIntyre while still in high school. After studying at Rockland Community College and SUNY Purchase, he made his first cult classic, The Driller Killer, in 1979, launching a prolific career. Ferrara‘s major films include Ms. 45 (1981), King of New York (1990), Bad Lieutenant (1992), Dangerous Game (1993), and The Addiction (1995). His upcoming memoir Scene will be published by Simon & Schuster in 2025. Ferrara lives in Rome. Photo: Ivano Grasso
IN SEASON
Gagosian Quarterly presents a selection of new releases coming this fall.
Monograph
Derrick Adams
This first monograph on Derrick Adams is published in advance of the exhibition Derrick Adams: View Master, to open at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, next year, and surveys the full richness of the New York artist’s twenty-five-year career. Celebrating and expanding on the dialogue around contemporary Black life and culture, Adams has developed a vivid iconography of everyday leisure and the pursuit of happiness. The publication includes color reproductions of 150 of his most significant works and is introduced by Alyssa Alexander, a curator and the artist’s studio manager. It includes newly commissioned essays exploring formal, conceptual, and thematic aspects of Adams’s work by Hallie Ringle, Salamishah Tillet, and Dexter Wimberly (the curator of Derrick Adams: View Master ), as well as an interview with the artist by Sandra Jackson-Dumont.
Derrick Adams (Monacelli and Gagosian, 2025)
Center Stage
The Birthplace of Off Broadway: 100 Years of Cherry Lane Theatre
Known as the birthplace of offBroadway, the Cherry Lane Theatre has nurtured experimental performance and budding talents from its home in the heart of New York’s Greenwich Village for just over a century. As the theater embarks on its next chapter under the auspices of the film studio A24, a new book looks at the pioneering venue’s history.
With an introduction by David Henry Hwang and an afterword by Jesse Eisenberg, this publication offers a backstage view into an iconic institution.
Left: The Birthplace of Off Broadway: 100 Years of Cherry Lane Theatre (A24, 2025)
Right: Richard Prince: Early Photography 1977–87 (Gagosian, 2025)
Below: Photo: courtesy Dior
Exhibition Catalogue Richard Prince: Early Photography 1977–87
Published on the occasion of three exhibitions by Richard Prince, this book features many of the artist’s iconic cowboy, girlfriend, and advertisement photographs, as well as the complete series of The Entertainers (1982–83), a rarely shown set of manipulated photographs evoking the adult-entertainment theaters once prevalent in New York’s Times Square.
Dior Maison The Ode à la Nature Collection by Sam Baron
Renowned designer Sam Baron joined forces with Dior for this year’s Salone del Mobile, Milan, to present a collection of glass vases.
Continuing Dior Maison’s Ode à la nature collection, these vessels, each nearly a meter tall, are handcrafted with Italian mouth-blown glass techniques. Each vase pays homage to natural forms, such as branches, flowers, and foliage, while also echoing the silhouette of the original Miss Dior perfume bottle.
the Other Sid e Trip by Amie
Barrodale
Moving through time and space at a bracing clip, Amie Barrodale’s debut novel is a singular exploration of parenting, death, addiction, and empathy, all told with a swaddling wryness. With clever nods to The Tibetan Book of the Dead , the classic bildungsroman genre, and Homer’s Odyssey, the novel is propulsive and utterly contemporary.
Left: Trip (Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 2025)
Right: Ed Ruscha’s Artist’s Plate Project (Atelier88, 2025)
Below, right: Jonas Wood: Sports Cards (Triangle Books, 2025)
Studio to Table Artist’s Plate Project
The Coalition for the Homeless has partnered with over fifty artists to create limited-edition dinner plates to support the organization’s lifesaving services and advocacy. Produced by Atelier88, these bone china plates feature art by Derrick Adams, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Amoako Boafo, Ewa Juszkiewicz, Takashi Murakami, Sterling Ruby, Ed Ruscha, Anna Weyant, Jonas Wood, and others. They are part of an annual benefit, launched in 2020, to raise funds to provide food, crisis services, housing, and other critical aid to thousands of people experiencing homelessness and instability. The purchase of one plate can finance meals for more than a hundred individuals.
Exhibition Catalogue Picasso: Tête-à-Tête
This book was published on the occasion of the exhibition Picasso: Tête-à-Tête at Gagosian, 980 Madison Avenue, New York, presented in collaboration with the artist’s daughter Paloma Picasso. Drawn largely from Picasso’s estate, it featured over fifty rarely seen paintings, sculptures, and drawings from 1896 to 1972, the full span of his career. The book includes an introduction by Larry Gagosian; a conversation between the artist Peter Doig and Paloma Picasso addressing the inspiration behind the exhibition and recounting her father’s creative life; “Hanging with Picasso,” an essay by Michael Cary reflecting on the diversity of the artist’s practice; and a translation of a 1932 conversation between Picasso and E. Tériade.
Home Run Jonas Wood: Sports Cards
Jonas Wood: Sports Cards brings together over seventy of the artist’s sports trading card drawings and paintings from 2005 to 2023. Available in four different covers, the fully illustrated monograph is the first comprehensive compilation of this body of work.
From
Fashion x Art Loewe x Josef & Anni Albers Foundation
Devising their Fall/Winter 2025 collection as a scrapbook inspired by things old and new, Loewe collaborated with the Josef & Anni Albers Foundation. The foundation’s namesake twentieth-century modernists serve as a point of departure for the collection: Anni Albers’s pictorial weavings bring a graphic tactility to coats and signature bags, while the nested squares and color blocks of Josef Albers’s Homage to the Square series transform the familiar forms of the Puzzle, Flamenco clutch, Amazona, and other bags.
Memoir Art Work: On the Creative Life by Sally Mann
Following up on her 2015 New York Times best-selling memoir Hold Still , Sally Mann returns with Art Work: On the Creative Life , an honest and vulnerable mélange of brilliant anecdote and advice. An ode to perseverance and to cleareyed, no-nonsense living, the book is geared toward anyone looking to build a life in the arts, but with her characteristic Southern charm and no-holds-barred fearlessness, Mann has created a compelling read worth everyone’s attention.
All Aboard
The Louis, Shanghai
The Louis is a new comprehensive concept destination unveiled by Louis Vuitton in Shanghai, integrating retail, a café, and an exhibition into a single destination. Designed to resemble a ship, its structure pays tribute to both Louis Vuitton’s extensive history of travel and Shanghai’s maritime heritage. This immersive space features the Visionary Journeys exhibition, exploring the brand’s origins and evolution, alongside luxury retail spaces and culinary experiences such as Le Café Louis Vuitton.
Above: Art Work: On the Creative Life (Abrams, 2025)
Above, right:
Photo: courtesy Louis Vuitton
Right:
Photo: courtesy Loewe
The Good Earth Oasi Zegna Global Initiatives
The luxury fashion house Zegna has unveiled its Oasi Zegna Global Initiatives program in Aspen, Colorado, marking a significant evolution of its century-long environmental legacy. Rooted in the original Oasi Zegna nature preserve in Trivero, Italy, this initiative extends the brand’s commitment to conservation, biodiversity, and ecological education on a global scale. In collaboration with local and national partners, including the US Forest Service and the Aspen Center for Environmental Studies, the program will support reforestation efforts and wildfire-risk reduction.
Monograph Helen Marden
The first monograph on the artist Helen Marden, this book spans forty years of her career. In addition to full-page illustrations of her vivid paintings, watercolors, and assemblages, the publication presents a new essay by Anna Godbersen and an interview conducted by the artist Kiki Smith. The texts trace the intersections of Marden’s personal life—grief, travels, friendships—with her rich body of work.
A new revolutionary anti-aging solution to target signs of advanced skin aging. Bringing new vibrance to skin.
Squeeze Me: Lemon Recipes & Art is a vibrant collaboration between celebrated chef Ruthie Rogers of London’s River Café and Ed Ruscha. Centered on the lemon, this unique cookbook offers fifty recipes that showcase the fruit’s versatility across sweet and savory dishes, all imbued with Rogers’s approachable Italian flair. Complementing the culinary journey is Ruscha’s original artwork, created exclusively for the book. The result is part cookbook, part art piece—a collectible celebration of food and form. Published by Rizzoli, the hardcover releases on September 23, 2025.
ART IN THE KITCHEN SQUEEZE ME
A new cookbook from Ruthie Rogers and Ed Ruscha.
Lemon almond polenta cake
• 1 pound ⁄4 sticks unsalted butter, softened, plus more for the pan
• All-purpose flour for the pan
• 2 ¼ cups superfine sugar
• 4 ½ cups ground almonds
• 2 teaspoons vanilla extract
• 6 eggs
• Zest of 4 lemons, plus juice of 1 lemon
• 1 ¼ cups polenta
• 1 ½ teaspoons baking powder
• ¼ teaspoon sea salt
Preheat oven to 325°. Butter and flour 12-inch round cake tin.
Beat the butter and sugar together until pale and light. Stir in ground almonds and vanilla. Beat in eggs one at a time. Fold in the lemon zest and juice, polenta, baking powder, and salt.
Spoon batter into prepared tin. Bake in the preheated oven for 45–50 minutes or until set and deep brown on top.
This puzzle, written by Myles Mellor, brings together clues from the worlds of
1 His life story is told in Amadeus
2 New York artist who uses tattoo ink, pink sand, diamonds, staples, and seeds in his paintings (two words)
3 The of the Prodigal Son , by Rembrandt
4 River sacred to the ancient Egyptians 5 Thanksgiving serving 6 2025 Grammy-winning pop singer Sabrina
7 Terrifying character portrayed by Anthony Hopkins (two words)
8 Alicia Keys hit
Federer often served one
Shakespeare’s Troilus Cressida
Beatles lyric: “Lovely Rita, meter ”
Relax 22 Gladiatorial sites
23 Gothic novel pioneer Radcliffe
26 “ are the apple of my eye”
27 Japanese contemporary artist Takashi , who blurs the line between the high and low arts
28 Arizona Native Americans famous for basket weaving 30 Mischief-maker
Get-up-and-go 36 French river painted by Turner and Sisley
37 Very, very long time
39 Mike Myers voice-over character 40 Rooster’s mate 41 “She’s Gone” singer in a duo
42 Claude Monet’s The Grande-Jatte
45 Drake’s music
46 Friend in France
47 Summer mo., abbr.
CARLO RATTI ON THE CITIES OF TOMORROW
On the occasion of Intelligens. Natural. Artificial. Collective.—the Venice Architecture Biennale on view through November 23, 2025—Bartolomeo Sala speaks to the curator, Carlo Ratti, about his work at the crossroads of technology, design, and urban planning in the face of climate change.
To read the full interview, visit gagosian.com/quarterly.
BARTOLOMEO SALA I would like to start by asking you about the theme that brings together the various strands of the current Venice Biennale Architettura, Intelligens. Natural. Artificial. Collective., and that’s the idea of intelligence. There might be no term that’s more fraught at the moment, nor one that, as of late, might be subject to a kind of narrow-minded reductionism.
The Biennale doesn’t reject a data-driven approach or the potential of AI, of course. However, it does gesture toward an integration with other forms of intelligences, be they human or nonhuman. Could you tell me a bit more about the thought process that drove the curatorial approach?
CARLO RATTI It’s exactly what you said. At a time when people tend to think about intelligence in a very reductive way—in terms of AI or ChatGPT or whatever—we thought it was important to look at the multiplicity. That’s also why we choose to include the word in its Latin root. Not only does the word “intelligens” combine Italian and English into one word, but also it has this interesting thing that in its ending it contains the word “gens”—that is, people. Again, it’s about multiplicity. There’s a lot of people involved, so there are many forms of intelligence coming together.
BS I wonder if the story arc of the Biennale doesn’t mirror that of your career. You are the director of the Senseable City Lab at MIT, and your work as an architect as well as an academic has long been dedicated to how the harnessing of data can deliver cities and urban spaces that are more efficient, sustainable, and user-friendly. At the same time, some of your recent designs—I am thinking of the canteen with grassed-topped roof you completed in 2024 for the Italian tomato company Mutti, near Parma—try to work out a new harmony between nat ural and built environments with concepts such as circularity and no waste.
Norman Foster Foundation, Michael Mauer (Porsche), Miguel Kreisler (BAU + Empty), Ragnar Schulte (Porsche), and Christopher Hornzee-Jones (Aerotrope), Gateway to Venice’s Waterways , 2025, Venice Biennale Architettura. Photo: Marco Zorzanello, courtesy La Biennale di Venezia
Where does this evolution come from? Was it something organic (no pun intended), or was there a specific “aha” moment?
CR To be honest, I would disagree with that reading. If you go back even almost 20 years, to the time when we did the Digital Water Pavilion at the Expo in Zaragoza, Spain, that project was about digital but also natural elements. In the very same year, we actually designed a project in Milan, the Trussardi Café. It was about bringing nature to the center of Milan, to the Trussardi Café and fashion house, with one of the first projects in Italy by Patrick Blanc, the French botanist who created “green walls.”
So, for us, data was always a way to look at the city in a biological way. In a biological sense, data allows us to see the city as a living organism. This was there from the beginning. And then there are other projects we have done over the years. For Milan Design Week in 2018, we designed Living Nature, a garden
pavilion where all four seasons coexisted at the same time. That was also putting together the two things—natural and artificial. So, the biological analogy has been with us from the beginning. Simply, some people got so excited by the technological side of what we do and put us in that bucket.
The idea of “collective” is also something we have explored in one of my first books, Open Source Architecture , whose first edition was published by Thames & Hudson in 2015. All three types of intelligence— natural, artificial, collective—have been threads at the heart of Carlo Ratti Associati since the start. As to how this ties in with the first part of your question—that is, how my practice informs the current Biennale—the latter is a much broader endeavor. It, of course, has links to my past projects, but at the same time—because it is concerned with nature and climate change— the Biennale explores a much broader array of things.
Abalone , silv er and 18K g old P eter Pan colla r. judygeib.co m
KATHLEEN RYAN TIME, CRAFTED
Harry Thorne writes on Kathleen Ryan’s artistic process, methods of assemblage, and how her studio resembles an excavation site. To read the full essay, visit gagosian.com/quarterly.
My brother once showed me a piece of quartz that contained, he said, some trapped water older than all the seas in our world. He held it up to my ear. “Listen,” he said, “life and no escape.”
—Anne Carson
Serpentine, prehnite, ruby in zoisite. Abalone shell, labradorite, calcite, rope. The given names of Kathleen Ryan’s materials are incantations in the mouths of witches. Cherry quartz, rose quartz, smoky quartz. Aventurine, aquamarine, carnelian. These lists exist as a memory game. A maze with always-moving walls. A plentitude. Onyx, horn, jasper, brass flies. Freshwater pearls, mother-of-pearl, rhodochrosite, opal. Amazonite touches dolomite. Fluorite meets malachite meets magnesite. Turquoise seeps through smears of angelite and druzy agate. (Say the word, luxuriate in its r : druzy.) Tigereye, garnet,
carnelian. Unakite, aquamarine, green line jasper. Volkswagen hood. Volkswagen trunk. Cast iron. Crystal balls. That there is such nominative richness among Ryan’s chosen materials should be unsurprising for an artist whose practice is so beholden to—at times dictated by— materials themselves. For while much has been said about that which Ryan depicts—eighty-four parrots perched on a satellite dish; a watermelon with an Airstream crust; a lemon decomposing with the utmost poise—there has been little discussion, to this point, of her methods of assemblage or of the scavenged objects upon which she chooses to bestow a second life. (This is a tale of the animate inanimate.) There can be no argument that Ryan’s is a practice concerned with waste, consumerism, overconsumption, nor that it conflates the supposed
binaries of “high” and “low” (class, culture, taste, and so on), nor that it reanimates the art historical tradition of vanitas for a generation that is increasingly distracted from its own mortality. (My generation, my distraction, my mortality.) But more centrally, perhaps more fundamentally, certainly more foundationally, it is a sculptural practice deeply rooted in objects and the stories they contain. It’s not what it looks like, it’s what it is, or was, or continues to be in some new form.
Ryan’s current studio is a grotto, a surgery, a junkyard on poured concrete. It is a modernday lapidarium on the banks of the Hudson. Beads and semiprecious stones are chromatically divided into buckets, drawers, and clear plastic tubs. The severed hoods of muscle cars are laid to rest against walls. Steel bumpers are piled like bones picked clean. A series of
chrome shelving units are heaped with thousands of gems that gradate, and do so oh-so-subtly, from cream to a dusty pink. As an undergraduate at Pitzer College, Ryan studied art and archaeology. Appropriately, her studio has come to resemble an excavation site, one that is chaotic and meticulously structured, oriented around a central workbench on which the artist and her team of beaders assemble vivid swatches of stones. On one tray, a grassy patch of deep emerald beads is offset by a belt of scarlet gems, juicy as strawberries. On another, a corolla in pink quartz encircles a glossy pad of olive green. On another, a procession of loose azure blocks stands to attention, stands in anticipation of attachment. With tools and tacks and nondescript tubes of adhesive occupying the few areas of vacant space, it’s as if Ryan and her team are attempting to put color back together again—and are doing so with no guidance as to its original form. They must simply follow its logic, its temperament, its tone. Follow the color and see where it leads.
Jordan Carter, curator and co-head of the curatorial department at Dia Art Foundation, engages with the new artist’s book Cady Noland: Polaroids 1986–2024.
OBSCENE
The contemporary cultural meaning of “obscene”— deriving from the Latin “obscenus”—has been said to be obliquely yet fittingly linked to the ancient Greek “ob skene ,” literally meaning “off-stage” and referring in Greek theater to events that were deemed too explicit or violent to take place in front of the audience and were conveyed instead by dialogue or other narrative devices. In this vein, Cady Noland assembles sculptural mise-en-scènes that become surrogates or understudies for the obscenities of daily American life and maladaptive media rituals, registering through culturally codified means the violence that goes unseen or that we choose not to see. Cady Noland: Polaroids 1986–2024 makes
us voyeurs of the behind-the-scenes social lives of Noland’s object coterie, observing how they behave in their natural environment, outside the neutralizing confines of museums, galleries, or collectors’ homes. While her Polaroids are devoid of people, there is a menacing sense that perhaps someone has just left the room or is about to enter, between the acts. There is no explicit narrative, yet the book’s structured, sequential band of image couplings creates an anxious sense of coincidence and correspondence, reference and relation, as though we’d been clued in to something sinister.
Part manifesto, part compendium, Noland’s critical stagecraft of the page renders a nonlinear, self-styled archive. It can be read within a genealogy of catalogues-as-exhibitions in the tradition of Seth Siegelaub’s similarly spartan Conceptual art publications Xerox Book (1968) and January
5–31, 1969 (1969), or as a perverse take on Marcel Duchamp’s Boîte-en-valise (1935–66) and its idea of the compressed antiretrospective. Notably, this is not Noland’s first foray into artist’s books that promiscuously slip between document and object, between two-dimensional codex and phenomenological experience. “Towards a Metalanguage of Evil,” Noland’s 1989 treatise on the ludus tactics of psychopathology and the American mediacelebrity-industrial complex, was transfigured into her sprawling multimedia installation at documenta 9, Kassel, in 1992, in which the text was screen-printed onto metal sheets leaning against the walls of an underground parking garage outfitted with a red Camaro and a toppled, tortured van. In a hauntingly recursive and metatextual gesture, images from this cacophonous exhibition are interspersed in this new edition: we see different views
of a panel of that text strewn atop the sports car. Unbound and metallized, the sequential order of the text became unfixed in the documenta installation and the panels variably lent themselves to combinatory readings, in a manner akin to Joseph Beuys’s Arena (1970–72), a hundred panels carrying hundreds more photographs that document the artist’s career up to 1972. Arena was similarly installed casually, leaning against the walls of the Galleria L’Attico, a former garage in Rome, in 1972 and staged the following year in an underground parking lot beneath Rome’s Villa Borghese for the international exhibition Contemporanea , in both cases presaging the chronologically defiant logic and layout of Noland’s Polaroids , as well as their car park scenographies.
The Polaroids predominantly feature barbarously unceremonious yet palpably staged
vignettes in which finished works commingle with what appear to be components or fodder for future works against makeshift industrial backdrops. Objects make repeat appearances throughout the book, and in their recurring roles suggest a theatrical cast of characters in a seedy thriller that unfolds across the otherwise sterile white spreads, with comparable real estate given to both image and margin. Certain pages are left imageless, like blanks for the reader’s projection, becoming a litmus test for our cultural conditioning. Noland’s dyadic compositions play with and deconstruct the architecture of the page; in one instance what appears to be the same metal pipe is cut off at the frame in two opposing Polaroids, bridging the imaginary space of the gutter invisibly.
A material grammar of sinister semiotics develops through juxtaposition, sequencing, and
repetition. There is a cadence that picks up and begins to read like visual poetry, filled with metal relays and ricochets. Varying angles and perspectival shifts are a throughline here: not only does Noland’s objectifying viewfinder frame what we can and cannot see but these multiple vantage points suggest the possible presence of more than one set of eyes in an arenalike spectacle. After all, Noland did trade in museum benches for stadium bleachers for her 1996 matrix exhibition at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford. On a handful of Polaroids Noland marks the distances and measurements between works in proportional notation, registering the significance of her staging. In other instances she annotates Polaroids with tagging language, further aligning the book with an evidence repository as we are tasked with deciphering her shorthand and self-invented cataloguing methods.
Throughout, we see Noland’s iconic works and typologies in repose—obscene, offstage—at times on pads, in provisional positions of indecent exposure, like a celebrity unwittingly snapped by paparazzi. The detail shots and close-ups crop and frame in ways that mirror tabloid shots, or perhaps the scrutinizing images of evidentiary photography. This is not unlike the clip-on method, as Noland describes it in “Towards a Metalanguage of Evil,” in which individuals are “reduced” to “photo-objects” by tabloids’ crops and zooms. Reduction is a key formal aspect of Minimalism, a genealogy that Noland radicalized. She manipulates her objects the way tabloids manipulate celebrities, reifying household names into fragmented objects of scrutiny, desire, and violence— tactics-cum-formal-strategies that she describes in detail in “Towards a Metalanguage of Evil.”
Indeed, her description of the “game” as a “synthesis of tactics” could also apply to her own material operations as staged and serially documented in her Polaroids. In this way, “Towards a Metalanguage of Evil” functions almost like the discursive counterpart to the visual manifesto that is Polaroids . The latter is the id to the former’s ego, to put it in psychoanalytic terms.
Indeed, Noland treats household objects like the tabloids’ household names, trading in embodied idols for Budweiser beer cans, canes, walkers, and garage trappings. In doing so she not only cultivates a chilling equivalence but also helps us better understand how she sees her work, and how we might begin to see her work with greater acuity. The “game” for Noland, though, is not only a structural and social device but a visual and sculptural methodology. Her Polaroids—works in their own
right—fastidiously document fiercely nonchalant material relations. Obsessive iteration of forms, and repetition of their images to ever-more-slightly different positions, reflect to us our own maladaptive compulsions.
The event-based nature of Noland’s work is palpable in these photographs that animate visceral moments with inanimate objects. As the scenes progress, certain Polaroids begin to unfold like shady Eadweard Muybridge sequences. A wheeled cart filled with hubcaps and scrap—a mobile scatter piece—pirouettes in place on one spread, personifying the tension between physical or social mobility and cultural paralysis. These images creep into borderline-pornographic closeups of violently intimate material mashups, as curved metal tops curved metal, and support devices collapse to resemble broken ribs. Noland’s precariously but
precisely arranged installations elaborate a tension between control and collapse, perhaps reflecting how, as she writes in “Towards a Metalanguage of Evil,” “The psychopath being the machine that it is, cannot imagine that it will cease to function, but in keeping with its obsession with control, it will short-circuit itself at the last moment if it is unquestionably about to be ‘offed.’”
A plethora of photographs featuring monumental walls or stacks of Budweiser cans—monetarily worthless yet conspicuously consumed and culturally emblematic—demonstrate how, to return to “Towards a Metalanguage of Evil,” “The game depends on investing in things which accrue in value, or in wasting things in an obvious way (but not at your own expense, only to exhibit a genuine surplus).” The beer can is Noland’s pungently ubiquitous variation on the units of Minimalism. Some
of her Polaroids emphasize this by picturing works that swap beer cozies for transparent cubes, as cans embalmed in acrylic prompt us to imagine Hans Haacke’s condensation cubes with alcohol sweats. Noland’s Polaroids are the product of a meticulous process of configuration and reconfiguration in which the slightest tweak has a gestalt impact. This recalls another of her hypothetical psychopathological scenarios:
There are times when X sees that the configuration of elements—be they persons, objects, or events, are in a pattern of environment hostile to the development of his program. X has two choices in this case: he may vacate the situation, or he can wait until [a] shift occurs which makes the environment more adaptable to his plan. A change, however seemingly inconsequential
to the outsider, might convince X to move. ¶ Waiting for reconfiguration as a strategy has a relationship to the decision to use shock therapy on a mental patient. Here, through the vehicle of electric shock it is hoped that some reconfiguration in the brain may chance to be therapeutic.
Reconfiguration as a strategy distills Noland’s sculptural and photographic impulse. Her rigorously and unwaveringly specific arrangements bear the promise and threat of reconfiguration. Noland’s Polaroids exhibit equal parts excess and restraint, maximum violence and minimal means, destruction and distillation, control and collapse, power and precarity. Throughout her photographic dramaturgy, Noland demonstrates her singular ability to be capaciously critical and sinisterly silent—obscene.
Harry Thorne addresses the practical and conceptual links between the visual art of Peter Doig and the work of various musicians on the occasion of Peter Doig: House of Music at Serpentine, London, an exhibition opening on October 3, 2025.
Patti Smith Group, “Ain’t It Strange” Lady B, “To the Beat Y’All” Neil Young, “Revolution Blues” The Kinks, “Where Have All the Good Times Gone” Funky 4 + 1, “That’s the Joint” Steely Dan, “Peg” Howlin’ Wolf, “Moanin’ for My Baby” Iggy and the Stooges, “I’m Sick of You” —Peter Doig, Desert Island Discs selections made as part of the exhibition Imprint 93/City Racing , City Racing, London, 1995
Mighty Sparrow, “Dan is the Man in the Van” Bob Dylan, “All the Tired Horses” Hank Williams, “Honky Tonkin’” Linton Kwesi Johnson, “Want Fi Goh Rave” Grandmaster Flash & the Furious Five, “The Message” Aretha Franklin, “Jump to It” Kraftwerk, “Computer Love” Shadow, “Way, Way Out” Desert Island Discs: Peter Doig , BBC Radio 4, July 14, 2023
Turn us loose, we shall overcome. They say: “Where you get that bass from?” In 1990, when rapper Chuck D thrust these lines through the frenetic instrumentals of “Power to the People,” his hip-hop group
Public Enemy were unavoidable, all-conquering, undeniable. For their third studio album, Fear of a Black Planet (1990), Public Enemy’s producers— Hank and Keith Shocklee, Eric “Vietnam” Sadler, and “Carl Ryder” (Chuck D’s production nom de plume), collectively termed the Bomb Squad—had sought to further fortify the sample-heavy “wall of noise” that had been established on the group’s previous record, It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back (1988). The result was a breathless rally of fragments, polyrhythms, and (re)processed sounds that provided the raucous backdrop for a strikingly sincere message of humanism and rage. It was a war cry, a rebuttal, an investment in people when people felt emptied of worth. It was, as the music writer Edna Gundersen wrote at the time, “a masterpiece.”1
Fear of a Black Planet featured, by Chuck D’s estimation, “about 150, maybe 200 samples.”2 In the 1980s there were few constraints on what artists could incorporate into their own songs, and to what extent. The result was a raft of experimental, open-eyed albums that borrowed from culture in order to give back to it, and did so in a way that was surprising, accessible, communal. A part of you, a part of me, an idea of what “us” could sound like. At just 3:48 minutes, “Power to the People” featured the work of Isaac Hayes (“Theme from Shaft,” 1971), Sly & the Family Stone (“Turn Me Loose,” 1967), the Time (“Wild and Loose,” 1982), Trouble Funk (“Drop the Bomb,” 1982), and James Brown (“Soul Power [Live],” 1971), among, somehow, others. It was released, as copyright lawyers Kembrew McLeod and Peter DiCola noted, during the “golden age of sampling”—but where there is gold, there follows a rush.3 In 1991, the court case Grand Upright Music, Ltd. v. Warner Brothers Records Inc. led to the criminalization of unlicensed sampling. In a 2010 paper, McLeod and DiCola calculated that, were Fear of a Black Planet released at the time of their writing, the samples would have cost over $6 million, leading to a loss of at least $5 per record sold and a total loss of $5 million. 4
Chuck D once said that “we,” meaning the Bomb Squad, “approached every record like it was a painting.”5 Peter Doig, speaking on an episode of BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs program in 2023, responded in kind. Reminiscing about his first introduction to “The Message” by Grandmaster Flash & the Furious Five, another hip-hop group whose sound was characterized by the isolation, reconstruction, and incorporation of preexisting songs, the Trinidad-based artist said, “I’d never really heard anything like it. . . . At the time, it really changed the way that I thought about making paintings, making art, collaging, and taking photographs.”6 Within the musical processes of sampling, looping, and mixing, of building out and up through multiple layers, both Doig and Chuck D identified a uniquely painterly methodology (nay, sensitivity). Not one that was overly beholden to a singular doctrine of origination, aggregation, or referentiality but one that was free to borrow from each of these seemingly oppositional strategies in service
of a cohesive yet intentionally fragmentary whole. To reconsider, to rework, to remix. Doig continued: “It gave me a liberty that I didn’t have before.”7
When we sample, things alter while remaining the same. Dependent on their newfound surroundings, samples can be intensified, diminished, undercut. They can be reset, offset, placed in a brand-new body. (The Bill Withers of “Grandma’s Hands” [1971] is not the Bill Withers of Blackstreet’s “No Diggity” [1996].) But the metamorphosis can never be complete: samples will always carry within them the evidence of their former life; they will retain an essence. When Doig samples in his paintings, when he assembles a variety of sources onto a single canvas, he does not bring virgin images of his own ideation alone; he brings a Goya portrait of the Duke of Wellington, a photograph of film star Robert Mitchum or painter Franklin Carmichael, an image of a Japanese ski resort reproduced in a Canadian newspaper. He brings rearticulations of photographs, postcards, album covers, architectures, and artworks (his own and those of others) that have lived full lives in various elsewheres; that have accrued their own aesthetics, connotations, associations; that have retained an essence . Which is not to say that Doig’s source material is recognizable. The Edwardian postcard of a German pier that built the architecture of Gasthof zur Muldentalsperre (2000/2002) is not a household image. The lone figure at the center of the 100 Years Ago (2000–2001) paintings is, but in Doig’s treatment is assuredly not, a member of the Allman Brothers. But the coexistence of these multiple sources within Doig’s compositions creates a muted yet discernible lack of ease, one that the artist smooths—with his mark-making, his chromatic dexterity, his ability to list from representation to abstraction and back again—but does not obscure. (Look at Music [2 Trees] , 2019, and watch as the players pass between brushwork and erasure; look at Painting on a Wall , 2008, and tell me if you see the same couch that I see.) The outcome is akin to a story told in multiple accents: legible, always, but reluctant to fully relinquish itself to a dominant voice. Restless, resistant, just a little bit off.
Samples breathe fresh energy into bygone cultural offerings: they bring life to death and vice versa. Sister Nancy keeps pace with Lauryn Hill. Lou Reed rubs shoulders with A Tribe Called Quest. Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 2 in C Minor is introduced to generation upon unsuspecting generation by way of Celine Dion’s “All By Myself.” It is a process of reanimation that shows culture to be self-referential, self-exploratory, and ultimately self-perpetuating, an entity that feeds on itself to feed itself and ensure its continual evolution. (It is self-reliant, as we should remember.)
Doig’s variations on a compositional, conceptual theme can span years. In a series of formally consistent paintings completed between 2012 and 2019, which will be central to his upcoming exhibition House of Music at Serpentine, London, a lion roams the vacant streets of Trinidad. Its bulk is undeniable; its mane, wreathlike; its fur is told through heated streaks of luminous gold; but the lowness of its shoulders belies the fatigue of a creature condemned to prowl the same street for eternity. Doig’s lion is an amalgam of photographs taken at the Emperor Valley Zoo in Port of Spain and of the Rastafarian emblem of the biblical Lion of Judah, ever present on T-shirts, flags, and walls throughout Trinidad. In Doig’s telling, the lion stalks the perimeter of the notorious Port of Spain Prison (formerly the Royal Gaol), which was built by the
British in 1812 as a detention center. As a 2014 paper on the Trinidad and Tobago incarceration system noted, “the foreboding exterior . . . reflected the moral architecture that dominated the period. No rehabilitative services were provided and inmates worked continuously albeit not gainfully.” 8 The walls are the color of buttercups.
The Port of Spain Prison is located in the heart of the city for which it is named. Its walls are the walls of a public road; its confinement begins where freedom ends. “In the cells you are very aware of the streets,” Doig said in 2015. “I began to think about what it must be like to be in there where you can hear the city and especially at Carnival time, when you can hear the music and revelry but you’re locked away.”9 A life denied life, articulated through the haunting removal of figures and the solitary presence of a lion, a creature all too familiar with the mechanisms and machinations of steel bars. But as is typical of Doig’s work, not to mention the
Previous spread: Peter Doig, Shadow, 2019 (detail), dispersion on linen, 51 ¼ × 31 ½ inches (130 × 80 cm)
Opposite, above: Peter Doig, Lion in the Road , 2015, oil and distemper on linen, 78 ¾ × 108 ¾ inches (200 × 276 cm)
Opposite, below: Peter Doig, Music (2 Trees), 2019, distemper on linen, 27 ½ × 32 inches (70 × 81.5 cm)
Below: Peter Doig, Maracas , 2002–08, oil on canvas, 114 ¼ × 74 ¾ inches (290 × 190 cm)
world of lived experience that it draws from, meaning is multiplicitous. Despite the contextual gravity suggested by the habitual repetition among these pictures, despite their austere silence, despite their wordless condemnations of systems of control, colonial subjugation, and carceral injustice, one cannot deny that their palette conjures images of the burgeoning petals of Vincent van Gogh’s sunflowers, the dreamlike serenity of Giorgio de Chirico’s plazas, the life-affirming tricolor of the Rastafari. And one cannot overlook that, in Rastafari culture, the lion is symbolic of the divine power of Haile Selassie, connoting strength, prosperity, hope. And one must not ignore the distant, unmoving presence of the St. Vincent Jetty Lighthouse, which provides safe passage for all who pass below. “It’s certainly no Garden of Eden,” Doig said in 2013 of his compositional duality, triality, quadrality, abundance. “Then again you don’t want it to be like a toxic wasteland either.”10
Why do we return? Why do we repeat? Why are we compelled to produce variations on themes when those themes have long since been established? Because there is more to say. Because there are different ways to say it. Or, because a spirit has yet to be put to rest. The foundational composition of Doig’s lion series is consistent (prison, road, beast; repeat), but among the individual paintings we find fluctuations in intensity and in architecture, in the arrangements and articulations of their constituent parts, in energy. In Lion in the Road (Sailors) (2019), our lion is lifted on a plinth as the city falls to geometry. In Rain in the Port of Spain (White Oak) (2015), a lone specter navigates our familiar street, the ghost of a soul imprisoned or the hope of eventual release. Whenever Doig fixates on a figure, a landscape, or an abstract effect to such an extent that he rearticulates it over, over, over once again, it’s as if he were trying to escape. It’s as if he were exercising painterly license as a means by which to exorcise a something —although the true nature of that something will forever remain hidden from our
view. Perhaps it is a lingering memory, an irresolvable thought, an emotional response to the world that was felt, felt for a moment, and then lost. Perhaps it is what he hopes to feel. “The process often becomes just as important as the source,” Doig has said. 11 That there remains an ambiguity over whether that “process” is painterly or otherwise feels apt.
Doig’s life has been performed with musical accompaniment; House of Music will pay tribute to its enduring influence. In 1979, at the age of twenty, he enrolled in art school in London in no small part because of his fondness for the postpunk scene and his aspirations to design record covers. While studying, he began working as a dresser for the English National Opera, a job he held for seven years. (The Napoleonic figures that would emerge in the Gasthof paintings some twenty years later originate in a photograph of Doig and a friend dressed in the costumes used for a staging of Stravinsky’s ballet Petrushka [1911]. During the final performance, the pair snuck onstage alongside the cast and were promptly relieved of their duties.) In 1998, Doig’s enviable collection of CDs, twelve- and seveninch vinyl, and cassettes was indexed in the catalogue for his exhibition Blizzard seventy-seven at Whitechapel Gallery, London. Unsurprisingly, his paintings have come to incorporate carnival scenes (representative and impressionistic), dancers (nude and clothed), musicians (known and anonymous), and hulking speaker stacks set down in pastoral scenes like invasive monoliths or Minimalist voids void of reference. (At the Paris showcase for Doig’s collaboration with Dior in 2021, the catwalk was lined by vast rusting sound systems.) The frontage of Music Shop (2023) is haunted by the enigmatic figure of the late Winston Bailey, a calypso singer appropriately known as Mighty Shadow, dressed in a wide-brimmed hat and a floor-length cape daubed with a luminescent ribcage. The scene, conventional in all aspects but the manifestation of death at its center, is cleaved by the exterior windows of the store, which seem to look directly
Left: Peter Doig, Rain in the Port of Spain (White Oak), 2015, distemper on linen, 118 ½ × 138 ½ inches (301 × 352 cm)
Below: Peter Doig, Fall in New York (Central Park), 2002–12, oil on linen, 47 ½ × 38 ½ inches (120.5 × 98 cm)
Opposite: Peter Doig, Painting for Wall Painters (Prosperity P.o.S.), 2010–12, distemper on linen, 94 ½ × 141 ¾ inches (240 × 360 cm)
onto the Caribbean Sea. This subtle compositional tweak, equivalent examples of which can be found throughout Doig’s House of Pictures series, disrupts the verisimilitude suggested elsewhere in the painting, thus doffing a figurative cap to the complexities of picture-making itself. Artworks allow us to remember, to recollect, but their inherent failing, which is at the same time their beauty, is that they are condemned to forever be artworks alone: they cannot, will not, should not, resurrect. (“ music equipment limited,” reads the facade within Music Shop. So too art, my friend.)
“Melody, harmony, music is the atmosphere,” sings Mighty Shadow in “Dingolay” (1988), “sweet music is everywhere.” Even when Doig’s visual allusions to music are not explicit, one would be forgiven for defining his paintings as assuredly “musical”—which is to say, ambient, ambiguous, accommodating of multiple interpretations. Like songs without words, they are works that establish a timbre, a texture, and a tone, yet are unwilling to overdefine themselves. (“The detail of a leaf does not really interest me,” notes Doig, “but getting across the feeling that what one is looking at may be a leaf does.”) 12 As such, they remain open to the individual projections of their viewers, acting as repositories or receptacles for our hopes, fears, histories, fancies, fantasies, or whatever else we feel compelled to relinquish ourselves of. They are, or play the part of, reservoirs. “I’m trying to make something that’s constantly evolving into another image,” Doig says. “Great painting does achieve that, really, or great songwriting, or whatever it may be. Music. Not everyone listens to the same piece of music and it sounds the same, or affects the same emotion. Sometimes you may want to cry; sometimes you may want to laugh.”13 To view
a painting by Doig is not to view the same painting as another, but to be granted a foundation upon which to overlay an inner landscape that is unique to oneself and oneself only. Your painting is not my painting. My painting is not yours. My world will remain my own. You see a downpour; I see a sky full of romance. You see a seascape; I see the sound of drums on the surface of an ocean. You see a snowstorm; I see the stubbornness of my father and I miss him.
Sharing music is a generous but revealing act.
To share in such a way is to open oneself up to the prospect of recognition, of closeness and a connection strengthened, but it also necessitates a momentary unmasking of oneself that may well amount in rejection—rejection of a fragment that becomes representative of the whole. (As Neal Brown wrote of the inclusion of Doig’s record collection in the Whitechapel catalogue, “Making these lists is an exposure of aesthetic sensibility that both makes vulnerable and securely bonds the compiler within the safe codes of a sub-group.”) 14
This gesture, which will be performed as part of House of Music by the revolving cast of musicians who will curate the exhibition’s soundtrack, feels akin to Doig’s painterly process. Doig has said that the often solitary figure in his works acts as “a cypher to draw the viewer into the painting”: an always shifting Rückenfigur onto which we can cast ourselves, through which we can consider ourselves. 15 I would propose that the figure is simultaneously a stand-in for the painter himself, endlessly wandering the many-layered, always melting landscapes of his own imagining, his own recollection, his own assembly, in an attempt to comprehend the power that those very landscapes continue to hold over him. Their gravity, unwavering. It’s as if Doig
were pulling records from his personal archive, plugging a jack into the 1950s speaker system that occupies a wall of his studio in Port of Spain, and asking whether we, too, can find ourselves in the music. If so, what do you look like? What do you feel like? A downpour, a seascape, a snowstorm. How does our world sound to you?
1. Edna Gundersen, “Fierce ‘Fear’ from Public Enemy,” USA Today, April 12, 1990.
2. Chuck D, quoted in Mark Dery, “Public Enemy: Confrontation,” Keyboard , September 1990. Available online at researchgate.net/ publication/278667668_Public_Enemy_Confrontation (accessed July 16, 2025).
3. Kembrew McLeod and Peter DiCola, quoted in Amanda Sewell, “Paul’s Boutique and Fear of a Black Planet : Digital Sampling and Musical Style in Hip Hop,” Journal of the Society for American Music 8, no. 1 (February 2014): 28.
4. Ibid.
5. Chuck D, quoted in Dery, “Public Enemy: Confrontation.”
6. Peter Doig, in Desert Island Discs: Peter Doig , BBC Radio 4, July 14, 2023. Available online at bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001np4c (accessed July 16, 2025).
7. Ibid.
8. Randy Sepersad, Dianne Williams, and Allan Patenaude, “‘To Hold and Train’: The Trinidad and Tobago Prison Service,” Justice 29, no. 1 (Winter 2014): 26.
9. Doig, quoted in Diane Solway, “A Guided Preview of New Peter Doig Show by Peter Doig,” W Magazine , November 5, 2015. Available online at wmagazine.com/gallery/new-peter-doigexhibition (accessed July 16, 2025).
10. Doig, in “Peter Doig and Angus Cook in Conversation,” in Peter Doig: No Foreign Lands (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz; Montreal: Montreal Museum of Fine Arts; and Edinburgh: National Galleries Scotland, 2013), 180.
11. Doig, in “Peter Doig and Matthew Higgs in Conversation,” Falmouth School of Art, May 26, 2018, part of the Groundwork program of CAST|Cornwall, Helston, Cornwall. Available online at youtube.com/watch?v=Q23w1cBFHC0 (accessed July 17, 2025).
12. Doig, quoted in Richard Shiff, “Drift,” Peter Doig (New York: Rizzoli International Publications, 2016), 346.
13. Doig, in “Peter Doig and Angus Cook in Conversation,” 189. 14. Neal Brown, “Peter Doig,” frieze , November 11, 1998. Available online at frieze.com/article/peter-doig (accessed July 17, 2025).
15. Doig, in “Peter Doig in Conversation with Bruce Ferguson,” AGO Talks, Art Gallery of Ontario, March 27, 2006. Available online at soundcloud.com/agotoronto/peter-doig-in-conversationwith-bruce-ferguson (accessed July 17, 2025).
ABEL FERRARA INTERVIEW
BY CARLOS VALLADARES
Abel Ferrara’s cinema has a very special violence. His films are soulful investigations—searches for structure, however tentative—that try to frame and narrativize the same mystery: the lunatic modern death-drive. Ferrara has continued this search since 1979’s The Driller Killer, about a Manhattan painter, played by Ferrara himself, driven so insane with capitalist urban stress that he starts to kill homeless people with a power drill. Since then he has been compelled by the worlds of a raped mute seamstress who takes up a .45 Magnum and starts targeting first rapists, then men in general (Ms. 45, 1981), of gangsters (King of New York , 1990), of philosophical vampires (The Addiction , 1995), and even of self-destructive Hollywood moviemakers (Dangerous Game , 1993). Ferrara has always been fascinated by the limits of reason and of images, and lately he has pushed his latest poetic works (Pasolini , 2014; Siberia , 2020; Tommaso, 2019; Zeros and Ones , 2021) toward these murky outer limits. Now, his latest documentary, Turn in the Wound (2024), has debuted on the Criterion Channel, continuing this late-artist trajectory. Billed by Criterion as “an intensely visceral, aesthetically bold personal response to the war in Ukraine” with “incantatory spoken-word performance art by punk priestess Patti Smith,” the film most resembles the productively unfinished work of one of Ferrara’s lodestars, Jean-Luc Godard (One Plus One [1968], Ici et Ailleurs [1976]). Ferrara
engages the viewer in a dialogue about images that have become globally commonplace—too much so—through Hollywood exportation, the Internet, and social media. He lets spectators dwell on what images of war really mean to them on a visceral level, beyond thinking in abstractions like “Ukraine versus Russia,” “humanity,” “tragedy,” and so forth.
Ferrara now lives in Rome, where he is, as of this writing, preparing his next film, American Nails , in Bari, Italy, with Asia Argento. In his words: “We’re taking the Phaedra myth and putting it in a modern gangster story, with Asia Argento playing Phaedra. It’s about addiction: an independent successful woman gangster has lost her mind for her underage nephew, and she’s ready to give up her whole world for him. In The Birth of Tragedy [1872] Nietzsche argues that Greek drama rose out of the fusion of two sets of elements: the Apollonian ones of measure, restraint, and harmony and the Dionysian ones of unbridled passion. The film deals with that conflict in our lead character, as well as in the film’s style, where I want to return to the more unbridled hardcore elements of King of New York or The Driller Killer.” Ferrara has also written a memoir of his life and career, Scene , to be published by Simon & Schuster in the fall of 2025.
I spoke to Ferrara over Zoom about Turn in the Wound , what it means to him personally, whether the human drive to destruction is natural or not, and his response to modern chaos.
CARLOS VALLADARES I’m really excited to talk to you. At the beginning of Turn in the Wound , Patti Smith talks right off the bat about the artist as a youngster versus an elder. She says that when you’re young you have the arrogance but not the confidence of an artist—and that later in life, though you trade off the former for the latter, you become like Piero della Francesca in his last years: blind. Having just seen your dazzling-as-hell Siberia (2020), I wonder if that was an idea running through your mind when you were making Turn in the Wound.
ABEL FERRARA Well, I’m a late artist, obviously. As late as you can get. As relates to Turn in the Wound , I got it together with Sean [Price Williams, the film’s cinematographer] and Phil Neilson, a dear friend and collaborator who I work with on my narrative films. We made two separate trips to Ukraine, maybe twelve days altogether. We didn’t film the actual getting there but the trip itself was pretty crazy. You fly into Warsaw, they drive you to some border town, you get on a fuckin’ train in the middle of the night since flying is prohibited. Kiev itself is safe, theoretically—safe as you can be during a war.
It’s ironic that the reason we even went is that their government is run by filmmakers. [Volodymyr] Zelenskyy is in the film business, an actor that’s also a producer. His guys knew of me—I’d met them at different film festivals over the years.
Our documentary approach is always the same: start from zero, turn the cameras on, and let it come
to us. We were free to go anywhere and speak to anybody we wanted. We didn’t go to the front line, which is hundreds of miles from Kiev. I’m not that courageous and I don’t want to risk getting guys I know killed. But in Kiev it’s still a war, and you can get hit by a random fuckin’ drone or missile at any time—especially when the Russians are firing at people and the places they live, as well as at military targets.
CV I’d never really seen the war from the perspective of the civilians and the utter confusion from their vantage point, how Russian soldiers aren’t coming in dressed as soldiers but in civilian garb.
AF That’s their MO: terrorize the fuckin’ population. In the first weeks of this war the Russians were totally avoiding the Ukrainian military. Instead they were targeting their grandmothers, mothers, and the children of the soldiers, not the soldiers themselves. Their thinking is, if you terrorize the populace, the Ukrainian military will succumb. But it doesn’t work that easy there, because the Ukrainians as a people are tough and ready to fight. Man, this war gets distorted when it becomes a conversation about politics and history. That’s the disgrace of abstract philosophizing. You could have a million conversations about and around this—all the while, average, everyday people are getting fuckin’ slammed.
CV Part of it is that people feel like they have to abstract today. I’m twenty-eight and I’ve grown up with the dehumanizing abstractions inherent
in social media, let alone as a privileged American thinking about Ukraine. I had to confront all that while watching this.
AF For most Americans, the Ukrainians fighting the Russians is like Game of Thrones ; they think they’re doing this on horses with swords and shit. Ukraine is so abstract to them, unless you’ve been in a war. And how many of us have? I haven’t. This is the closest I’ve ever gotten to a war. Unless you count living in New York in the ’70s and the ’80s [laughs ].
During the shoot, our Ukrainian cameraman said to us, “The war in Ukraine is like 9/11 every fuckin’ day.” If you haven’t experienced that every fuckin’ day, you don’t know what you’re talking about. And if you’re not from there, you’re not going to get what the fight is, or what they’re fighting for. There’s a million armed guys there and they know what they’re fighting for. And it’s not just for Zelenskyy but for their idea of freedom and sovereignty.
The film is predominantly focused on the events of the first weeks of the war. The invasion happened in February; we arrived in August and went to Bucha to talk to the people who lived through it.
CV And the Patti Smith footage—was that before or after you’d decided to go to Ukraine?
AF It was during. The Patti stuff was its own separate documentary shot during the same eighteenmonth period. So in the editing room we were cutting Patti in the morning and Ukraine in the afternoon. It was during this process that my editor,
Previous spread: Still from Sportin’ Life (2020), directed by Abel Ferrara. Photo: courtesy Saint Laurent Productions
This spread: Stills from Turn in the Wound (2024), directed by Abel Ferrara. Photos: courtesy the Criterion Collection
Leonardo Bianchi, suggested, “Why don’t we put them together?” And it started working for us. Because you can’t make a definitive fucking movie about the war, you’d have to be Ukrainian, you’d have to be Russian—you’d have to be beyond both. It would be a never-ending movie because the politics there are constantly changing. You could make a thousand movies about the history of Ukraine, and the politics since glasnost and before. The war now isn’t the war when I was there.
Maybe at my age it becomes clear: you’re either for life or for death. We’ve been fighting since we’ve been on Earth. The idea of killing people didn’t begin in the Ukraine and it’s not gonna end with some kind of fuckin’ peace treaty. This film is symbolic of every fuckin’ war that’s going on right now, in Africa, on the borders, Gaza—all of it.
CV Absolutely. And the thing is, with social media and technology today, which provide a great number of the images in the film, it’s literally in your face now with the iPhone—more, perhaps, than in the 1960s, when you had CBS beaming what we were doing in and to Vietnam into every family’s television.
AF No kidding! They filmed Vietnam. Growing up, we saw it. That war ended because we saw it. Then at a certain point the leaders of the world pulled the plug on giving out the images. You didn’t see what happened in Iraq or a lot of the other places. There were no images of the fighting.
They’re fighting these wars and it’s like when you read George Orwell: somewhere, some place, is a war going on. Nobody sees the pictures. Nobody hears the screaming. Nobody does anything. This went on for a long time, and you can fight easily like that because it’s just a conversation. Like you say, an abstract, philosophical conversation from a million miles away. Now the soldiers themselves are gaff-taping their phones to their helmets. You see guys dying right in front of you. You’re getting it as it is, bro, in real time.
That last bit of footage we got blows away any combat film you could ever make. Look on Telegram, on X: it’s all there. And that shit is fuckin’ frightening. And it’s here, too. All I see on social media is kids bullying the shit out of each other in American high schools while ten other people are either laughing or filming it. Car crashes. Murders left and right. Cameras everywhere. And it’s a good thing that these images are everywhere. But it’s hard, Carlos.
CV Say more on how this proliferation is a good thing. Wouldn’t you feel like, given the incessant flow of images today, when we receive them there’s a possible apathy that builds up as a result of all of them, all at once, an insanity-inducing pileup?
AF Well, if you have real empathy, you’re not going to have apathy. If you’re an individual who cares, yes, it’s going to hurt, but at least you know what the fuck is going on.
CV Ah, yeah, I get you now.
AF You shut it off because there’s nothing you can do about it. But if you’re born, you’re born with empathy. Unless you’re a sociopath or it’s been beaten out of you, you’re not going to be immune. You’re going to feel for the victim.
I live in Rome, okay? I live in a peaceful town. I have a ten-year-old daughter and I’m raising a family and it’s a peaceful deal. And there’s plenty of complicated drama and nightmare here without anybody killing each other. But now when you raise the stakes to a war: Then what?
My favorite image in this movie is right near the end. You see the helmet footage of the guy out there fighting for his life. They all have their equipment— Uzis, grenade launchers, whatever. And then we cut to Emmanuel [Gras], one of the DPs, shooting at Patti’s concert in Paris and holding another piece of complicated equipment: the camera. And that’s it bro, you’re either killing people or you’re glorifying them. You’re on the side of murder or you’re on the side of fuckin’ life. And that’s what all that footage of Patti is about. Her glorifying art and people’s need for expression: [Arthur] Rimbaud, [René] Daumal, [Antonin] Artaud. Remembering and honoring their deaths, not just ’cause they’re great artists but because every life is sacred.
CV That’s the position of what’s been my favorite of your films, Pasolini , with [Willem] Dafoe. You include the final interview [Pier Paolo] Pasolini conducted, on the day he was assassinated. He lays it
Below: Abel Ferrara. Photo: Paolo Santambrogio
Opposite: Still from Pasolini (2014), directed by Abel Ferrara.
Photo: courtesy Kino Lorber
out in the interview: the way schools, TV, and newspapers are set up, they’re trained to create a race of inhumane gladiators who have cut off that human part of themselves and replaced it with the will to destroy.
AF Pasolini was specifically talking about consumerism. And what did he say? You can fight fascism, you can’t fight consumerism. He said that these kids are programmed to want something, a watch. You have all these ads trying to sell a watch. Then everybody wants a watch. These kids want a watch too. Because advertising works; you can’t fight advertising either. But let’s say the fifteen-yearold kid doesn’t have money for a watch. He’ll either take your watch or your money. What put Pasolini over the edge was that he knew these kids, he was with them every night. And he knew that they were also willing to kill for a watch. Congrats, Madison Avenue.
Me, as an individual, I need my iPhone. I’m all for the iPhone, I’m all for AI; I’m for any bullshit that’s gonna make my moment-to-moment reality as a whatever—filmmaker, writer, father—easier. You take my phone, I might try to fuckin’ kill you. That day Pasolini was talking, it was 1975 Rome—but in fact he was envisioning the future, our present. And that’s what was getting him depressed.
You know how those kids knew Pasolini? They didn’t know him as a fuckin’ filmmaker or any bullshit like that. They knew him because he, the
big communist, owned an Alfa Romeo, which he’d custom painted ice blue. (It took us forever to match in the movie.) It was the coolest car in Rome. That speech he gave—I mean, he gave that interview the day he fuckin’ died, bro. He said it: “We’re all in danger and there’s nowhere to hide from it.” We’re all in this together.
CV One of the things I admired about Zeros and Ones and Turn in the Wound is the DIY iPhone aesthetic. This is something I find kind of troubling with a lot of filmmakers today who are so precious about shooting on 16mm or 35mm film, getting “beautiful” shots. But seeing your work I sense a different, more direct honesty in how you, Abel, observe, or how someone like, say, Hong Sang-soo observes: you don’t go out preserving conservative ideas of beauty, you create new standards. You wrestle with what an image is, in all its possible degradations. And that’s a more accurate reflection of our historical times.
AF This is a lot to do with Sean, because he goes after the beauty. I joke with him and say, “We could use any camera we want—and you’re using cameras out of a Cracker Jack box” [laughs ]. But he knows what he’s going for and what he needs to get it. And the other guys who shot Turn in the Wound [Gras and Alessandro Abate], even when they’re using highend stuff, also know how to degrade that image. There’s a beautiful aesthetic in the negative and blah blah blah, yeah, but there’s another aesthetic: the
practical reality of shooting a low-budget film and you need to get the fuckin’ images. If the guys got their phones, I’m telling them, “Pull ’em the fuck out.” Digital editing allows you to manipulate these images in a way we never could have before. You can take a shot, slow it down in the beginning, speed it up at the end. Maybe you have a shot and it’s something that in the past you would have thrown out— except there’s one thing in the background you love. Now you can isolate that thing.
CV When you interview Patti Smith in Paris, she mentions this story about Jimi Hendrix, which I feel is a lot of the thesis of the film. She says it was Hendrix’s dream to—
AF —have everybody in the world sitting around in a field somewhere, playing instruments together. Hendrix didn’t give a shit if they were in tune, out of tune, what key anybody played in: all that mattered was everybody making music in a field together. That was the John Lennon dream, too. Now, everybody’s in a field at the end of Turn in the Wound —and they’re all trying to kill each other.
Some of these people have a very specific reason why they’re going to kill the guy across from them. But I’d say 80 percent of those poor fuckin’ kids out there, they don’t know what the fuck is going on. They’re just there . This is what the powers that be want. But I’m a Buddhist. I don’t buy that’s the fuckin’ natural state of mankind. I don’t buy it.
CV Neither do I.
DOUGLAS STUART JENNY SAVILLE
Ahead of her exhibition over the summer at the National Portrait Gallery, London, Jenny Saville met with the novelist Douglas Stuart to discuss Glasgow, the beauty and blemishes of bodies, and their respective creative processes.
DOUGLAS STUART You’re about to open your show at the National Portrait Gallery, of fifty works spanning thirty-five years. How does that feel?
JENNY SAVILLE I’m looking forward to seeing the whole group of my work over the years. It’s useful for future work, because I can see: That worked, that didn’t work as well, that still holds up. It helps me adjust a little bit.
DS I also imagine that since you work at such a scale, it must be quite hard to get to see so many of them all together at the same time.
JS When I see a photograph of myself in front of the paintings, they look huge relative to my scale. The challenge of a large-scale work is exciting because to achieve the level of realism at that scale, to build out that kind of realism, is a journey.
DS And looking back now, what do you think your twenty-two-year-old self would think about this show coming up at the NPG?
JS Well, it’s exciting.
DS Would it have shaken her?
JS My twenties were an incredible time. Before that, I had waitressing jobs alongside being at art school, so I’d have to leave the school’s studios and go to waitress. But during the summer between my third and fourth year, I worked to put enough money in the bank so that I wouldn’t have to waitress. And I learned a lesson about time, that it was the most precious aspect of life. It was wonderful to be able to paint every day—everything came together in my fourth year, and my degree show had my first mature pictures. A lot of art coming out of Glasgow felt exciting, and there was a strong
figurative craft.
DS It’s quite a technical, traditional school, isn’t it, the Glasgow School of Art [GSA]?
JS Yes, it was departmentally structured—a painting department and a photography department.
DS Did you always know that you wanted to work in paint?
JS I always painted or made things from a young age. I have always felt very present when making or painting something. The permission for creativity was strong in my upbringing. My parents were teachers and would encourage creativity, that I had the right to create.
DS In a lot of ways, it’s you and your work that gave me my right to create; you were the one who gave me my first creative awakening. Growing up in Glasgow, I’d never been to a museum or a gallery. After my mother died, when I was sixteen, a couple of art teachers at school, Mrs. Mcleod and Mrs. Chesney, could see I was struggling. One night after school, they said, “Look, just come with us,” and they took me up to the Glasgow School of Art. They took me through the 1992 degree show and a lot of it was sort of lost on me, because I was only a kid. But then I turned the corner and there was Propped, and although I didn’t understand all the layers of it, I was blown away. Art had pierced me. Really, in that one moment, your work changed the course of my entire life.
JS Was that the first time you went to the building?
DS First time. I grew up less than a mile away
from it and hardly knew it existed. Even if I had, I would have been intimidated; working-class kids don’t always feel that they’re invited into those circles. But the art school is the shining jewel of Glasgow, and [Charles Rennie] Mackintosh is so important to a Glaswegian’s sense of identity. That building is a global icon.
JS The atmosphere of the building was one of the reasons I wanted to go there. You walk up the Mackintosh steps, go through those double doors, and feel it’s a place to make art. The painting department was in the purpose-built Mackintosh building.
When I first got to Glasgow, I was ignorant to the nuances of the language, but as I learned to tune my ear, the humor’s great and I enjoyed living there.
DS Glasgow patter is confrontational, and it takes time to pick up the rhythm, but it’s warm and inviting and it connects us. Those works in your degree show were perceived as quite confrontational at the time as well, but for me, just the fact that those images existed, I found them incredibly generous. They invite you to be a bit vulnerable, they don’t hold themselves back from you.
JS There’s a strength in vulnerability. If you’re prepared to be brave, it’s empowering to offer that vulnerability.
DS It took me some time to feel brave enough to do that with my writing. But yes, that’s how you connect. I think about those bridal shoes in Propped a lot. They’re the things that always hold my attention, that sort of small, knowing, almost novelistic detail.
JS I bought those from a charity shop.
DS They kill me because they’re signaling a kind of pride and vanity. It adds great tension to the work.
JS It heightens the nakedness. It’s a narrative aspect of the painting.
Following spread, left: Jenny Saville, Red Stare IV, 2006–11, oil on canvas, 99 ¼ × 73 7⁄8 inches (252 × 187.5 cm). Photo: Mike Bruce
Following spread, right: Jenny Saville working on Pause (2002–03), Tewkesbury Road, London, 2002. Photo: courtesy Jenny Saville Archives
DS They’re just the perfect detail. But when I was writing Shuggie Bain [2020], I looked at Trace [1993] a lot. It was an image that I had of Shuggie when he takes off his mother’s bra to care for her because she can’t care for herself and he’s looking at her back, and looking at the lines left in the flesh and rubbing them and hoping they would lift, like if he could erase them, he could take away some of her pain. There’s a truth in that sort of intimacy.
JS Hilary Robinson, who was my theory tutor for my dissertation, had written an essay where she said, “A body is not a neutral ground of meaning but a copper plate to be etched.” And thinking about that just connected these tight constricted bra marks, these indentations of an intimate space.
DS Those paintings were helpful in slowing me down. They ask us to observe closely and make sure to pay attention to both the beauty and the blemishes in a body. They challenged me to write about bodies in a similar way, and it’s essential because the body is a very political thing. It’s often the only thing that my characters have—their bodies are shaped by what they do, and their lives are shaped by how they use their bodies to survive. Their bodies are the only thing of real value that they own.
JS It’s what you can affect, and there’s a lot of attention concentrated on our bodies. You see that shift in the high street, the way the shops change over the years: you used to have a post office, a stationer, a butcher; now many have transitioned to nail bars, tanning salons, tattoo parlors.
DS I was just at a university a couple of weeks ago to do a reading of Shuggie. It’s only five years
old but I can’t yet look back on him with fondness. So I had an hour-long reading before the audience and all I wanted to do was rewrite the book. I just wished I had a red pen.
JS You would change words or sentence structures?
DS Often, I would try to say it with fewer words. Like just one more edit, please! Do you look back with kindness? With fondness?
JS Fondness sometimes, or I find my fearless naivete a bit amusing. Often I hear the music that was playing at the time, look at passages of paint and remember making that mark, the size of brush I used, the feeling inside. Sometimes I wonder what this drive is I’ve got, to get up a ladder for hours making paintings of figures or portraits. When I see my paintings I often think, “Oh, that part worked, but maybe I should have put another bridging tone there.” People say, “Oh, that’s a great painting,” and you think, “It’s not as good as it was in my head” [laughter ].
DS It’s similar with writing: your audience encounters the finished artifact and they don’t see the journey and the loneliness.
JS I wouldn’t call it loneliness. I enjoy making paintings.
DS I find writing very lonely because I worked for twenty years in fashion.
JS So that’s very social.
DS And very kinetic. There was a lot of energy and movement.
JS It’s fast too, isn’t it?
DS It’s very fast. Fashion was my job but writing was my art. I worked twelve hours a day, six days a week, all the way up until I was short-listed for the Booker. I’d spent years becoming a fashion designer and I had that real Presbyterian Scottish guilt that said, “You’ve built this, you cannot throw it out.”
JS Knowing deep inside you were a writer.
DS I’d always wanted to be a writer. Now, writing in contrast to fashion feels incredibly lonely because I sit around and talk to imaginary people all day.
JS Do you have a routine?
DS I find imaginary people are chattiest in the mornings, so I try to get up at six and I work till two or three. How about you?
JS I’ve had different working rhythms and routines in my life. Recently I’ve been getting up around six thirty in the morning and then I’ll paint until I feel that lull, which tends to be around four, and then I might do another session. I like painting eyes first thing in the morning.
DS Why is that?
JS Because my concentration’s at its highest, so I tend to paint details like teeth and eyes first thing in the morning, when I’m sharp. And then there are times when I like to do more adventurous paint work—I’ve learned how to be in tune with the time and pace of the day. The more I’ve painted and made radical changes or color choices, the more confidence it brings getting everything in balance. Sometimes when I have a few interesting passages but want to live with that for a while, I put the painting aside and work on something else to stay fresh. I look at the previous painting and find solutions for it.
DS I’ve found something similar in writing because I rarely write a book in a linear fashion, or chronologically. I don’t start at the start and go to the end because I feel like inspiration comes and goes and I’m always fearful of losing it. If I feel a scene or a character or a moment, then that’s where
You
just put the train on the tracks, because once you lay something down in paint, you have somewhere to travel, a presence to build on. It’s a game of flexible thinking and staying in the present. It’s satisfying to run paint together that gives a sense of space and depth. I like paintings with balance and a strong armature.
I go. There’s nothing worse for me than sitting at a blank page and trying to bring it forth, so I go to the page where the work wants to come.
JS You just put the train on the tracks, because once you lay something down in paint, you have somewhere to travel, a presence to build on. It’s a game of flexible thinking and staying in the present. It’s satisfying to run paint together that gives a sense of space and depth. I like paintings with balance and a strong armature.
DS One of the things that speaks to me the most about your work is your journey with color. It has evolved so much. In the early work I can actually feel Glasgow in the paintings. In the work from the GSA I can sense the sky.
JS That silvery sky. Glasgow can have beautiful light. My first home there was on Hill Street, and you’d look over toward the flats and mountains and see this silvery light. I’ve never seen it anywhere else quite the same way, and that light of Glasgow is very much in those paintings, that
silvery gray background and the greens in shadows. Over the last few years I’ve thought much more about nature and light. At GSA you learn naturalistic skin tones, but then I’d travel, look at other approaches to painting. I went to Paris and New York and saw how [Willem] de Kooning painted flesh and thought, “What great, fleshy colors and fluidity.” I started to collect images that had a lot more color in them—images of paintings, fashion compositions, all types of imagery, medical images, surgical imagery. Then after September the 11th and the Iraq War, we were flooded with images that had a lot of intense color and emotion and I responded to the atmosphere of that time. So I started to think about the differences between nature, reality, and the photographic process in relationship to painting. Artists like Gerhard Richter used to talk about those techniques, a lot of painters were engaged in that. My work evolved and I started using ranges of red and blue pigments, for example, like in my Stare heads
[2004–14]. I wanted the realism of a body or a head and evolved to using stronger color. If you’re curious you experiment, and on that journey you discover possibilities.
At the beginning of making a new body of work, the first one or two paintings can be quite conceptual. Once I’ve got a good rhythm going, the paintings are less conceptual and I enjoy making those paintings more. I tend to move the paint around better, with more fluidity.
DS The same in writing. You’ve got to write through it, in a way, to sort of free yourself of it, and then get to the thing that you’ve got no idea that you were heading toward. You’re feeling a character and you’re not quite sure what they’re going to do, so you build this world for them and then you see how they react.
JS It’s been said before, but it’s probably impossible to make the perfect work. I often think, “That’s almost what I meant, that’s got something.” And this moves you forward to the next painting.
DS Truth is essential in writing. And there’s power in writing truths that people would rather leave unsaid—maybe like depicting a body that some might rather not see? When you’re painting do you think about the truth a lot? Do you think about truth and beauty, or is it a different. . .
JS All good art has truth, even a mysterious truth that works somehow beyond knowledge. You can feel it.
DS When people take my books to bed and they open the novel and find it’s a bit tough or challenging, or even ugly, it’s like, “Why did you bring this into bed with me? Why are you telling me this?” I think readers can feel violated by literature because it can force the truth upon them when they feel they are otherwise safe, protected.
JS Truth, beauty, light, mystery, they’re all important. It’s almost impossible to describe why something works in painting. It is what it is and you either feel it or you don’t.
DS I think you’re right when you say it starts with the light. Glasgow can have that sort of very clear light that illuminates it all, and it’s reflected in the spirit of the place, because people are very frank and clear-eyed about it. They see the truth. I was worried about the reception the novel would get at home, but what I’d underestimated was the ability of Glaswegians to look at themselves in that clear unfiltered light. In my adopted country of America, things are different, especially at the moment: it’s all illusion and artificiality. If I’ve done my research right, it was when you got to America that you really began to perceive different types of bodies? Is that right?
JS It was the first time I’d been in an environment where there were multiple big bodies, and I found that shocking—the consumption of food, the portion sizes, et cetera. At that time I was interested in the narrative journey that a bigger body had, because no body starts out that big, so there’s a journey to get to those sizes. I’ve painted all types and sizes of bodies and everyone’s body is interesting. When people model for me, even if they’re slightly apprehensive if they haven’t modeled before, they often say it made them feel empowered and when they see the finished work, they often say to me, “I’m so glad I did that.” I’m grateful to those who’ve modeled. In the process of modeling, the conversations are interesting, a lot comes out about their life’s journey, and there’s such connection in people’s humanity. And I’ll hold those conversations in my memory while I’m making the work.
JS There’s a combination of them—who they are—and the techniques involved to portray them in paint.
DS You capture the soul in that way.
JS That’s up to whoever’s looking at the paintings.
DS I must admit, I was horrified looking back at the journalism around some of your earlier work, and the fact that reviewers would use the word “grotesque” to describe it. Obviously those works haven’t changed, but the world around us keeps shifting and changing, so hopefully reactions to those works have changed as well. Has that journey been interesting to you, or do you not pay attention to it?
JS I just get on with my work. You can’t predict how work will be perceived. And you evolve as well, you know. I was navigating my way in painting but in the early ’90s there were fewer spaces to show, and only a small minority of artists got major platforms. Now art is exhibited from all over the world and different voices are being heard. I was given the chance to exhibit in such beautiful spaces, like the Saatchi Collection and then at Gagosian in New York, and I put everything into those works. And then once you’ve been accepted, it’s like, you’ve won the Booker Prize, you can’t stay annoyed about that [laughter ].
DS Are you sad you can’t be an outsider anymore?
JS You have a platform now. And it’s the bravery of your truth that gave you that.
DS I felt really overwhelmed by the feeling of being on the outside and nobody knowing me. And then suddenly everybody looked at me like, “Where the hell did you just come from?” There was fifteen years of work behind my novels so I hadn’t just arrived, I’d just been quietly over there where no one was paying attention to me. I miss that.
JS It’s important to have time to develop, be playful, use your imagination. I’m often judged on those early degree-show works and I’ve developed my painting a lot since then. You have to make the work the way it should be. You can’t make work to appease people who have written a bad review.
And if you’re mature about it, the bad review of a new body of work is okay: “Yeah, that is an aspect that I’ve got a problem with.” If you can be mature enough to accept that!
DS That’s very big of you. I’m not sure I’m quite there yet [laughs ]. That’s why the world is so nostalgic for the ’90s, a time before the Internet, for that sense of being by ourselves inside our own lives, without constant commentary and feedback. That’s probably why the GSA and your time there and my overlapping time holds a fascination for me, because it seems like an idyllic time to make work when you could be in your own experience and also feel like you weren’t so exposed to the world every single day.
JS You can’t have that first journey again.
DS I’m fascinated by what Cy Twombly told you once about working—about trying to be ignored for as long as you can in your career, which is so smart.
JS By the time he’d told me that, everybody wanted to know Cy, to show his work and talk to him. And your impulse is to look at that with admiration, but I could see there was a kind of suffering in his words, because you need to concentrate, you need time to play, and that’s probably why he worked in isolated places, so he could focus. You can’t have judgment when you play. You want to be like that child sitting on the floor making a painting when nobody cares—that’s the most precious thing because it’s a space without judgment, and you need to feel that.
DS You’ve got to retreat from the world. But was your early success overwhelming at twenty-two, or did it just feel like permission?
JS Many opportunities happened in a short space of time. I was fortunate to sell my degree show, which was the first time I had enough money to work for a prolonged period; I won the Newbery Medal and Charles Saatchi commissioned a body of work to show at his Boundary Road gallery. So I had this run of wonderful things happen. And as I moved forward I just said to myself, “Get this work right, make this work the best you can.” So I stayed quiet and concentrated. And that’s the lesson I learned—that the prize is the journey. Working and enjoying life’s opportunities with family and friends is the prize.
This page: Jenny Saville and Douglas Stuart, New York, 2025.
Photo: Stefan Ratibor
Opposite: Jenny Saville, Leda , 2025, oil on canvas, 98 5⁄8 × 77 ½ inches (250.3 × 196.7 cm).
Photo: Prudence Cuming Associates Ltd
Saville
AT THE MOVIES
Carlos Valladares tracks the artist’s engagements with Hollywood glamour, thinking through the ways in which the star system and its marketing engine informed his work.
WITH ANDY WARHOL
Ilike American films best. I think they’re so great, they’re so clear, they’re so true, their surfaces are great. I like what they have to say: they really don’t have much to say, so that’s why they’re so good. I feel the less something has to say, the more perfect it is.
—Andy Warhol, in Cahiers du Cinémas in English , 1967
Andy Warhol, Silver Screen: can’t tell ’em apart at all.
—David Bowie, “Andy Warhol,” 1971
When Mickey Mouse met Andrew Warhola Jr., the seed of a star was born. An older Andy claimed that cartoons were not his thing. 1 Ever the king of a poignant, hilarious contradiction, though, he would go on to say that his favorite actor was Mickey Mouse and his favorite actress was Minnie. 2 Like many other working-class kids in 1930s Pittsburgh, the young Andy Warhola was enthralled by the world of motion pictures—not only the movies but also the newsreels, the cartoons, the munched-on popcorn, the movie magazines, the ranking of favorite gods and goddesses, the whole ritual. He was made for the underground—not just the underground New American Cinema, above which he would tower in the 1960s with Sleep (1963), Eat (1963), and Empire (1964), but also the great directors hidden in plain sight: Howard Hawks, early John Ford, Wild Bill Wellman, Don Siegel, Henry Hathaway. All these were improbable models for what little Andy would become when he dropped the last “a” in his name and became Warhol: “perfect examples of the anonymous artist, who is seemingly afraid of the polishing, hypocrisy, bragging, fake educating that goes on in serious art.”3
Once, Andy’s beloved mother, Julia, saved up all the earnings she had made from nine days of housecleaning work—about $9, or $215 today— to buy Andy one of those newfangled home movie projectors he so desired. She never told
her husband. 4 Thus sprang Andy’s clandestine, quiet passion, cinephilia. His inspired enthusiasm for the kind of movies that were then dismissed as “schlock,” and that today are laughed at and accepted only as “camp,” would continuously befuddle the art world over which he would reign in the ’60s. He especially shocked people in 1965, at the height of his branded popularity, by saying that he was retiring from his known-commodity media of painting and sculpture in order to make movies. It’s not hard to see why: had any of us been a fly on the wall in Julia’s house, watching her youngest son watch Mickey in The Band Concert (1935) and Thru the Mirror (1936), cut up magazines, and decorate a scrapbook with glossy headshots of Carmen Miranda, Mae West, Henry Fonda, and the beloved Shirley “Animal Crackers in My Soup” Temple— well, Warhol’s provocative declaration of his preference for cinema would have come as no mid-movie twist out of Alfred Hitchcock.5
Warhol came of age with Hollywood sound cinema. He was born in 1928, a year after Warner Bros. fatefully released the first feature-length movie with synchronized sound, The Jazz Singer, starring Al Jolson. As related in Blake Gopnik’s 2020 biography of Warhol, the naughty Kid Andy often snuck into cinemas past the ushers without paying the requisite 10¢—“the worst thing that Andy ever did,” according to John, his older brother.6 Before and during his time as a student at the Carnegie Mellon School of Art (then Carnegie Tech), Warhol would routinely attend the prodigious repertory screenings at the Pittsburgh art gallery Outlines; films as diverse as Leo McCarey’s Marx Brothers farce Duck Soup (1933), Jean Cocteau’s fairy-tale romance La Belle et la Bête (1946), Fritz Lang’s German sci-fi freakout Metropolis (1927), and the early experimental work of Joseph Cornell and Maya Deren were all shown at Outlines and all made a considerable impact on the teenage Warhol. Parker Tyler, whose classic film histories The Hollywood Hallucination (1944) and Magic and Myth of the Movies (1947) cemented him as one of the earliest
serious thinkers on Hollywood, gave numerous lectures at Outlines that piqued Warhol’s later personal and intellectual interest in stardom.7 And as Gopnik relates, one particular filmed allegory— the debut of the left-wing film noir master Joseph Losey—would hold particular resonance for Warhol in years to come:
At one art-student party . . . Warhol arrived with his hair dyed chartreuse—a sure reference to a new movie called The Boy with Green Hair. It premiered in November 1948 and starred the child actor Dean Stockwell, who as an adult would show up at a Hollywood party given for Warhol in 1963. The movie’s plot involves a twelve-yearold orphan who wakes up one day to discover that he’s become “different” from everyone else—because of his suddenly green hair—and has to learn to cope with discrimination and even beatings. Warhol and the [Carnegie Tech students] who watched him parade his emerald dye job could only have read this as a parable for coming out gay in Pittsburgh.8
Movies kept Warhol alive. The films of classical Hollywood and their nitrate allure fed his artistic imagination more than anything else did. His later cultivation of Superstars—Candy Darling, Viva, Pope Ondine, Edie “Poor Little Rich Girl” Sedgwick—was sneakily a cockeyed reimagining of the MGM star system: more stars than there are in heaven! All Warhol’s manic-compulsive repetitions of Marilyns, Elizabeth Taylors, and Elvises suggest, on the basic level, a film strip. Yet unlike a film strip, the great ’60s Warhol paintings do not show the figure in a pantomime of movement: They are touchingly frozen. It is only when he applies camp-ish mascara, and when the figures’ backdrops half-evoke the blank screens used in old Hollywood rear projection—but come in varying shades of piss-and-jaundice yellow, puke green, Vincente Minnelli red, the purple of an Upper East Side biddy’s shock of hair—that any (illusion
Previous spread:
Andy Warhol, Double Liz as Cleopatra , 1962, silkscreen ink and acrylic on linen, 21 1 8 × 31 ¼ inches (53.8 × 79.4 cm)
Opposite:
Andy Warhol, National Velvet , 1963, silkscreen ink, silver paint, and pencil on linen, 136 3 8 × 83 ½ inches (346.4 × 212.1 cm), San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
This page:
Andy Warhol with a Liz and an Elvis painting at the Factory, 231 East 47th Street, New York, c. 1965. Photo: Billy Name
of) bustle is magically restored into the cinematic painting’s field. Famously, Jean-Luc Godard drew our attention to the twenty-four frames a second in which a film lies to us about the fantasy that it moves, convinces us that we are observing living beings in front of us, when in fact we see only a trace of them trapped in an insignificant sliver of time—a mortal couple of near-gods, the Odysseus of Spencer Tracy and the Penelope of Katharine Hepburn, who can be conjured up long after death. Every time we watch or return to Angels with Dirty Faces (1938), Father of the Bride (1950), Flaming Star (1960), or The Misfits (1961), we begin a séance. And we witness the drugged, slowed-down, 16-mm film of the séance every time we face one of Warhol’s proliferating icons, which repeat in the manner of a child who, discovering how to draw, becomes fixated on a weird wild animal and must repeat its paws and fangs and fur over and over again, to confirm (pathetically) that it exists, that it once existed, that it might continue to exist.
Elizabeth Taylor constitutes her own solar system. A star and its shine are never enough. So, taken as he was with one Liz, in Blue Liz as Cleopatra (1962) Warhol felt the need to fill the blue movie of his scrapbook mind with fifteen Lizes, four for each row and one tantalizingly left out of the last row. The backdrop is a bewitching moody blue, reminiscent of those tinted scenes in silent movies that take place in forests at night, when paramours scheme together under naked moonlight. The black-and-white image of Taylor, taken from a spread on page 40 of the issue of Life magazine for April 13, 1962, shows her off in her iconic Cleopatra makeup, with its Orientalist knife-blades of thick black lines around the eyes; the lack of color makes it impossible to note Taylor’s heavy blue eye shadow, dark-brown wig with bangs, and gold-inflected braids. But Warhol’s silent-film tinting in Blue Liz as Cleopatra suggests the deep blue of Taylor’s makeup in the finished film.
Certainly what appealed to Warhol was the fact that he was making his audience face—en fait , not a woman but the idea of a woman, playfully ribbing the quaint conservative presumptions of womanhood: the girl as mass-produced blank form for an art-world coloring book. This aesthetic battleground emerged through the face of one of the most famous and globally powerful women of all time, being played by her modern equivalent: the Hollywood superstar, paid $1 million to play-act, plus 10 percent of the film’s gross, plus $50,000 a week for every week that the play-actor was deathly ill from pneumonia and therefore couldn’t even play-act. Playing around with the signs of the day, Warhol immediately recognized that beyond the stiff, molasses-slow, talky mise-en-scène of Joseph L. Mankiewicz, the kook significance of an expensive hunk of celluloid like Cleopatra (1963) lay in its status as the quintessence of star ideology. A humble early-teen horse girl (the National Velvet Liz of 1944, which also piqued Andy’s curiosity and inspired a parallel series of works highlighting Taylor at twelve) wizens and grows up into a blazing symbol of power, sex, and modern transmedia poetry, a name that doubles as a quilt of gossip, marriages, and hype-machine intrigue. As the original Life caption has it, she is the quintessential femme fatale.9 And it took a Warhol, an acolyte of the church of cinema, to depict this with such sincere, unsignposted cheek. I emphasize the work’s poetry, for Liz is arranged and multiplied in Warhol’s blue field like the Esso gas cans in the “Filling Station” of another poetic Liz, Elizabeth
Bishop, cans arrayed to “softly say / Esso—so—so— so.” And so Warhol’s rows of Lizes softly say, Miss Taylor—Lor—Lor—Lor.
It’s critical that Warhol culled his Liz from a Life spread. That lucky copy! Had it been picked up by anyone else—i.e., a nonartist—it would most likely have been gleaned through for the pictures, consumed and read quickly (if at all), then thrown in a bin, consigned to its status as an ephemeral object: the mass media weekly. Instead, Andy, like any good scrapbooker, preserved the pictures. He liked remembering. But he also worked with a mind seemingly machine-made for the automatic, a mind that nightly forgot the accomplishments of the day.
His portraits of James Cagney (1962) and the many Elvis Presleys (1962–64) were based on promotional photographs taken by anonymous photographers hired by movie-studio executives to sell (once again) not the man but the idea of the man. Cagney, fearful in his classic gangster suit but remembering his days as a hustling songand-dance man (Footlight Parade , Hard to Handle , both 1933), looks panicked, about to be plugged by a tommy gun set to kill; Presley, nervous as he play-acts the big bad serious Hollywood actor but remembering his days as a song-and-dance man on the Ed Sullivan Show and Sun Records 45s, looks panicked, about to shoot his load.
The poet John Giorno (for a time Warhol’s lover), in Great Demon Kings (2020), his fantastic memoir of the art, love, and poetry of the 1960s, writes with delight about the day when he went over to Warhol’s and saw him drawing the cover for the
Below: Andy Warhol, Triple Elvis [Ferus Type], 1963, silkscreen ink and silver paint on linen, 82 ¼ × 72 inches (208.9 × 182.9 cm)
Opposite: Andy Warhol, Cagney, 1962, screenprint, 30 × 40 inches (76.2 × 101.6 cm), The Museum of Modern Art, New York, gift of UBS
October 20, 1963, issue of the New York Herald Tribune : a still life of a Coca-Cola bottle, a thermos, and a jar of Vaseline. As Giorno writes, “For gay men at the time, a jar of Vaseline meant one thing: anal sex. So I was thrilled at what I saw as secret homosexual subtext. ‘A Vaseline jar on the cover of the Herald Tribune ! Andy, that’s so brilliant!’ ‘I need the seventy-dollars,’ [Andy replied]. . . . It was a gay image in mass media.”10 Let’s also recall what John Waters has said. Writing on the Liz paintings, Waters sees more than just those stodgy art-historical cliché ideas like “the accidental,” “the postmodern melancholy of Warholian form,” and “the markings of Abstract Expressionism”:
The other Double Liz (1963) is even more lowtech: terribly silkscreened. . . . We all know he lusted for fame, not sex, but one can’t help but wonder if Andy artistically “masturbated” to Liz’s Hollywood celebrity—the fame he feared he could never have. He did do “cum paintings” later in his career, so is it nervy of me to see a symbolic “facial” here? A semen paint deposit that just missed the right side of Liz’s head and was never wiped up by studio assistant Gerard Malanga with a Silver Factory “wankerchief”?
A very sexually satisfying one-night stand that would be forever remembered by art history? 11
Warhol always aimed high and low, far and wide. Perhaps that nice raucous night extended to the similarly “terribly silkscreened” early Cagney Perhaps, too, in the throes of his artistic jerk-off, he had in his mind the picture of a straight-backed Elvis, gun aimed in his line of sight, shaking and waiting for it to go off. The orgasm: the paintings’ reception, their purchases, their status as legend. A night to remember.
The orgasm, in French, is le petit mort . Even in the wittiest, prettiest, and gayest of the Hollywood portraits, stubborn traces of death linger. Of course, the Marilyns, so the story goes, were made as part of the Death and Disasters series—an idea suggested to Warhol by the mover-and-shaker-curator Henry Geldzahler. The image of Marilyn is taken from a promotional headshot of Monroe in Henry
Hathaway’s neat, brutal noir-in-color, Niagara (1953); yet nothing in the photograph signifies Marilyn’s shrewd, nuanced performance as Rose Loomis in that film: no Joseph Cotten, no cabins, no raging falls under which doomed lovers meet. “This is her,” the photo blankly, blaringly says. And Warhol made the Lizes, so the story also goes, when he was sure Taylor was about to die—from a sudden bout of pneumonia during the making of Cleopatra that hospitalized her, bringing the film’s already rocky shoot to a grinding halt. But Warhol’s blasé front when asked what compelled him to fill his first Pop shows in 1962 New York with the visages of these stars is typical, perhaps closer to the awful truth: “I was just making fabrics.”12 Indeed, Monroe and Taylor and Presley are just like different cloths that can be bought in varying shades to please the prospective collector. In the age of mechanical reproduction, once the photograph is taken one can do anything with it, regardless of the subject’s consent in life or death. Frightening. So it goes with the cults around Hollywood stars, where actors and actresses are endlessly discussed, their images cut and fetishized (today they are memed), leaving them as a queer race of walking-dead symbols. In this respect perhaps the key influence on Warhol was Edgar Morin, the celebrated French sociologist who teased out this quality in stark terms in his 1957 book The Stars , which occupied a privileged place on the artist’s vast bookshelf. In The Stars , Niagara is held up as an example of the star’s postwar renaissance: “Marilyn Monroe, the torrid vamp of Niagara , naked under her red dress, with her ferocious sexuality and her killer face, is the symbol of the star system’s revival.”13
It’s key to remember: Andy loved the artificial, absurd, over-the-top mythos of the movies. To many, Presley as an actor is a bad joke. But this joke is what turns Andy on. So the resultant work (whether a single Elvis or Eight Elvises , 1963) ends up running away from the initial flash of inspiration, i.e., a frighteningly and unusually remarkable performance by Presley as Pacer Burton, a halfwhite, half-Kiowa rancher who finds himself torn between his two worlds. The film, Flaming Star, is equally remarkable; it was directed by Don Siegel,
praised by the critic Manny Farber as “a manipulative sock-bang director” and “a determinedly lowercase, crafty entertainer.”14 Surely these are pluses to the cinephile, the historian, the nostalgic, and the priest of remembrance.
Andy was only one of these, the first. Everything else he did was decidedly in the moment, unheedful of his past, unconcerned beyond the headlines of a day. This, ironically, gives longevity to his film paintings—let alone his extraordinary films, wherein he acted successfully in the deranged parody role of a studio head à la David O. Selznick, and which Gary Indiana has identified as “his richest body of work.” 15 In their curious mixture of pathos, humor, Zen calm, and loving acceptance of the nothing as if it were the flibbertigibbety Katharine Hepburn to Warhol’s stoic Spencer Tracy, the film work of Warhol reflects the crazy beauty of modern life itself.
1. “I like all kinds of films except animated films, I don’t know why, except cartoons. Art and film have nothing to do with each other: film is just something you photograph, not to show painting on. I just don’t like it but that doesn’t mean it’s wrong.” Andy Warhol, in “Nothing to Lose: Interview with Andy Warhol by Gretchen Berg,” Cahiers du Cinéma in English , no. 10 (May 1967): 42. Repr. in Michael O’Pray, ed., Andy Warhol: Film Factory (London: British Film Institute, 1989), 58.
2. See Blake Gopnik, Warhol (New York: HarperCollins, 2020), 26.
3. Manny Farber, “Underground Films,” in Farber on Film: The Complete Film Writings of Manny Farber, ed. Robert Polito (Washington, DC: Library of America, 2009), 488.
4. See Gopnik, Warhol , 26.
5. Ibid., 27.
6. Ibid., 26.
7. Not to mention Parker Tyler’s status as the idol of Gore Vidal’s novel Myra Breckinridge (1968): Myra is entranced by Tyler’s theories on Hollywood stars as the modern-day equivalent of Greek gods and goddesses.
8. Gopnik, Warhol , 62–63.
9. “Coming of Age in Celluloid-Land,” Life , April 13, 1962, 40.
10. John Giorno, Great Demon Kings: A Memoir of Poetry, Sex, Art, Death, and Enlightenment (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020), 73.
11. John Waters, “Blue-Collar Liz,” in Warhol: Liz (New York: Gagosian, 2011), 104.
12. Warhol, quoted in Gopnik, Warhol , 283.
13. Cited in ibid., 282. My translation, however, from the French original: Edgar Morin, Les Stars (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1957).
14. Farber, “Don Siegel,” 1969, in Farber on Film , 675–76.
15. Gary Indiana, “I’ll Be Your Mirror,” The Village Voice , May 5, 1987. Repr. in O’Pray, ed., Andy Warhol: Film Factory, 185.
THE DARK SIDES OF
OF LIGHT AND SPACE
Tracking works by Chris Burden, Bruce Nauman, Maria Nordman, and Eric Orr as outliers and outcroppings of the California Light and Space movement, Michael Auping argues that darkness—the absence of light and space—is a key element of the aesthetic.
In 1971, the University of California, Los Angeles, Art Galleries presented an exhibition designed to acknowledge an aesthetic, if not a movement, specific to Southern California at that time. It included four artists: Peter Alexander, Larry Bell, Robert Irwin, and Craig Kauffman. The show’s title summarized the characteristics of their work, qualities shared by the work of a number of other local artists of the region: Transparency, Reflection, Light, Space . We have come to know this phenomenon as the Light and Space movement, light being the presumably pivotal glue holding these bodies of work together.
The movement drew international attention for its carefully formed, translucent, light-absorbing plastics, its glass sheets coated with subtle tinted colors and bathed in gallery lighting, and its room-sized installations in which architecture became a container for light. Doug Wheeler embedded voids of light in walls, beckoning us into another portal. Irwin’s illusive scrims generated subtle glows that made the shape of the room feel more fluid. James Turrell’s skylights cut open the ceilings of rooms, allowing natural light to breathe new life into architecture. In all of these cases there was a sense of ethereality, openness, and release. It was like going to Minimalist heaven through Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s “primacy of perception”—a cleansing of the mind’s eye. The artworks had a luminescent beauty that felt like a perfect abstract portrait of a parched, sunsoaked region looking out at the space
and light above the Pacific Ocean. This view was an oversimplification that persisted for decades, to the point that some of the press releases devoted to the aesthetic read like sales pitches for a day at the beach. Only in recent years have we come to explore different angles into the movement.1 Maybe it’s my advancing age and increasing crankiness that makes me want to remember the dark sides of Light and Space, even to the point of seeing its overall development as an evolution into various shades of psychological, phenomenological, and spiritual darkness. From a certain viewpoint, even light can be dark.
Bruce Nauman arrived in Southern California from the Bay Area in 1969, bringing an edgy, discomforting quality to Light and Space. Like the artists mentioned above, Nauman was a pioneer in creating special rooms of light that immersed the viewer, but he didn’t take you to heaven, unless heaven feels like a vague headache. Untitled (Variable Lights/Extreme Bright Lights), a room in a critically acclaimed survey of his work at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1972, addressed the strange banalities of both light and space in many museums. Nauman had the exhibition technicians install as many light cans as they could find, spaced evenly around the ceiling of the room, most of them facing down, so that you walked into a volume of very bright, institutional light pounding down on the empty space. The atmosphere was banal and felt hot. It was an empty room, but somehow oppressive.
Nauman’s light resonated less with Merleau-Ponty than with Fritz Perls’s Gestalt psychology. Perls’s research revolved around the way the human personality deals with spatial situations, especially those that are not constructed in organized or appealing ways. Nauman’s comments on his work of that period reflect a similar interest: “What really interested me is what is it about certain spaces that makes us feel uncomfortable, and what do we do and what emotions do we have when we sense a room is not right. I didn’t want to escape that condition. I wanted to go right to it.” 2
The artist’s famous Green Light Corridor (1971)—a long narrow corridor that allowed one person to walk or,
in some cases, squeeze themselves through it essentially sideways—countered the apparent ethereal openness of Irwin’s and Turrell’s installations with a beautifully nauseous compression. What initially looks like a rich, material slice of green atmosphere is altogether different once you enter: the light intensifies into a darker emotion. About halfway through, you begin to feel the weight of the green fluorescent light and the compression of the narrow corridor. It’s not a feeling of release; it’s more like a feeling of entrapment.
Fluorescent yellow was one of Nauman’s preferred colors in the early ’70s, because, he later said, “It can be so bright it goes kind of dark, and can be unsettling. Also, it doesn’t work well with other light. It gets a little squirrelly.” He did two works— Installation with Yellow Lights (1971) and Yellow Triangular Room (1974)—in which rooms were filled with yellow fluorescent light from long tubes that hung above the viewer. 3 The rooms,
constructed within the gallery space, had no ceilings. In both cases you entered out of rooms lit by cool, white gallery lighting; the adjustment was not dramatic but it was annoying. You felt a strong need to blink your eyes, a reflex that didn’t really help. In the psychology of color, a certain intensity of yellow is considered appealing and joyful. Taken up another degree, though, yellow becomes a color of caution, and very bright yellow induces nervousness and agitation. These rooms did the latter. Moreover, if you looked up to the open ceiling, where the yellow fluorescent and cool white gallery light mixed, you would see purple and some dark spots.
Nauman left Southern California in 1979, but he carried the dark side of LA light with him. Room with My Soul Left Out, Room That Does Not Care , presented at the Leo Castelli Gallery in 1984, consisted of a series of intersecting black Celotex tunnels with yellow lights hidden in their black interiors. Looking for those
lights from the ends of the tunnels, you couldn’t tell whether the light was emerging or diminishing.
It was often the seeming outliers of Light and Space who offered some of the greatest rewards. But they made you work for it, and no one more so than Maria Nordman—undoubtedly the most mysterious and, some would say, the most cantankerous of the artists associated with the movement, which she denied being a part of at all. Light was a key part of her art in the early ’70s, but she was very stingy with it. I almost felt that she had a love/ hate relationship with it. She once told me she disdained electric light.
In the 1960s, Nordman had worked as an editorial assistant for the architect Richard Neutra. The essential characteristic of Neutra’s simple, minimal buildings was the employment of glass panels and doors that allowed light to flow freely into his California homes. As an artist, Nordman was less generous with her light, distilling Neutra’s rooms of broadly painted light into seriously dark rooms with tightly controlled channels of light that you had to discover with great patience.
One of the best-known of Nordman’s architectural interventions, at the gallery of the University of California, Irvine (UCI), involved an experience that everyone who visited seems to remember differently. My recollection is that you entered a long hallway that led to a larger darkened room. At the end of the hallway was a mirror that over the course of the day directed subtle amounts of light very slowly across the room. I didn’t stay all day, but most of the time I was there was spent in darkness or semidarkness, just waiting.
“I spend much of my time in darkness,” Nordman told me later, referring to the studio that she called a “work room”: an anonymous, sealed-off storefront on Pico Boulevard in Los Angeles. 4 For me this was the heart of the Nordman experi
Bruce Nauman/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: Emanuele Cremaschi/Getty Images
with light and darkness by covering the glass with various types of paper; she used movable walls to work similarly with the rest of the building. I visited her work room twice in the early-to-mid-’70s. There was a mystical, mad-scientist quality about the project. In some respects it was a performance between herself and the viewer: she would greet you at the entrance on Pico and escort you to an anteroom—a small, simple space with little or nothing in it. After a few minutes of quiet conversation she would open a door to another room and ask you to enter by yourself. When she shut the door behind you, the room was pitch black. I remember being alone in her darkness, and trying to get out of the room after about five minutes. She patiently encouraged me to stay for at least fifteen or twenty minutes. I can’t remember ever spending that much time in the dark when I have been awake, and I came to appreciate darkness in a new and animated way. Over time, the room’s atmosphere changed from a deep dark space to a kind of flickering gray. The experience became a collage of illogical perceptions involving spatial density,
architectural scale, and the possibility of emanating light coming from somewhere, but you could never figure out from where. Like Ad Reinhardt’s black paintings, which are not precisely black but a layering of dark colors, the experience involved seeing some semblance of light in extreme slow motion. Nordman was embedding light in her darkness. I later found out that she made her black atmospheres more dense by painting the interior walls of her rooms with black latex paint that was absorbent to light. This was a new kind of space, and a new kind of materiality. For the most part, the luminous branch of the Light and Space movement created glorious perceptions of an evanescent physicality. The materials either gleamed in their luminosity or seemed to disappear into the light of the room. The dark side of Light and Space seemed to transfer this “disappearance” to the viewer’s body. There is something sublime—scary, but exciting—about experiencing your mind, eyes, and body moving through the densities of darkness. Looking up through the open-air ceiling portals of Turrell’s rooms at night, when there are no stars, you feel yourself being pulled or transferred into a sublime darkness.
There is darkness and there is
darkness, and the heart of darkness of the Light and Space movement took place in a small locker on the University of California at Irvine campus during the height of the Light and Space movement. It could be argued that every movement begins to reform itself, even attack itself, the moment it recognizes that it might be a movement, and sometimes the revisions are radical. For Chris Burden’s Five Day Locker Piece (1971), the young graduate student had himself padlocked into one of the school’s small portfolio lockers for five days with little water and no food. Burden later told me he didn’t know what to expect. Part of the time it seemed like full awareness, he said, and part of the time hallucinatory. 5
Some will argue that Five Day Locker Piece had nothing to do with the Light and Space movement—that Burden’s art was a bridge too far from the luminous beauty of Irwin and Co. At that early point in his career, many thought Burden either a masochist or a shock master, or both. Those would have been people who didn’t know him and didn’t sense his understanding of developments in art and of how an artist can address them. Burden was always sensitive to context, and Five Day Locker Piece framed his knowledge of and reaction to the movement in a brilliantly intense way. Irwin, Kauffman, and others associated with Light and Space taught at UCI, and Burden kept abreast of their work. It wasn’t lost on him that one of the most interesting events in the development of the Light and Space aesthetic began in a very dark place, when Irwin and Turrell spent time in one of NASA’s anechoic chambers, which were used to prepare astronauts for the deep darkness and silence of outer space.
Five Day Locker Piece also reflected the darkness of its time, framed by racial unrest and war. For some of us thinking about the locker, it was hard not to think also of American prisoners of war locked in small cages in Vietnam. But that is another essay. Obviously we couldn’t experience Burden’s isolated performance except in our imagination, which we project into the photograph of the outside of the locker that ultimately
This page: Eric Orr, Zero Mass, 1969, installation view, Galleria Salvatore Ala, Milan, 1975
represented the work. In so many ways, that image represents the imagined darkness of our minds looking for light. Burden wasn’t sure he could see any light in that locker, but he thought he might have seen some little beams shooting through empty screw holes.
I thought of Five Day Locker Piece as a potential end of Light and Space. Of course it was not—the movement would go on to balance darkness with light in what many saw as a transcendental experience. In fact, a term often used in describing the experience of this art used to be “transcendental.” For a time, the work had a pseudo-religious following. The critic Jan Butterfield, who wrote
the first book on the movement, was also one of the first to suggest religious connotations.6 This made many of the artists nervous. Irwin said, adamantly, “I don’t make religious art.” 7
Nonetheless, you couldn’t deny a certain spiritual aspect to the work, even on its dark side. Both Irwin and Kauffman attended the Zen Center of Los Angeles at least once, and both talked about incorporating “shadows” in their work, which was often very subtle. The artist Eric Orr was also attracted to the dualities of dark and light in Zen. His work Wall Shadow (1968), originally created on the pavement in front of the Eugenia Butler Gallery, was an early example of making
dark a full partner with light. Part sculpture, part performance, it included the construction of a cinderblock wall, positioned so that one side of the wall would catch the sun while the other would create a shadow. The completion of the work involved painting the ground shadow gray and then deconstructing the wall, leaving the painted ghost of the shadow as the piece.
For the series Zero Mass , begun in 1969, Orr used paper to explore different ways of creating a sense of zero mass. For the version of the piece that I saw at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego in 2012, he hung photographers’ background paper from the ceiling to create a dramatically simple oval chamber. Suggesting a black hole floating in a museum gallery, the work was indeed transcendental: Zero Mass is a perfect title, not only because of the delicate nature of the paper room but because the darkness seemed to absorb your body. There was a subtle feeling of floating. Eventually, tiny pricks of light began to show through the paper walls, like distant stars; no longer claustrophobic, you were made to feel inseparable from a much grander space. Zero Mass might have been Light and Space at both its darkest and its most intimate. One of the beautiful aspects of Light and Space was that it was capable of allowing darkness in, however little that is acknowledged in the literature around the movement. In fact, darkness was critical to the movement. Even Irwin had his dark side, particularly in his later installations, when he employed darkness through line and layering in concert with light and color. I saw Irwin at the opening of Cacophonous , an installation of vertical fluorescent lights at Pace Gallery, New York, in the spring of 2015, and was surprised to see a lot of black lines and panels inserted into the compositions. I asked him about them and he said, “You have to have some darkness. It holds the light together.” 8 I rest my case.
1.
and Robert Irwin: Light and Space (Kraftwerk Berlin), 2021–22, commissioned by the Berlin foundation LAS (Light Art Space) and shown at Kraftwerk Berlin.
2. All quotations of Bruce Nauman are from the author’s interviews with the artist, December 15 and 20, 2007.
3.
or
4. All quotations of Maria Nordman are from the author’s interviews with the artist, 1974 and June 1979.
with the
Two excellent examples of the reframing of the Light and Space movement are the exhibitions Phenomenal: California Light, Space and Surface , Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, 2012,
Yellow Lights was first shown at the Leo Castelli Gallery, New York, in 1971, and was exhibited later under the name Left or Standing, Standing
Left Standing at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth in 1998.
5. Chris Burden, in an interview
author, Newport Harbor Art Museum, May 1974.
6. Jan Butterfield wrote numerous articles and lectures related to Light and Space and collected them in her book The Art of Light + Space (New York: Abbeville Press, 1993).
7. Robert Irwin, in an interview with the author, January 29, 2007.
8. Irwin, in conversation with the author, April 2015.
This fall, Florence will celebrate the work of Fra Angelico with a major retrospective—the city’s first in seventy years—at both the Palazzo Strozzi and the Museo di San Marco, opening on September 26. For the occasion, Ben Street writes about the resonance of Fra Angelico’s work in modern and contemporary art.
In September 1968, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, staged its exhibition The Great Age of Fresco: Giotto to Pontormo. An Exhibition of Mural Paintings and Monumental Drawings . Two years before it opened, devastating floodwaters had surged through many Italian cities, causing extensive damage to historical sites and killing over 100 people. The wall paintings on show at the Met had been salvaged from ancient buildings whose structures were sodden with rising water. What this delicate process of removal and remounting had revealed were the underdrawings, or sinopias, that had been until then hidden beneath layers of plaster and pigment, ostensibly forever. The revelation of these huge drawings, and their display in New York, obliged a reappraisal of what Renaissance painting was—and what contemporary art could be. In a 2009 essay for October, “Why Would Anyone Want to Draw on the Wall?,” conceptual artist Mel Bochner looked back at his encounter with these works at the Met and answered his own question by declaring that large-scale wall work could “negate the gap between lived time and pictorial time.” The problem of painting in the late ’60s—its apparent inability to speak beyond itself, to rub up against the issues of its moment—found an unlikely solution in centuries-old works of art, for which that gap barely existed.
It was easy enough to pass by Fra Angelico’s work in the 1968 exhibition. Compared to the huge sinopias of his fellow Florentines Andrea del Castagno and Paolo Uccello, his contribution was small: three or four sinopias, saved from sites in and around Florence just after the floods. One of these, a Virgin and Child in rust-red pigment (the term “sinopia” refers to that material, almost always used in underdrawings), charms for its repeated attempts to nail the crook of the baby’s elbow. It has a tentativeness absent from the artist’s completed works. Yet Bochner’s claim that Renaissance wall painting could suggest “a new site, a new scale, a new sense of time” for contemporary art resounds in those of Angelico’s frescoes that remain in their original locations more strongly than in the work of any of his peers. You can see this for yourself: Step off the street in Florence and into the whitewashed cloister of the Dominican monastery of San Marco. Ascend the steep stairs to the top floor, where long corridors are punctuated by arched doorways. Within each of these is a monk’s cell containing a single fresco by Angelico. Each is an argument in paint for the interdependence of life and art. Each says: What gap?
Take this one. An angel with rainbow wings stands before a woman who, like her, is pale, thin, and haloed. Her arms folded in front of her, with
right hand up and left hand down, the angel is silently communicating something, announcing something. The woman (a girl, really) echoes that arms-folded gesture, her right fingers holding open the book she’s been reading up to this moment. Those up-and-down gestures condense the subject of the painting: It’s a meeting of worlds, the up and the down, immortal and mortal, heaven and earth. Held still in front of the bellies of the two figures, the gesture also anticipates what’s coming next, namely the birth of a child, who’ll be held in a similar gesture, as babies tend to be. The painting’s subject is the annunciation of the birth of Jesus to Mary by the Archangel Gabriel, but none of Angelico’s presumed viewers would need that story spelled out. It’s entry-level Christian narrative, familiar to even a novice Dominican. Instead, Angelico leans into the implications of the story. That cloister you passed through on the way here, designed by the architect Michelozzo in the late 1430s—contemporary, that is, with Angelico’s fresco—is clearly the model for the painting’s plain architectural interior. The cool Tuscan light that picks out the folds of Gabriel’s garment is the same light illuminating you. And a robed figure behind Gabriel—a man with an alarming gash in his head, the blood dribbling down—is a modern figure, inserted into the ancient narrative: Saint Peter Martyr, a Dominican
saint murdered a century before the painting was made. The complex temporality of the work makes demands on its viewers even now. What it means is that the painting is both about the interaction of heaven and earth and is that. Literally embedded in the walls of the monastery, the painting collapses real and painted space, lived and pictorial time: It extends art into life, and vice versa.
Even the name of Fra Angelico has something of the divine about it, yet it wasn’t a name he knew. He was born Guido di Pietro in the Mugello valley north of Florence, sometime toward the end of the fourteenth century. His first recorded paintings coincide with the beginning of his life as a monk; it’s impossible, then, to separate his artistic production from his spiritual life, as the posthumous name “Fra Angelico” (meaning “Angelic friar,” a name that emerged within a decade or so of his death) reflects. By the middle of the nineteenth century, critics such as John Ruskin were asserting (without evidence) that his “purity of life . . . and natural sweetness of disposition” accounted for the spiritual sincerity of his art. In 1982, he was beatified by Pope John Paul II—the only artist thus far to have received that honor, making him the default patron saint of artists. That status provided a framework, perhaps misleading, for understanding his art as a direct expression of spiritual purity. It also set him apart from his contemporaries, many
of whom, such as Donatello and Piero di Cosimo, were quite happy to produce images of Roman gods and goddesses for private patrons, something it’s impossible to imagine Angelico doing.
This and other qualities make him an anachronistic figure, whose work never quite shook off the decorative Gothic elements and serene abstraction of his earliest work, from the 1420s. Well into his career he was making ethereal paintings with backgrounds of pure gold leaf while his peers had moved on to more naturalistic settings and anatomies. The 2025 exhibition at the Palazzo Strozzi and the Museo di San Marco, the first in Florence in seventy years, reiterates the case for Angelico’s place within the constellation of Renaissance household names, showing newly restored paintings and reuniting altarpieces dismantled in the nineteenth century. Yet Angelico resists such company. His work troubles the clean break between medieval and modern worlds. And that generative anachronism accounts for his reappraisal in the work of artists centuries after his death in Rome in 1455.
In 1950, nearly 500 years after that date, Mark Rothko came to Florence to see the frescoes in San Marco. The visit—the first of two he made to the site (the second was in 1966)—coincided with the emergence of the approach with which he has become synonymous: large-scale, light-absorbent
abstractions, often shown in low-lit, chapel-like interiors. The site-specificity of Angelico’s frescoes in the monastery, and their address of a single viewer resident in the room, evidently left a lasting impression. When, eight years later, Rothko accepted the commission from the Canadian whiskey manufacturer Seagram to create paintings for the walls of the Four Seasons restaurant in the Seagram Building, New York, the example of Angelico informed the calm solemnity of his canvases—and, perhaps, his decision to pull out of the commission the following year, citing the restaurant’s inappropriate atmosphere. The pale geometric planes that provide the infrastructure for Angelico’s San Marco fresco The Mocking of Christ , for instance, and the even, clear illumination within the painting, seem eminently translatable into Rothko’s delicate, numinous color zones. Rothko’s reading of Angelico speaks to his desire to create religious art for an irreligious age. But the richness of Angelico’s painting is such that artists indifferent to art’s spiritual pretensions also found possibility in his work. Bochner’s Measurement Room (1969), which used black tape to indicate the specific measurements of a given interior space, feels informed by his encounter with wall paintings such as Angelico’s at the Met’s Great Age of Fresco exhibition the previous year. The mapping of space in Angelico’s San Marco
frescoes, their precise reiterations of the simple geometries of Michelozzo’s cloister, does related work to Bochner’s conceptual cartography, saying, to related but divergent ends, You are here
This probing at the spatial mysteries of Angelico’s work returns in Richard Hamilton’s inkjet digital print The annunciation (2005), which is directly based on Angelico’s fresco of the same name at the top of the steps in the monastery of San Marco. Hamilton’s work shows a white-cube gallery interior, based on the Anthony d’Offay Gallery, London, that resembles the bare spaces of the monastery, implying the secular replacement of religion by art. On the wall of the gallery is an artwork showing a nude woman in an interior, speaking on the phone: like Mary, she is receiving a message that remains silent to the viewer. Eleanor Ray’s small 2016 painting also based on Angelico’s Annunciation articulates the artist’s modernist appeal by reducing the fresco and its surroundings to thinly painted areas of pale color, a Piet Mondrian by way of Giorgio Morandi. What her painting shows, too, is what seems to have captured many artists in contemplating Angelico: the quasi-magical extension of real space into illusion, the melting of one into another.
In late 1970, Philip Guston visited Florence for the third time. He and his wife, Musa McKim, traveled there under a cloud: his exhibition of
new paintings at the Marlborough Gallery, New York, that October had received withering critical reviews and general lack of acceptance among his peers. These were the works for which he is bestknown today—the awkward figurations of hoods and hands, the blood-spattered robes and junky piles—but at the time, their anachronistic embrace of the figure, and indirect evocation of American violence, failed to find purchase within a post-Pop artistic landscape. In returning to Italy in these gloomy circumstances, Guston sought to reconnect with the support network of artists he had always turned to, Giotto, Masaccio, Piero della Francesca, and Angelico among them. His early career as a muralist in the United States and Mexico certainly informed his engagement with artists working in fresco. Visiting Masaccio’s Brancacci Chapel in Florence, he talked about “smelling the lime,” and about how the works were “painted like billboards, like sign painting, bing boom.” What Guston drew from the art of the past was its ability to communicate in everyday vernacular: bing boom . Angelico’s Mocking of Christ is like that. In the center of the fresco, Christ sits on a plain dais, holding a reed and a stone—a mock version of the scepter and orb conventionally held by a king. Two figures sit beneath, like courtiers—Mary on his right, Saint Dominic on his left. At the same time, all pretense to regality is undermined by the blindfold across
his eyes and the disembodied hands that slap and strike him. A floating head raises his hat in mock greeting and spits into his face. Painted on the wall of one of the San Marco cells, this is a work aimed at a single viewer devout enough to disentangle the strange ironies of this inversion of the iconography of power. Its violence is, as so often in Angelico, told plainly. Blood drips, heads roll, tortures are carried out: these shocking incidents in Angelico’s paintings are folded into his clear-eyed vision of human behavior, with horror and serenity side by side, as in Guston’s work of the 1970s.
Rothko’s and Guston’s encounters with Angelico produce forking paths in contemporary art. One heads toward a limpid sublime, accessed through a controlled engagement with art in space; the other toward a stark accounting of the textures of modern experience, in all its violence and tenderness. The floating hands and heads in Guston’s paintings put forward a vision of tragedy that is, as in The Mocking of Christ, timeless, in that it’s taking place right now as well as in the past. It’s outside time. Angelico’s anachronism turns out to be the very thing that has revitalized his work in the eyes of his successors. Its temporal discrepancies—that bloodied monk in the archway, peering in—remind us that his is an art of eternal presentness: an annunciation from the past that is always happening now.
ANNA WEYANT: WAIT FOR IT
Previous spread and left: Anna Weyant, Slumber, 2020, oil on linen, 36 ×
Below: Mattia Preti, The Concert , c. 1630–35, oil on canvas, 42 × 57 inches (107 × 145 cm), Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid. Photo: Museo Nacional ThyssenBornemisza/Scala/Art Resource, New York
Opposite: Anna Weyant, Buffet , 2020, oil on linen, 36 × 48 inches (91.4 × 121.9 cm)
Anna Weyant’s first solo institutional exhibition, at the Museo Nacional ThyssenBornemisza, Madrid, was curated by Guillermo Solana in close collaboration with the artist, and places more than twenty paintings by Weyant in dialogue with a selection of works from the museum’s permanent collection. Sydney Stutterheim considers the artist’s contemporary exploration of suspense, identity, concealment, and temporality.
In Anna Weyant’s Slumber (2020), danger lurks just around the corner. A champagne-hued blonde is tucked into bed. Although her mouth is curiously agape, her lips remain soft, hardly the tense expression of a scream; her body, too, is languidly reposed. Her vision shielded by a satin eye-mask, she fails to see the flame of a long-stemmed candle perilously brushing against a curtain behind her. Comfortably nestled against cream-hued sheets, she is blissfully unaware of the risk of impending disaster.
Set just before the moment of action, the scene opens onto several possibilities, ranging from the uneventful (the candle extinguishes) to catastrophic (the room alights in flames). Similar depictions of unresolved ambiguity recur in Weyant’s work, as the artist introduces almost imperceptible elements that create suspense within otherwise serene scenarios. The work’s title, Slumber, most commonly refers to a light sleep; it also connotes a sense of naivete. While this kind of obliviousness is often seen in terms of imminent danger, it likewise relates to Weyant’s ongoing explorations of
female adolescence, during which identity oscillates between innocence and precociousness, eagerness and trepidation about the future.
Representations of anticipation continue in Weyant’s adjacent body of vanitas -inspired still lifes, as objects are shown on the verge of disintegration or collapse: semideflated balloons, partially undone bows, almost wilting flowers in their last moments of bloom. In Buffet (2020), a table is neatly set with three groups of objects related to consumption. At center is a cluster of hard-boiled eggs, piled gracefully in a wicker basket lined with a delicately embroidered cloth. The unnatural angle of the lining may be the first indication that things in this depicted world operate according to rules different from our own. Flanking the container of eggs—conventional symbols of rebirth, fertility, and transformation in the still life tradition with which Weyant is in dialogue—are two food items that undermine the generic nature of the depicted scene: On the left is a slice of bread, shown with a silver butter knife embedded deeply into its crust. At right, a pair of
48 inches (91.6 × 121.9 cm)
piranhas atop a silver tray, their teeth bared in menacing snarls, seem out of place—a rare delicacy in South America but rarely served as a dish in New York, where Weyant lives and works. The festive tenor of the meal is tinged with an ominous sensibility that suggests a threat still to come.
Emblematic of the artist’s signature aesthetic, such explorations of temporality are the focus of Weyant’s first-ever museum exhibition, which opens at the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid, this summer. Across the twenty-six paintings and drawings on view, the decisive moment of action is continually deflected—a point echoed by the novelist Emma Cline, who has described Weyant’s paintings and drawings as having “the quality of waiting.”1 In deciding to capture a state of expectation, the artist differs from many of her artistic forebears, who often emphasize the moment of heightened drama. Take Artemisia Gentileschi’s Judith Beheading Holofernes (c. 1620), which famously depicts female revenge at its goriest and most dramatic moment. In contrast, Weyant’s
self-possessed subjects coolly look out onto their worlds with a teenage ennui. While both artists position women at the center of agentic decisions, Weyant’s paintings stage suspense rather than conflict, unsettlingly hinting at possibilities just outside them.
As part of a newly established exhibition program based on the Blanca and Borja ThyssenBornemisza collection, Weyant was invited to choose pieces from the museum’s permanent collection to be shown alongside her own. Her selections, which span from the dusky, chiaroscuro-laden palettes of the Italian Baroque to the uncanny eroticism of Neue Sachlichkeit painting, elaborate on the suspense that permeates her own compositions. Mattia Preti’s The Concert (c. 1630–35), for instance, in contrast to the jubilant and lively performance suggested in its title, captures a trio of musicians who appear to be warming up, engaging in a private moment right before their debut in front of an audience. This depiction of the intimate preparations that one undertakes before engaging in public
Left: Giovanni Battista Piazzetta, Portrait of a Young Woman in Profile with a Mask in Her Right Hand , c. 1720–30, oil on canvas, 18 1 8 × 14 ¼ inches (46 × 36.2 cm), Carmen ThyssenBornemisza Collection, Museo Nacional ThyssenBornemisza, Madrid. Photo: Museo Nacional ThyssenBornemisza/Scala/Art Resource, New York
Below: Anna Weyant, She Drives Me Crazy, 2022, oil on canvas, 30 ¼ × 60 ¼ inches (76.8 × 153 cm)
Opposite: Anna Weyant, Feted , 2020, oil on canvas, 60 × 48 inches (152.4 × 121.9 cm)
self-display is alluded to in Weyant paintings such as Untitled (2018), in which a young woman, clad in Ivy League gear from rival universities, stands listlessly among objects connoting celebration, without any active festivities on view. Surrounded by markers of success, Weyant’s subject seems to be caught in a moment of self-reflection, presumably just before beginning her social obligations at the event.
While titled as a portrait, Giovanni Battista Piazzetta’s Portrait of a Young Woman in Profile with a Mask in Her Right Hand (c. 1720–30), a partial view of a young woman anticipating the thrill of a costume ball, captures a similar feeling of expectation: it minimizes personal subjectivity to communicate instead the performativity of identity, as suggested by the mask held in the protagonist’s hand. Weyant often uses this mode of figuration as well. In A Disaster, Such a Catastrophe (2022), for instance, she depicts two figures, one with eyes closed, rendered in a realistic style, and the other in a jocular, cartoonish guise. While there are similarities that might suggest two adjacent renderings
of the same subject, neither representation communicates a clear expression of a specific individual. Despite their stylistic differences and the uncanniness of the juxtaposition, both figures seem to be wearing “masks,” obscuring their inner selves in distinct outwardly manners.
In Pearls (2021), a delicate rendering of two necklaces in a jewelry case, Weyant uses the traditional principles of the still life genre as a stylistic convention for exploring allegorical themes of transience, whether in terms of the eventual termination of existence or of notions of value that shift and evolve over time. This concept is further explored in She Drives Me Crazy (2022), wherein a trio of silverhued cookware items set on a table visualize a portent of mortality by capturing a person wielding a knife in the gleaming reflections in the metal. Weyant adds complexity to objects often associated with domestic labor or fashion, fields typically seen as the domain of women. Her reframing of the still life as linked to contemporary female experiences that complicate conventional stereotypes offers a
feminist take on what might otherwise be considered staid artistic subject matter.
Like Slumber, Christian Schad’s Portrait of Dr. Haustein (1928), another of Weyant’s selections from the Thyssen-Bornemisza collection, suggests a premonitory threat of tragedy rather than an actual one. Schad’s depiction of Doctor Hans Haustein, a prominent dermatologist in Weimarera Berlin, is haunted by a large shadow that looms over the sitter. Schad said that the ghostly figure represented the doctor’s mistress, a model named Sonja; however, given the suicide of both Doctor Haustein and his wife, Friedel, in the coming years—Friedel because of her husband’s romantic indiscretions, Hans in anticipation of his imminent arrest by the Gestapo—the silhouette assumes an omenlike presence.
Weyant’s selection of Balthus’s The Card Game (1948–50) captures the two artists’ shared interest in the developmental age between adolescence and adulthood. Taking a subject favored by artists including Caravaggio and Cézanne, Balthus
Opposite: Anna Weyant, Escape Artist , 2019, oil on panel, 16 × 12 inches (40.6 × 30.5 cm)
presents his cardplayers as two young teenagers. The protagonist is undoubtedly the girl, whose erect posture and confident if slightly bemused facial expression indicate her strong hand. In contrast to her partner, whose face is cast in shadow and who duplicitously holds a card behind his back, the girl is illuminated, as if positioned under a soft spotlight.
“Children in Balthus are uncertain of their bodies,” curator and art historian Jean Clair once declared; this is often true of Weyant’s subjects as well. 2 While their poses and makeup seem coquettish, their expressions convey ambivalence and their figures are often unarticulated, more childlike than womanly. They are stylishly dressed in understated but sophisticated clothing—white button-down shirts, taffeta party dresses, pleated plaid skirts, accents of fur, designer jewelry. Their surroundings are similarly refined: manicured lawns, well-groomed horses, crisp linens, silver tableware, tastefully patterned wallpaper. Although not expressly uncomfortable in their
settings, the young women are often shown as emotionally detached from their environs, their eyes closed or averted. The sunglass-clad, partly nude subject of Semi-Charmed Life (2021) exemplifies this point.
Weyant’s seemingly perfect scenes upended by peculiar, logic-defying events recall René Magritte’s Surrealist compositions, one of which she chose to be in dialogue with her work. In The Key of the Fields (1936), Magritte uses the visual device of a window to play with expectations around depth perception and illusionism. Sharply broken shards of what appears to be glass from a window above them are revealed as something more puzzlingly inconclusive—opaque objects rather than a clear pane. Weyant adopts a similar approach in Escape Artist (2019), in which an Art Deco–inspired picture frame seems to surround a window through which we see a pair of precariously hanging bare legs, accompanied by a dangling rope whose presence is either benevolent or sinister.
Considered alongside Weyant’s works, these five historical paintings from the Museo ThyssenBornemisza’s permanent collection offer context for the various influences on her art. Yet this dialogue between past and present also provides an important point of contrast, demonstrating how Weyant has developed a thoroughly modern take on temporality and identity for young women in the age of social media, digital avatars, and global interconnection. Turning to the past as much as reflecting upon the contemporary world around us, Weyant gives weight to the experience of female adolescence, the move between childhood and adulthood, often only cursorily explored but hugely formative. As such, Weyant’s compositions are thoroughly contemporary, a fresh artistic vision that looks backward and forward at once.
1. Emma Cline, “Anna Weyant: Baby, It Ain’t Over till It’s Over,” Gagosian Quarterly, Winter 2022, available online at https:// gagosian.com/quarterly/2022/10/21/essay-anna-weyant-baby-it-aintover-till-its-over (accessed July 24, 2025).
2. Jean Clair, quoted in Gilles Néret, Balthus (Cologne: Taschen, 2003), 43.
Marina Tabassum Hans Ulrich Obrist’s
Questionnaire
Hans Ulrich Obrist
In this ongoing series the curator has devised a set of thirty-seven questions that invite artists, authors, musicians, and other visionaries to address key elements of their lives and creative practices. Respondents select from the larger questionnaire and reply in as many or as few words as they desire. For the third installment of 2025, we are honored to present , the architect behind this year’s Serpentine Pavilion in London, A Capsule in Time
Marina Tabassum
6. What is your unrealized project?
A: A studio and a workshop, for the longest time, till I gave up. Now it’s a farmhouse where I can become a farmer.
9. What keeps you coming back to the studio?
A: A sense of purpose that defines my existence.
13. The future is . . . ?
7. What role does chance play?
A: 50 percent, if I act on it. 0 percent, if I don’t.
A: Waking up in the morning to face the day.
14. Do you write poems?
A: With bricks . . . I try.
15. How would you like to die?
A: With an awareness of death—as my lived life flashes by.
22. Do you have rituals?
A: When my mind goes wild, I meditate for a sense of calm.
17. Has the computer changed the way you work?
A: Partly. In a good way. With caution. Not to lose my ability to think.
37. Is the mirror broken?
A: No, not yet. But there’s a crack.
16. Your favorite color?
A: The dusk in a clear sky.
JEAN SCHLUMBERGER: TAKING FLIGHT
The jewelry designer Jean Schlumberger permanently changed the face of High Jewelry with his daring approach to materials and techniques. His engagement with flora and fauna from the sea to the sky, and his choice of unparalleled gems, found an eager audience during his lifetime and continues to glamour the eyes and minds of jewelry lovers today. The Quarterly ’s Wyatt Allgeier explores his life, legacy, and the persistence of his studied yet whimsical work.
In the rarefied world of High Jewelry, few names command the reverence reserved for Jean Schlumberger. His work remains a touchstone of imagination and technical aplomb, as jewelry that seems not merely made but conjured into being. As if springing from myth or dream, and deeply influenced by his travels to such places as Bali, the island of Guadeloupe, and India, Schlumberger’s designs dance between whimsy and elegance, capturing the natural world with a hand both exacting and enchanted.
Schlumberger’s journey to becoming one of the most celebrated jewelry designers of the twentieth century was anything but conventional. Born in 1907 in Alsace (today French, but then part of Germany) into a textile-manufacturing dynasty, Schlumberger was discouraged by his family from pursuing art. (Like so many parents over the generations, they wanted him to work in finance.) Alas for them, and thankfully for everyone else, creation was his calling. Moving to Paris in his early twenties, Schlumberger wandered the city’s flea markets for materials and inspirations—some of his earliest creations were clips repurposed from porcelain flowers he found there—and immersed himself in the robust literary and artistic circles on offer. Over the next decade he opened an atelier and caught the eye of Elsa Schiaparelli, the grande dame of Surrealist fashion. It was with her house that he further established himself as a talent unbound by the traditional vocabulary of adornment, creating buttons and unique costume jewelry in the forms of cherubs, fruit, insects, and beyond.
World War II put Schlumberger’s creative life on hold, as he served first in the French army and then in exile alongside General Charles de Gaulle. After the war, though, he moved to New York, where his work quickly gained attention in the international jet set forming and re-forming in the city. (It didn’t hurt that Diana Vreeland, editor-in-chief of Vogue , had been admiring his work since his days with Schiaparelli.) His originality and meticulous craftsmanship attracted a sophisticated clientele eager for something different from the mainstream, something whimsical and amusing after so many years of chaos and privation around the globe. After the horror of the war, can we blame anyone for having a proclivity for shimmering seahorses and bejeweled parrots?
In 1956, Schlumberger’s career reached a defining moment when he was invited by Walter Hoving, then chairman of Tiffany & Co., to join the American jeweler. Schlumberger accepted, becoming the first
Left: Jean Schlumberger, 1971.
Photo: Horst P. Horst/Condé Nast via Getty Images
Right: The Tiffany Diamond set in Jean Schlumberger’s Bird on a Rock brooch for the Schlumberger retrospective at the Musée des Arts décoratifs, Paris, 1995. Photo: The Tiffany Archives
designer in Tiffany’s history—and one of only four— to sign their work, a rare honor that underscored his influence and artistry. (He was in good company; the others were Frank Gehry, Elsa Peretti, and Paloma Picasso.) Schlumberger found the perfect stage for his imagination on the mezzanine of Tiffany’s Fifth Avenue flagship. Over the next two decades, working with expert craftspeople and drawing inspiration from flora, fauna, history, and mythology, he produced some of the most iconic jewelry of the twentieth century. His designs defied convention, embracing asymmetry, movement, and vivid color. As he said, “I observe nature and find verve.”
Schlumberger’s work was not just decorative but narrative. Whether sculpting sea urchins from sapphires or mid-flight birds from diamonds and gold, he brought to each piece a draftsman’s eye and a poet’s instinct. His insistence on drawing each design by hand is readily apparent in the works’ unmistakably nonmechanical lines. And his client list reflects his singular approach, his pieces finding their way onto the bodies of a veritable who’s who of twentieth-century glamour. Jacqueline Kennedy was famously fond of his enamel-andgold bracelets; her husband, the US president, gave her a Schlumberger berry clip in yellow gold, diamonds, and rubies to celebrate the birth of their son John Kennedy Jr. in 1960. Elizabeth Taylor (who received a dolphin clip from Richard Burton to celebrate the 1964 premiere of The Night of the Iguana), Audrey Hepburn, and Greta Garbo were among Schlumberger’s admirers. His pieces were coveted not only for their beauty but for the distinctive personality they expressed. Beyond being straightforward clients, many of these women, including
Rachel “Bunny” Mellon, became close friends and confidants, exchanging letters with the designer for decades. While all this sounds quintessentially luxurious, Schlumberger was not obsessed with status or ostentation, preferring quiet travel and solitary engagement with the natural world. He was known to avoid interviews. He loved the sea.
Schlumberger retired from Tiffany in the 1970s but continued to influence the world of design until his death, in 1987. His work remains among the most beloved in the world of jewelry collecting. His designs are housed in permanent museum collections, including the Musée des Arts décoratifs in Paris, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, and the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond (the last thanks to Bunny Mellon’s donation of her substantial personal collection).
Among Schlumberger’s many triumphs, perhaps none is more emblematic than his Bird on a Rock—a glittering avian figure perched irreverently atop a massive gemstone. First conceived in 1965 for Bunny Mellon, in yellow and white diamonds atop a lapis lazuli cabochon, the concept ran into various iterations over the years (the setting of the house’s legendary 128.54-carat Tiffany Diamond into the motif for the 1995 Schlumberger retrospective at the Musée des Arts décoratifs being the apotheosis). The piece embodies everything Schlumberger stood for: technical precision, natural inspiration, and playful grandeur.
This year, Tiffany & Co. introduces a new chapter in the bird’s mythos with the debut of Bird on a Rock by Tiffany, a new Fine and High Jewelry collection that reinterprets the iconic design through a thoroughly modern lens. Under the artistic direction of Nathalie Verdeille, the bird doesn’t just land, it soars. “For the High Jewelry Bird on a Rock designs, we studied birds as Jean Schlumberger did—carefully observing their stances, their feathers, the structures of their wings—to create dynamic forms that seem to flutter and perch upon the wearer,” says Verdeille. Her approach is both academic and poetic, a continuation of Schlumberger’s own method of rigorous observation transformed into imaginative abstraction.
At the core of the collection lies the wing motif, a sculptural symbol of freedom, love, and metamorphosis. This motif becomes a connective thread across both High and Fine Jewelry suites, taking bold yet graceful form in diamonds and precious metals. Verdeille distills the bird’s essence not into literal feathers but into textural patterns that evoke movement, lightness, and fluidity. “For the Fine Jewelry collection, we looked at this bird from another perspective, distilling it down to its essence—the wing—and stylizing the motif into elegant, abstract patterns,” she continues. “These sculptural forms intertwine and unfold in textural creations that are as abstract as they are symbolic.”
Nature, in Schlumberger’s hands, was something not to imitate but to converse with—to stylize and exaggerate, to transform through imagination. The new collection understands this implicitly. It doesn’t merely replicate the past, it listens to it, responds to it, and lets it evolve. In reinterpreting Schlumberger’s bird, Tiffany has done more than revisit a classic: With Verdeille’s vision, they have added a new chapter to an already extraordinary story—one that affirms the power of reinvention grounded in tradition. The bird, once a gleaming sentinel atop an immovable gem, now spreads its wings, reminding us that even icons can take flight again.
Above: Bird on a Rock by Tiffany earrings in platinum and 18k yellow gold with tanzanites, diamonds, and rubies. Photo: Fujio Emura
Below: Jean Schlumberger by Tiffany Jellyfish Brooch
Opposite: Bird on a Rock by Tiffany Wings Graduated Necklace in platinum with diamonds. Photo: Fujio Emura
All photos: courtesy Tiffany & Co.
FASHION AND ART PART 23: TORY BURCH
Tory Burch, chairman and chief creative officer at her namesake brand, which she launched in 2004, met with the Quarterly ’s Derek C. Blasberg this past June. The two discussed Burch’s Fall/Winter 2025 runway show at the Museum of Modern Art, her collaboration with Rashid Johnson and Janicza Bravo for the 2025 Met Gala, early encounters with art and its lasting effects on her process, and the ethical core of her approach to good business.
DEREK C. BLASBERG: Your most recent fashion show was at the Museum of Modern Art [MoMA] last spring. I saw you again there earlier this week when the museum honored Glenn Lowry, the outgoing director. Let’s start our conversation about fashion and art here.
TORY BURCH: Glenn was at MoMA for thirty years. What an incredible tenure. And his wife is wonderful too. I feel very, very fortunate [to have hosted my Fall 2025 runway show in the museum] because I’ve always wanted to do it there. I’ve always been obsessed with the garden, the sculptures, just the history of the museum. It’s one of the most extraordinary museums in the world. And, it was started by three women.
DCB: Did you read that book MoMA published last year, Inventing the Modern , which was all about those women?
TB: Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, Lillie P. Bliss, and Mary Quinn Sullivan.
DCB: Not to oversimplify a fashion show, but was it easy to pull yours off in a museum? I attend many shows, and I love it when they’re held in an inspiring setting such as a museum. But I can’t imagine it’s easy.
Museum on Fifth Avenue and 91st Street.
TB: The Cooper Hewitt shows were outdoors, and I was a little tired of doing a weather dance. Our luck was going to run out at some point!
DCB: Have museums always been a part of your life? Did you go to them often as a kid?
TB: I was thinking about that before I saw you today—when did art first enter my life? In a way, my childhood was my introduction. Being exposed to beauty was an essential part of our upbringing. My parents were always collectors, but they never focused on value; it was always about style and things that they loved. It was super eclectic. They both loved folk art, and porcelain was almost an obsession. That was my first experience of appre -
I don’t think of myself as a “collector,” but I do have a collection of art, antiques, and objects that I love, things I’ve found over many years. As a designer, the way art inspires me is never literal.
TB: I wouldn’t say it was easy, no. You may recall that it was on two floors, with live streaming and models going up and down the stairs. The goal was to create a dialogue between the two spaces. The museum made it as easy as possible, but we had to figure it out.
DCB: I love that you use these types of New York institutions for your shows. Last year you were in the Richard Gilder Center [for Science, Education, and Innovation] at the American Museum of Natural History, and that was the first show in the cool new cavelike atrium that Jeanne Gang designed. Before that you showed in the garden of the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design
ciating art, which I only sort of realize now.
DCB: Basically your mom was curating a life in Philadelphia.
TB: She was a curator. I’m not sure she knew that, but maybe she did.
DCB: I’ve met your mom! She knows.
TB: Okay, she definitely knew. My dad was an aesthete. When I was older, we would go to museums. I was an art history major at the University of Pennsylvania, and I would often visit the old Barnes Foundation and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. As a family we would visit various cities, and it was a thing, but it wasn’t something we did every weekend. And my dad loved auctions. Obsessed.
DCB: Really? For what?
TB: Everything. He collected armor. I remember there was this crazy Hearst Castle sale; I’m sure the estate was selling some of the leftovers, and we had some.
DCB: Whole suits of armor?
TB: They were fans of very odd things. I’ll have to find pictures of our house.
DCB: I love thinking about you in Philadelphia. Do you remember when you organized a trip several years ago for a big group of us to visit the Barnes together? I loved that excursion.
TB: Wasn’t that fun? We got on the train, toured the museum’s new exhibition space, and then had an early dinner before heading back to New York. I kind of want to do it again. I’m on the board of the museum—
DCB: Yes! Do it again! I’m RSVPing yes right now.
TB: We did that long table with the dinner, and Jeff [Koons] was on the end. And we took Amtrak. That was an enjoyable trip that you don’t get to do often.
DCB: You put together a fantastic group of people from the art world, the fashion world, and the culture world at large. That’s something I love about New York: the art world and the fashion world, which are sometimes so separated, coexist here.
TB: There’s a lot of crossover for me.
DCB: Earlier this year, for the Met Gala, you collaborated with Rashid Johnson, right?
TB: Rashid is a great friend, and so is Sheree Hovsepian, his wife, who is also an artist. Working with him was an incredible honor, and with this year’s theme [ Superfine: Tailoring Black Style], it was an important collaboration for me. We were introduced to Janicza [Bravo, the filmmaker] through Jeremy O. Harris, who I admire so much; he’s a force. We had a call, and Rashid said, “I want to dress the Toni Morrison of today,” and Jeremy brought up Janicza.
DCB: Of course they collaborated on that movie, Zola [2020], which was incredible.
TB: When I got to know Janicza I fell in love with her of course. Working together was pretty inspiring.
DCB: Remind me, you incorporated a Rashid print into Janicza’s ensemble?
TB: We visited Rashid’s studio downtown and he showed us his work. We interpreted three of his pieces through embellishments—micro-sequins, flocking, 3D silicone, painted foil. It required multiple techniques to capture the intensity and depth of his work. For the silhouette, I’d seen an image of Belle da Costa Greene, [the legendary librarian] of the Morgan Library, and
had found nearly the same photo. It was this incredible workmanship, achieved through collaboration. I’m very proud of it.
DCB: Did you have fun at the Met Gala? In addition to Rashid and Janicza, I know you brought your son, Henry.
Janicza
Previous spread: Tory Burch in her living room, seated on a chair by Paul Poiret. On the wall behind her is The “Eliza Hancox” (1864) by James Bard. Photo: Max Farago
This page: Rashid Johnson, Tory Burch, and Janicza Bravo at Johnson’s studio, Brooklyn, New York. Photo: Noa Griffel
TB: I did. Bringing Henry was the best part. I’ve never brought my boys to anything like that.
DCB: Altogether [between you and your husband, Pierre-Yves,] you have nine kids. How did you land on one?
TB: Well, I sent an email to all the kids and I said, “I have one ticket, you pick.”
And they all literally wrote back within fifteen minutes and said, “Henry!”
DCB: That worked out. I know you also had Pamela Anderson at your table, and your sons are friendly.
TB: That’s how I met Pamela, actually. I think it’s so lovely that she works with her sons.
DCB: I agree. They were producers on her Netflix documentary and they’re involved in her career now. Gia Coppola was the director of The Last Showgirl , which Pamela was in last year, and she tells a story that she sent the script to Pamela’s agent, who shot her down.
But she tracked down Pamela’s son, showed him the project, and Pamela loved it. Pamela said that the agent is no longer her agent. Ha!
TB: I like Pamela. I think she’s super interesting and I love what she’s doing; I like the second act. At this point, she’s raised her kids and she’s focusing on herself. She’s obviously beautiful, but she’s also smart and a great person.
DCB: The week before the Met Gala you hosted the first fundraising event for the Tory Burch Foundation—your nonprofit focused on empowering women entrepreneurs by providing access to capital, education, and community. At this event you introduced some of the incredible women whose businesses have benefited from the foundation, and you then moderated a Q&A with Martha Stewart, the OG female entrepreneur.
TB: That was one of the first times that we’ve shown the work we’ve been doing for fifteen years in a
significant way, in a very public way.
DCB: You started the foundation when you started the brand, right?
TB: It was in my business plan from the beginning. When I would pitch investors to raise money, they told me to never use “business” and “purpose” in the same sentence. I said I wanted to start a global lifestyle brand so I could start a foundation, and they basically patted me on the back and told me to never to say that again.
DCB: How patronizing!
TB: I actually saw one of the people who said that a few years ago. I said, “It’s interesting to see you, I just came from a conference where the theme was ‘doing good is good for business…’” And he’s like, “OK, OK, what do you want?”
This page: Tory Burch Fall/Winter 2025 collection, The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Photos: courtesy Tory Burch
DCB: He knew he was wrong and you were right?
TB: He was great about it, but yes. I said, “I want a check for the foundation, actually.” And he did write one.
DCB: A happy ending at least.
TB: Yes, and I still believe that doing good is good for business.
DCB: Has that always been the company motto?
TB: From the beginning. It wasn’t my only unpopular idea; I also launched with e-commerce in 2004, when people told me no one would ever shop online.
having this visceral reaction to something. When I look at the art I have, it’s so eclectic—everything from Old Masters to Helen Frankenthaler, René Magritte, Peter Doig, Gertrude Abercrombie, Madeline Hewes, Giacometti, folk art and flea market finds. What I love is when it’s all mixed up. I think there’s some rhyme and reason when you look at it, but there is no rhyme or reason to the way I collect it.
DCB: You prefer the word “aesthete” to “collector.”
TB: I don’t think of myself as a “collector,” but I do have a collection of art, antiques, and objects that I love, things I’ve found over many years. As a designer, the way art inspires me is never literal. I was recently looking at some works by Agnes Martin, and I was struck by her restraint. It’s how I approach design—my inspiration comes from all over and in abundance, but it’s all about focus and restraint.
When you’re creating something from scratch, it’s interesting to see other people’s creative processes and how they work. When I was at Rashid’s studio, he talked about how he will feel something, and he wants to get that across on the canvas. I want the same. I want people to have an emotion when they wear our collections, I want them to feel confident. That is a powerful feeling.
DCB: The Oprah moment in 2005, which is now fashion history: You went on that show to be one of “Oprah’s favorite things” and your world changed, right?
TB: Yes. And if we hadn’t had e-commerce during Oprah, it would have been a very different scenario.
DCB: Your website crashed, right?
TB: Yes. Temporarily! We got it back up, but we had 8 million hits, and that was in 2005.
DCB: Do people stop you in the street now with business ideas?
TB: Yes, I get a lot of pitches. It’s great, there’s nothing better than entrepreneurship.
DCB: What’s the craziest place you’ve been pitched?
TB: The ladies’ room in a restaurant? On a plane, when you’re sitting next to someone? It can be kind of tricky if they ask at the start of a flight and then you have to sit next to them.
DCB: Has that happened?
TB: Yes! But the time I’m thinking of actually worked out: They wanted a recommendation and I connected them. It’s wonderful to be able to connect people and help them get a leg up in some way. That feels great.
DCB: Let’s talk about your beautifully appointed apartment. I love the Walton Ford in your foyer.
TB: I got that a long time ago, and I love it. I don’t know him well, but I’ve met Walton.
DCB: He has a quirky, fabulous house in the West Village.
TB: When we met, we spoke about his place in Maine.
DCB: He’s a character.
TB: I knew Paul Kasmin, he introduced me to Walton, and I just loved his work. I was interested in his technique and the way he approached his work. And they always have some kind of twisted story.
DCB: The storytelling behind the works is always fascinating.
TB: [In my Ford work] there are two stags, who are extinct or endangered, and the story is that the viewer is a hunter, and he comes across them, and he has his gun. But are they game? You’re asking, is he going to kill them?
DCB: When you’re collecting—or curating your life, to steal the concept from your parents—how do you approach this art world?
TB: It’s a huge part of how I see the world. But for me, it’s never been about value; it’s about emotion and
DCB: That tees up my next question: How does art, or what you see at MoMA or the Barnes, or what you have on your walls, affect what you do at the studio?
TB: Every collection has had art and artists on the mood board. It’s about color, texture, and form, but mostly emotion, and then I start the collection. Even in the beginning, my inspiration was David Hicks in Morocco, as well as my parents. In 2014, we published our book Tory Burch: In Color, and the inspiration was Richard Diebenkorn, the Old Masters, Man Ray.
DCB: The same question always comes up in this series: Can art be fashion? Can fashion be art?
TB: Art and fashion can be a commentary on the zeitgeist and what’s happening in the moment, but the response is often different. When I’m designing a collection, I’m thinking about longevity—the way art is enduring and can evoke a feeling. Art gives this emotion and power. But art and fashion both need to fit into a period as well. I see it both ways.
DCB: I like that idea, that artists and designers are both chasing a feeling, and for you that’s empowered.
TB: When you’re creating something from scratch, it’s interesting to see other people’s creative processes and how they work. When I was at Rashid’s studio, he talked about how he will feel something, and he wants to get that across on the canvas. I want the same. I want people to have an emotion when they wear our collections, I want them to feel confident. That is a powerful feeling.
Opposite: Tory Burch Fall/Winter 2025 collection, The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Photo: courtesy Tory Burch Below: Rashid Johnson, Sheree Hovsepian, Janicza Bravo, Jeremy O. Harris, Pamela Anderson, and Tory Burch prior to the Met Gala, 2025. In the background, So Panteth My Soul After Thee (2001) by Walton Ford. Photo: Noa Griffel
The Danish painter Vilhelm Hammershøi (1864–1916) has been on Ed Ruscha’s mind as he creates a new body of work for an exhibition at Gagosian, Paris, this October. Christian House visits Copenhagen to consider the quiet and persistent power of Hammershøi’s art.
HAMMERSHØI’S QUIET WORLD
Standing outside Strandgade 30 in Copenhagen is a disconcerting experience. It’s an elegant seventeenth-century brick building in the city’s fashionable Christianshavn neighborhood, a well-heeled residence bookended by the city’s harbor and the baroque serpentine spire of Vor Frelsers Kirke. But its calm courtyard also feels to me like a precipice offering a fall into another, more personal world. Between 1898 and 1909, in a quiet apartment on the second floor, the Danish artist Vilhelm Hammershøi painted a long series of enigmatic interiors that continue to fascinate audiences and artists alike.
Hammershøi’s world is one of suggestion, transforming domestic space into a painterly ecosphere
of hints and traces. Rendered in a muted palette, the rooms of his apartment are either empty of figures or contain a single woman, usually seen from behind. The woman is Ida, Hammershøi’s wife. Not that you would know that; on canvas she is anonymous and mysterious. Turned away from the viewer, she often seems consumed in some activity we cannot see—reading a letter, perhaps, or stitching a thread—and her feelings remain inscrutable. She dresses soberly in dark dresses next to which her pale neck shocks like a flashbulb.
The rooms are similarly unfathomable. They are puzzle boxes, with little ornament: the occasional piece of porcelain on a sideboard, a frame without a picture. Hammershøi limited his pigments to ash gray, pale blues, diluted browns, and a variety of whites. He was a minimalist in a time of clutter.
“How much better homes would look if all the ‘rubbish’ could be got rid of,” he observed. Instead of stuff we get viewpoints—open doorways to other rooms, windows onto courtyards, windows onto windows—all of which pose questions. What’s in the next room? What lies on the other side of an opaque window?
Copenhagen—its merchant seamen unloading cargo, its congregating churchgoers—is almost entirely absent from these pictures. The most we are shown is the tiles on a neighboring roof or a ship’s mast punctuating the skyline. There is inside (Hammershøi’s world) and outside (in which everyone else goes about their business).
In fact his world was larger. In a career spanning three decades, Hammershøi also produced dignified portraits, pared-back Danish landscapes,
and unusual views of grand buildings, including Christiansborg Palace in Copenhagen and the British Museum in London. He even painted a few nudes. His interiors, however, remain his greatest achievement. Few artists have found such emotional potential in plain, often empty rooms. And when Ida is present, she is only half there. She is lost in thought or reading in the half-light. One fears for her eyes. But dusk seems of a piece with an approach fixated on reduction. Less was more for Hammershøi, but blank was better.
Hammershøi was born in Copenhagen in 1864 into an affluent and close family of merchants. His artistic talent was recognized in his childhood; he received private drawing lessons from the age of eight and went on to study at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts. His early work focused on
his family, including several serene portraits of his sister Anna.
“I think I will learn more from the old art than from the new,” Hammershøi noted during his studies. Chief among his influences was Vermeer, whose pictures of solitary women in seventeenth-century Dutch rooms also spoke to a specific time yet reverberate on down the centuries. As Hammershøi’s career developed, he won praise from established painters such as Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Emil Nolde. The Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke called him a master of “slow” art (he meant it as a compliment).
A handsome, neat young man, Hammershøi dressed crisply and perfected the art of a sharp beard. Although an introvert by nature—being in a group setting was like being a fish among
strawberries, he once remarked—he befriended his fellow Danish painters and academicians Carl Holsøe and Peter Ilsted. In 1891, he married Peter’s shy sister, Ida.
The couple honeymooned in Paris, where Ida was appalled at the appearance of French women in lipstick. At Strandgade 30, she proved an inscrutable muse—pretty, unassuming, anxious—and, just like the bureaus, chests, and chairs he arranged within his paintings to make their lines align, she was an essential prop for many of his compositions.
Life on Strandgade was deliberately quiet, but the couple took trips. Vilhelm was particularly fond of London, and his great contemporary inspiration was the London-based American painter James McNeill Whistler. Both artists created symphonies of assorted whites. On one visit to London,
Hammershøi called on Whistler, only to discover that the American was also traveling. The pair never met.
The period spent at Strandgade 30 was Hammershøi’s most productive. In 1909 the property was sold to a new landlord and the couple moved away, but they soon returned to the street, renting an apartment a block away from their old home at Strandgade 25, where they remained until Hammershøi died from cancer, at the age of fifty-one, in the winter of 1916. They had no children.
Little is known of what happened to Ida after Vilhelm’s death, although we understand she moved on from Strandgade and lived for another three decades. Her widowhood—seemingly secluded, once again anonymous—was just the kind of subject that would have fascinated her husband.
Hammershøi was obsessed with the effects of “lines and light,” says Gertrud Oelsner, director of Ordrupgaard, a manor-house museum on the leafy edge of Copenhagen. Over coffee in its garden café, Oelsner talks to me about Hammershøi’s enduring appeal. “There’s something about him. He was very relevant in his own time and he seems to still be relevant to artists today. In a way his paintings are so timeless.”
Ordrupgaard has an extraordinary collection of works by Hammershøi, acquired by the Danish insurance tycoon Wilhelm Hansen in the 1910s. The group includes a picture I consider the artist’s masterpiece: a simple composition of a door, a floor, a closed window, and some modest cornice work. The sun shines through the windowpanes, creating a patchwork of light on the smooth graypink floor. Painted in 1900, the painting has had
several titles over the years: Sunbeams , Sunshine , Dust Motes Dancing in the Sunbeam . It’s a study of time caught in air.
Hammershøi’s paintings are visual tuning forks. They set a tone, a temperature, that is restrained yet mercurial. The pitch quavers between the melancholy and the meditative. Perhaps unsurprisingly considering the refined craft of their execution, his works continue to resonate with painters, not least with American ones. His interest in doors, windows, and cool, watery light was to have a ripple effect on the other side of the Atlantic later in the twentieth century: similar elements appear in the pictures of Edward Hopper and Andrew Wyeth. But where Hopper’s windows framed American modernity and Wyeth’s barn doors outlined rough, hard-worked farmland, Hammershøi reveled in the contemplative quality of confined views. His interiors are safe spaces.
spread, left: Portrait of Vilhelm Hammershøi, 1912, Royal Danish Library
Opening spread, right: Vilhelm Hammershøi, Interior with Ida Playing the Piano, 1910, oil on canvas, 30 × 24 ¼ inches (76.2 × 61.6 cm), The National Museum of Western Art, Tokyo. Photo: HIP/Art Resource, New York
And now Ed Ruscha, an artist of a profoundly different time and place from Hammershøi’s—you couldn’t get farther from the peaceful atmosphere of late-nineteenth-century Denmark than the hot velocity of contemporary Los Angeles—has found a kinship with the Dane. But the connections are clear: the geometry of architecture, the riddle of sightlines, a love of the negligible and everyday. The pair have shared interests.
Today, Hammershøi’s compositions have become reference points for stories of solitude. A 1901 painting of Ida seated at the piano, facing away, was used for the cover of Bernard MacLaverty’s novel Grace Notes , shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1997, a story of claustrophobic family life in Ireland. And his paintings shaped the set design for the 2015 film The Danish Girl , Tom Hooper’s feature about a transgender Danish artist in the 1920s.
“There’s this sense of loneliness and alienation in these canvases,” observed Hooper.
Oelsner emphasizes the importance of photography to Hammershøi’s eye. “He was interested in it as a medium in itself. This way of stopping time, that must have meant something to him.” Indeed, his pictures have the dappled appearance of nineteenth-century photographs, and looking at a Hammershøi can be like looking through a viewfinder.
Returning to Strandgade 30, I take a smartphone snap of the building. Time has moved on. A gentleman’s outfitters and an architect’s practice reside on the lower floors. Electric bikes buzz by. But above, Hammershøi’s sanctuary is still a private residence. It sits out of sight, out of time. Its own closed world. I imagine Hammershøi would have liked that.
Opening
FESTIVAL DE CANNES:
Miriam Bale reports from Cannes on the 2025 edition of the international film festival, highlighting three standout films.
The latest edition of the Cannes Film Festival was a return to basics in ways both intentional and forced. One of the strongest films in any section was an old B Western called Red Canyon , a 1949 action film directed by George Sherman and presented by Quentin Tarantino in the Cannes Classics strand. The old-fashioned genre of the Western was key for a few new films in competition, including Ari Aster’s New Mexico–set film Eddington , about life in May 2020, and Oliver Laxe’s Sirât . In the plot’s central search for a missing daughter, the Laxe film was a bass-booming rave version of John Ford’s The Searchers (1956), transposed to a dance subculture of European travelers in the Moroccan desert instead of the Comanche tribe in Monument Valley.
On the last day of the festival, hours before Laxe’s film won the Prix du Jury, the power went out during a repeat screening of Sirât . The entire city of Cannes and neighboring areas were without electricity for over five hours. Shops were closed, market stalls and restaurants were accepting cash only, and people ate oysters on beds of melting ice or ordered half-liquid gelato. There was a confused and isolated feeling in the city, running to vaguely apocalyptic on the periphery, depending on what nihilistic films you had watched. The winds were still, so there were rumors that the power outage was deliberate. (This was proved correct when an anarchist group took credit for the act in protest of “a world that will not stop bombing, extracting, hoarding, ravaging” and committing other egregious acts.) In contrast, the power disruption affected the screening of Sirât and other films
for less than thirty minutes: organizers immediately turned on high-powered emergency generators and the show went on. Movies and espresso machines churned inside the Palais des Festivals while surrounding life was in temporary chaos. That was a similar feeling in some of the best films of the festival. These singular artistic visions had equally strong political messages pushing in at the edges of the frame: Jafar Panahi’s It Was Just an Accident , Harris Dickinson’s Urchin , and Kelly Reichardt’s The Mastermind
In press notes for her new film, Reichardt described the current political reality as a major inspiration for her Vietnam War–era story of a fictional former art student’s museum heist in 1970 Massachusetts. “Horrors peek into your world, but then you go on with your day. It’s hanging over all of our heads. There’s a collective sorrow we’re all living with,” she stated. The film’s lead character, D. B. Mooney (Josh O’Connor), ignores war protesters and dodges draft-dodgers while concentrating on his simple yet flawed plan to steal a few paintings by Arthur Dove. He then endangers friends and family, including his young sons and wife (Alana Haim), when he goes on the lam. This mediocre man who feels entitled to success seems as motivated by using theft as a shortcut to notoriety as by hocking art for cash. With influencers crowding the Cannes red carpet in 2025 in place of the protesters who disrupted the festival in 1968, the themes of Reichardt’s masterpiece about a self-deluded flop felt all too relevant. Another film about the lure of putting on blinders in order to pursue everyday life was Panahi’s
EDGES OF THE FRAME
Palme d’Or–winning It Was Just an Accident . The accident in question happens in Iran, where a family car containing a young girl, her father (Ebrahim Azizi), and her very pregnant mother run over a dog while taking a rare road trip. When they pull into a garage for emergency repairs to the car, the sound of the father’s walk—he has an artificial leg—arouses painful memories of political imprisonment in one of the garage workers, Vahid (Vahid Mobasseri), who is convinced that his customer was a notorious torturer nicknamed “Eghbal.” Learning where Eghbal lives, Vahid impulsively kidnaps him yet shies away from killing him, even though he feels retribution would be fair, when the father denies being Eghbal. Uncertain,
Vahid asks several other former political prisoners to confirm his identification. As a photographer, a bride, and a loose cannon join this shaggy crew of mostly good people who cannot resist getting revenge, a question emerges of the nature of justice. Should they or would they become as bad as their torturer? Should they blow up their current lives while righting the wrongs of the man who destroyed their earlier lives? Would violence lead to more violence, or would taking the high road let bad people continue to do harm? The film addresses these themes with formal rigor. Sound, framing (often within a vehicle), structure, and character are all streamlined, differentiating It Was Just an Accident from fascinating but looser competitors.
The film feels personal, since Panahi himself endured years of imprisonment, travel bans, and being forced to film in secret after having been found guilty of “propaganda against the system” for participating in protests and making films critical of the Iranian government. While several of his films have screened in Cannes over the last two decades, this year was the first time he was able to attend the festival in person since 2003. When the president of the Cannes jury, Juliette Binoche, announced that Panahi had won the top prize, the Palme d’Or, he took a minute to take it in before going onstage to accept.
A first-time filmmaker at Cannes but not a first-time attendee, Dickinson screened his directorial
debut, Urchin , in the festival’s Un Certain Regard section. Dickinson had previously been at the festival for acting in Ruben Östlund’s Palme d’Or–winning film Triangle of Sadness in 2022. Festival director Thierry Frémaux asked Dickinson about that film when the two were introducing Urchin from the stage of the Théâtre Claude Debussy. This seemed to confuse Dickinson, who was clearly there as a director. If the film is any indication, he may consider himself a director first.
Dickinson appears in a supporting role but doesn’t star. Instead, Frank Dillane plays Mike, a man who has spent years sleeping rough on East London streets. After emerging from jail newly clean of drugs, Mike tries to maintain a job and a bed with the
support of social services, not an easy task for someone with no real family or savings and little community. In one of cinema’s most accurate depictions of laboring in dead-end jobs, Frank and his coworkers fill the boredom and emptiness of hospitality or sanitation work by gabbing endlessly about sex, politics, and the meaning of life. They seem to try to escape drudgery mainly through conversation, though occasionally also through alcohol, drugs, or karaoke. Mike is usually gentle and searching. His internal life is not immediately accessible to the audience, but is shown at a polite distance through gorgeous abstract scenes and the audio of his self-help books. He only really becomes distraught, in a highstrung and heartbreaking way, when
a stranger callously tosses liquid in a trash bin that Mike will have to clean up.
A stereotype about actors-turneddirectors is that they excel at working with actors, and the performances are strong here (especially those by Dickinson as Mike’s frenemy and Shonagh Marie as one of Mike’s coworkers). Yet the strengths of Dickinson’s debut are the writing and the visual imagination. His influences are obvious, from Mike Leigh’s Naked (1993) to Josh and Benny Safdie’s Uncut Gems (2019). But when the film is not emulating the styles of others, Dickinson’s own style emerges as genuinely warm, witty, weird, and class-conscious in a particular and accurate way that few British films currently attain.
In all three of these Cannes highlights, the basic elements of a film’s sound and image are honed to create a very specific world, more dreamy than realistic yet with more to say about life and politics than many films with styles that could be described as realist. The production design, natural-light cinematography, and ’70s-style brown palette of The Mastermind create a world recalling 1970s American classics such as Bob Rafelson’s Five Easy Pieces (1970), with Jack Nicholson. That era was defined by charismatic antiheroes, though, and these films are about charming buffoons. Their lead characters are people who mean well but can’t get it right— can’t quite connect with the world around them.
Previous spread: Still from The Mastermind (2025), directed by Kelly Reichardt. Photo: 2025 Mastermind Movie Inc., all rights reserved
This spread, right: Stills from Urchin (2025), directed by Harris Dickinson. Photos: courtesy Festival de Cannes
This is Bvlgari’s largest exhibition ever in Japan and the first there in a decade. Why was now the right moment to reintroduce the Maison to the Japanese public in such a grand way?
There are moments when the convergence of vision, heritage, and cultural resonance makes the timing not only right but essential. The year 2025 marks a pivotal chapter for Bvlgari, seeing the launch of our Polychroma High Jewelry collection—the culmination of decades of artistic exploration and chromatic mastery. We felt there could be no more fitting moment or place to celebrate this milestone than in Japan, a country whose deep reverence for beauty, craftsmanship, and innovation has long mirrored the values of our Maison
After a decade, it was important not just to return but to return with meaning. Bvlgari Kaleidos: Colors, Cultures, and Crafts is not simply an exhibition, it is a tribute to the enduring dialogue between Italy and Japan, between color and emotion, between past and possibility. Tokyo, the city where tradition and modernity coexist in perfect harmony, provides the ideal backdrop for this immersive journey into the heart of Bvlgari’s creative universe.
With nearly 350 pieces on display, we invite the Japanese public to see not only what Bvlgari has become but also what we continue to strive for. This exhibition is not only a retrospective but also a bold statement of our future. It reflects our evolution, our creative daring, and our unwavering commitment to excellence.
How has Japan inspired Bvlgari over the years?
Japan has been a profound source of inspiration for Bvlgari, not only in the country’s aesthetic principles but in its deep respect for tradition, its pursuit of excellence, and its ability to find poetry in detail. The subtle harmony in Japanese culture between innovation and heritage has resonated deeply with our own values as a Maison. This exhibition is our way of honoring that inspiration. It is a gesture of admiration and gratitude toward a country that has long embraced our creations with sensitivity and sophistication. This exhibition is designed not only to display our jewelry but to create a shared experience that reflects the mutual respect and creative dialogue that have linked Bvlgari and Japan for decades.
Bvlgari’s embrace of so-called “semiprecious” stones has long challenged conventional definitions of luxury. Do you see this as a statement about redefining value in jewelry?
At Bvlgari we think that the value of a gemstone is not defined solely by tradition or market convention. From the very beginning, our embrace of so-called “semiprecious stones” such as tourmalines, peridots, amethysts, spinels, and many others has been a bold, deliberate choice. For us, value lies in creativity, in emotional impact, in the harmony of color and form. We never forget that every gemstone, whether traditionally precious or not, is a gift from the earth—a unique creation of nature, formed over millennia and entrusted to us with the responsibility to honor it.
What message or emotion do you hope visitors take away from the exhibition Bvlgari Kaleidos: Colors, Cultures and Crafts?
We wish to offer visitors an emotional journey and a celebration of beauty in all its forms. Here, color becomes a language that transcends borders and craft becomes a bridge between cultures. We hope visitors will leave with a renewed sense of wonder and a deeper understanding that jewelry, at its highest level, is not merely ornament but also storytelling, heritage, and art.
An exhibition is not simply an aesthetic experience; it is a powerful storytelling tool. It can be an act of connection, a journey through time and emotion, and a new and essential way to bring the Bvlgari brand to life in its most authentic and human dimension, both for new generations and for those who have grown up with us.
AN INTERVIEW WITH JEAN-CHRISTOPHE BABIN
KALEIDOS COLORS, CULTURES AND CRAFTS
September 17–December 15, 2025 National Art Center, Tokyo
Kaleidos: Colors, Cultures, and Crafts is an exhibition that unfolds in three distinct chapters, each exploring color through a unique lens. The first chapter delves into the science of color, revealing how the chromatic choices in jewelry align with the same artistic principles that govern simultaneous contrasts and complementary relationships. The second chapter shifts to a cultural reading of color, interrogating how our perceptions are shaped by upbringing, geography, and shared symbolic associations. The final chapter considers color through the role of light: The viewer is invited to perceive how gemstones and metals reflect and refract light in varied ways, eliciting diverse sensory and emotional responses.
Between the late 1950s and the early 1960s, Bvlgari made a bold creative departure from the French traditions of High Jewelry. At the heart of this aesthetic revolution was a radical rethinking of color: Bvlgari broke away by boldly combining rubies, sapphires, and diamonds, soon adding emeralds and a vast array of other vibrant stones, approaching color as a painter might approach pigment. The foundation of the exhibition is Bvlgari’s Heritage Collection, which comprises nearly 1,000 pieces including jewelry, watches,
and precious objects. The curatorial selection from that collection highlights the creations that best embody Bvlgari’s chromatic identity. Jewels adorned with vivid gemstones, works in gold and silver, objects enhanced with enamel or unexpected materials—all come together to articulate a vision of the world in which color reigns supreme.
Conceiving the exhibition as an artistic journey centered around color, we invited three female artists to contribute their unique visions of that theme. Lara Favaretto envelops visitors in a vibrant, chromatically saturated environment; Mariko Mori invites viewers to circle her monumental Onogoro Stone III, whose shifting colors respond to light; and Akiko Nakayama offers a video installation composed of fluid, ever-changing hues. Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa, founders of the Tokyo architecture studio sanaa, have shaped the exhibition around a form recalling the mosaic patterns found in the Baths of Caracalla in Rome. To imbue their vision with a distinctly Italian sensibility, we invited the design studio Formafantasma to collaborate with sanaa . The exhibition is conceived as a fully immersive sensory experience, guiding visitors through a scenography that integrates color into the display cases, the floors, and the walls.
—Gislain Aucremanne, Bvlgari Heritage curator
Tubogas detail, ca. 1972; necklace in platinum with emeralds and diamonds, 1961; convertible sautoir-bracelets in gold with amethysts, turquoises, citrines, rubies, emeralds, and diamonds, ca. 1969; Serpenti necklace in gold with black enamel and diamonds, ca. 1970; Tubagos choker in gold and brown enamel and diamonds, ca. 1972; “Bib” necklace in gold and platinum with emeralds, amethysts, turquoises, and diamonds, 1968, formerly in the collection of Lyn Revson; En Tremblant brooch in platinum with rubies and diamonds, ca. 1958; bracelet in gold and platinum with citrines and diamonds, ca. 1940. All jewelry: Bvlgari Heritage Collection; photography: Matthieu Lavanchy
WHAT YOU SEE IS GRACE NATHANIEL MARY QUINN
On the eve of ECHOES FROM COPELAND, an exhibition of new paintings at Gagosian, New York, Nathaniel Mary Quinn met with Ashley Stewart Rödder to discuss the genesis of the works he’s been creating, their literary origins, and his evolving approach to the practices—and intersections—of painting and drawing.
ASHLEY STEWART RÖDDER How are you feeling as you prepare for your September show?
NATHANIEL MARY QUINN I’m in the final lap of completing the works, so I feel good physically and my energy is strong.
ASR That’s amazing. Has there been anything that’s motivated you along the way? I know you love podcasts and you read a lot—
NMQ Yes, I’ve been listening to a plethora of longform YouTube podcasts, ranging from discussions of the current political landscape to relationships. Then in the evening I turn my attention to the Steve Harvey Morning Show Fresh Air with Terry Gross on NPR is one of my favorites, because they do various interviews with different people: actors, singers, writers, researchers, historians, doctors, scientists. The guests share experiences that most of the public wouldn’t know, and I find many of their testimonies encouraging and motivational. I try to listen to things I find entertaining, engaging, and fun. It works as suitable backdrop noise and it often doesn’t require a lot of attention, because I just want to focus on the work I’m making. I use those podcasts as a metric of time: I normally try to pick a podcast that’s about two hours long, and then I know how long I’ve been painting.
On occasion I listen to podcasts on art history. You learn about the Impressionists or the Italian Renaissance or the Harlem Renaissance. Those podcasts offer insight into the lives of artists and
the worlds in which they grew up. Oftentimes, when we think about these artists we laud as masters, we fail to consider the world in which they lived at that time in history. For example, I would argue that there is no contemporary painter who paints like Caravaggio. And I think, Well, why is that the case? It’s not that human evolution has grown in such a way that today’s artists no longer possess the capacity to make paintings of that caliber. The world in which Caravaggio lived was a society ruled by kings. There was no such thing as a democracy. So how did that political landscape impact artists like Caravaggio and his view of the world? What kind of pressure was he under to make a painting of that caliber? During that time there were no art galleries either, right? I mean, artists were commissioned by members of the aristocracy. So essentially you were working for one’s lordship. It isn’t like today, where artists are represented by a gallery. It isn’t like a Medici family anymore.
ASR Some might argue that those families still exist, but in a different way.
NMQ True, there are parallels, but the political ties the Medici family had in Florence were very different.
ASR In talking about podcasts, you seem drawn to peoples’ characters, their psyches. When I was in the studio you mentioned Alice Walker’s book The Third Life of Grange Copeland [1970], and how it
played a pivotal role in the inception of the upcoming exhibition. The underlying themes of that book have to do with the dynamics of power, the psyche of this particular character in this hostile environment. Could you describe how you came across the book, and how it inspired this body of work?
NMQ Many years ago, when I was a teacher at cases, a New York nonprofit that works with at-risk youth, they had a library, and as I was looking through the books there, I came across The Third Life of Grange Copeland . Just by chance—I didn’t know it existed but the title caught my attention. I read the book and was very moved by it. To this day it remains in my top ranking in terms of literature. I always look back at different passages to get ideas, and I wanted to make a show that would broadcast these characters from the book. I don’t know what these characters look like, right? It’s not a picture book, it’s a piece of literature. And
Alice Walker is one of the most formidable authors ever born on American soil. She’s not didactic, she’s not preachy, she doesn’t go through the trouble of clearly defining what these characters look like. That was advantageous for me because it gave me the opportunity to explore my imagination about these characters, which then opened a pathway for me to find more palpable links between the figure and abstraction. So this book was a great foundation for me to launch into this campaign of abstraction in the figure. And that’s pretty much it in a nutshell. It’s also an ode to my love and admiration and reverence for literature. I want to pay homage to that part of my disposition as a person and as an artist.
ASR Since I’ve known you, you’ve been driven by complex humanity. I think taking literature and applying that to a body of painting is an exciting evolution in your practice. In terms of subject
Previous spread:
Nathaniel Mary Quinn, Study for The Traveler, 2024 (detail), oil paint, oil pastel, and gouache on linen canvas stretched over wood panel, 36 × 36 inches (91.4 × 91.4 cm)
Opposite: Nathaniel Mary Quinn, Study for Grange Copeland , 2025, oil paint and gouache on linen canvas stretched over wood panel, 18 × 15 inches (45.7 × 38.1 cm)
Above:
Nathaniel Mary Quinn, Paint-Drawing Study for Brownfield’s Daydream , 2025, oil paint and gouache on linen canvas stretched over wood panel, 20 × 20 inches (50.8 × 50.8 cm)
matter, when you think of these fictional characters versus real people you’ve interacted with in your community, do you find similarities, differences? Do you find a difference between how the visions come to be?
NMQ There are similarities, definitely, but they’re also different. What remains is that I’m generating visions. It’s challenging because the fact of the matter is, I wasn’t born in the late 1800s. I don’t know what it’s like to be an immediate descendant of a sharecropper. I never worked on a farm. I never grew up in the South, in these parts of Alabama, Georgia, or North Carolina. So a lot of the process of making the work was born from my visions and my imagination as predicated on the book. On the other hand, the trials and tribulations that the characters endure in the book do undoubtedly remind me of my upbringing in Chicago, and of the trials and tribulations I had to endure, my family had to endure, and, more empathetically, what my neighbors in that community had to endure. So that would be the correlation between the two.
The book also gave me insight into what life may have been like for my mom and my grandmother. They were from the South. I don’t know anything about my mother’s upbringing when she was a child and a teenage girl, but this book helps to give me some sense of what life may have been like for a woman growing up in Mississippi, which is where my mom is from. It gives me the chance of a connection with what her life may have been like, her family and friends and the community she came from.
ASR We’re all thinking not only forward but also backward. Like the historical artists you mentioned as reference points for you, seeing what the world was like during their time.
NMQ Yes. Another influence on the show is Francis Bacon. We saw exhibitions of his work together in London at the National Portrait Gallery and before that at the Royal Academy. Seeing those exhibitions moved me in ways that no other exhibition ever has. I’ve felt a kinship with this Irish-born, Britishraised painter, this man I’ve never met.
Francis Bacon spent considerable time on a farm in his youth. That’s why he developed such an interest in animals. And once again, I never worked on a farm, but the way he was able to articulate that experience on canvas, coupled with his obvious campaign to defy traditional ways of looking at art and making art, has been very impactful for me. And I wanted to find ways to explore that in my own studio practice, because I had the bug. I just had to find a way to do it in my way through my language and my visual exploration, because I’m not Francis Bacon, I’m me. I wanted to find a way to express me through the influence of this great artist.
ASR Speaking of the National Portrait Gallery in London, you just finished an impressive run of exhibiting a number of your works there, as well as at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the North Carolina Museum of Art, in Raleigh. How do you feel when you see these works out in the world?
NMQ I still pinch myself, because I never thought the day would come when my works would be in institutions of this caliber around the world. I’m sure other artists feel the same way. I mean, look, on the one hand I’ve been a full-time artist now for about eleven years. You do grow accustomed to it because it just becomes part of your life. But on the other hand, I can never escape the surreal nature of it all. Seeing my name on the walls of these museums, and then having people I’ve never met visit the museums to look at my work and respond to it,
is incredible. I don’t have the capacity to diminish my sense of gratitude. I’m not wired that way. My gratitude and my humility for the fortune of my work’s presentation in such institutions will always be very high, very, very high, because it didn’t have to work out this way. And my mother’s name is in those museums too, because my name is Nathaniel Mary Quinn.
ASR So she’s experiencing the success you’re having as well?
NMQ Yes. This woman who was poor, illiterate, never traveled, never been anywhere, had no money, no real prospects of upward mobility. No one cared about her; now her name is on the walls of these institutions throughout the world. Even when I had my solo museum show at the Museo Bardini in Florence, Italy, I go there and my name, Nathaniel Mary Quinn, is there in the bedrock of the Italian Renaissance. I’m speechless. This is why I continue to work as hard as I do, because I care. I really do care about what I do. I don’t take myself superseriously. I don’t presume that what I do is so important that it transcends what everyone else is doing. It’s not like that. But in my cocoon of working in the studio, my little world, as insignificant as it may be to a lot of people, it’s very meaningful to me. Which is why I give my all to make the best works of art that I can possibly muster with all the strength that I have.
ASR Well, humility is such an important trait, and I think that’s why you can make those works, because you have that character. Many times we’ve talked about the compositions of the figures and what’s happening in the foreground, but I’ve noticed in these works, you’ve really started developing the background more. Can you tell me a little more about how you got to this place? You’ve told me about finding the technical strength to get to this point.
NMQ Yes. For the past two or three years I’ve been contemplating placing my figures in an
This page: Nathaniel Mary Quinn, PaintDrawing Study for Down The River, 2025, oil paint, oil pastel, and gouache on linen canvas stretched over wood panel, 30 × 30 inches (76.2 × 76.2 cm)
Opposite: Nathaniel Mary Quinn in his studio, New York, 2025
environment, and also exploring ways I can introduce cityscapes and landscapes, which is something I’ve never done but I thought maybe I should give it a shot. It wasn’t contrived, either; I really wanted to be genuine and to do it from a place of real conviction. What that means is, look, I’m not a landscape painter, I’m not a cityscape painter, and I have tremendous respect for those kinds of painters, but I’m a figurative painter. I felt like it made sense, as long as I was still working with the figure, to find ways to intertwine it with an environment or world. That felt more honest for me as an artist.
And when I began to reexplore Walker’s novel, it clicked. Those stories, the experiences of the characters in that book, helped me build a foundational defense for making sense of the marriage between figures and environment. I could stand by that with great conviction and confidence, and that’s how everything began to take shape. Beyond that, I had to change the way I looked at my paintings as well, because of course, when you put a figure in a world or an environment, you have to consider the total harmony of the painting as a whole. It’s not just about the figure now, it’s about how those colors compositionally join the rhythms of the activity around that figure. So that required a particular shift in my viewing of the works. I wanted to always try to maintain contrast. That’s a big thing in this body of work, the power of contrast, bright and dark, light and heavy, warm and cool, simplicity and complexity, always finding ways to put
two competing forces next to each other. I want the paintings to be as palpable and robust as I can possibly make them.
As you know, Ashley—you’ve been to my home many times—I’m a very organized person in my daily life. You see how neat my studio is; I introduced that into my work as well. So it’s a lot of straight lines, very clean. It’s organized. There’s a structure, because I find that to be a strength in my practice. Some artists are the very opposite of that, and it works for them. But for me, that’s my natural disposition. So I wanted to make sure to implement that into the paintings. This is an all-painting exhibition, fourteen paintings, and it’s the first time I’ve done that. So with all of the elements I described, I’m pulling ’em together like the Avengers—
ASR [Laughs ] To attack the canvas.
NMQ That’s it. And to produce the best body of work that I can make at this point in my career.
I also looked at a lot of paintings by Edward Hopper as reference material for dealing with space. Hopper was a cityscape painter, and I learned a lot from the way he negotiated space.
ASR You’re quite intentional about where the figure is sitting in the canvas and developing these landscape backgrounds, but you’re also really intentional with the titles. And something I noticed with this body of work: you coined or incorporated the language “paint drawing study” into several titles for the show. Could you talk more about that?
NMQ Simply put, before this body of work I made use of construction paper and frisket, which is like
a plastic film, to demarcate or isolate sections of the figure. I moved away from that, which then allowed for the introduction of more line work in the paintings. So, in effect, the lines have become the replacement for the construction papers and the frisket film. And I’m painting, yes, and I’m also incorporating movement of lines and contour drawings and different strokes here and strokes there. So there’s an element of drawing in the painting, and that’s why I like the term “paint drawing,” because drawing is my first love. I didn’t want to lose my attachment to drawing so I wanted to find a way to bring it into painting. I saw no reason to completely eradicate drawing from my practice. I can incorporate an incredible amount of rendering to construct an eye, and then in other cases the eye is rendered with just lines. That’s it. Just like a drawing. It’s simple, but as long as it’s harmonious in its implementation in the work as a whole, that’s the real key, because otherwise it feels like a distraction. It’s clunky.
You know what I don’t want? I don’t want a viewer to have trouble enjoying the work. You don’t wear a winter coat in the dead of summer. It’s like that kind of idea. If you watch great sprinters run, they’re moving at, I don’t know, fifteen miles per hour, but they look very relaxed. So you can just enjoy that performance.
ASR Like a ballet dancer on stage.
NMQ That’s right. You don’t see the gruel and the labor; what you see is grace. You see a seamless performance. So that’s what I call paint drawing.
Willem de Kooning
Endless Painting
This past May, artists John Currin, Jenny Saville, and Dana Schutz joined curator Cecilia Alemani for a conversation inside the exhibition Willem de Kooning: Endless Painting , a substantial presentation of paintings and sculptures at Gagosian, New York, organized by Alemani with the support of The Willem de Kooning Foundation. Reflecting on de Kooning’s techniques, evolutions, and legacy, the artists underscore the lasting importance of these paintings and sculptures.
CECILIA ALEMANI De Kooning was an artist who evaded easy categorization. He lived a very long life and went through many different styles and chapters, but despite the radical shifts that are often discussed in his work, he also maintained a profound engagement with the essence of painting itself, interrogating over and over what a painting could be. For this reason the exhibition doesn’t follow a chronological order but instead highlights connections across five decades, from the ’40s to the ’80s, among seemingly disparate paintings, following recurring methodologies and visual motifs throughout his work.
How has de Kooning influenced your practice? DANA SCHUTZ He’s been an influence throughout the years in terms of his process. The paintings feel like they’re on the way to something and then they’re caught in a moment. It’s a good reminder, because when you’re painting, sometimes it’s not going well and you can think, Well, there’s always something coming. And his paintings really do that. You encounter them instead of viewing them, the Woman paintings especially. They feel like a wild animal in the room. His works are confrontational, they feel alive; there’s so much going on in the pictorial space and interior of the painting that they always look back at you.
JOHN CURRIN When I started in art school, de Kooning was my first love. I made fake de Koonings all through grad school [laughter ]. I was part of a long tradition of grad students making fake de Koonings. His works were really my entry into modernism, and I stayed with them—they retained a level of excitement. They still awaken the teenager in me.
CA Do you still look at them the same way?
JC Well, I’ve always liked the drier ones, the ’50s works with dry white paint. But in this show I was drawn to Montauk II [1969]. It’s flabby, it’s globby, it’s amazing [laughter ].
JENNY SAVILLE De Kooning’s painting vocabulary is wider than most painters’, and I’ve always admired the dexterity of his process—the range of dynamic brushwork to wet-on-wet drawing of forms through paint, consistency of paint. He was a versatile painter. His technique evolved to using varying densities of paint with colors mixing directly on the canvas retaining a freshness—his paintings are caught in a “moment of becoming.” This exhibition highlights how structural similarities are embedded in his paintings across many decades; you see the skeleton of what he was doing, the rhythms and the shapes.
CA And has your perception of his work changed since the first time you approached it?
JS Aesthetically, I’m drawn to certain types of work, and as a painterly painter de Kooning was obviously going to be an artist I responded to. Woman I [1950–52] I saw first as a reproduction and then I saw his paintings in America. There was something iconic, idol like, relating to those ancient Sumerian sculptures he referenced. De Kooning energized this ancient, wild, and new “woman.”
When I came to New York, I saw Easter Monday [1955–56] at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Woman I at MoMA [the Museum of Modern Art]. The painted surface was lively, full of movement, even though there was quite a shallow spatial depth. I’d never seen painting quite like this, and I admired the shifts he made as he explored painting.
CA And Jenny, I want to talk about flesh. De Kooning famously said in a lecture about the Renaissance period, and I’m going to quote, “Flesh was very important to a painter then. Both the church and the state recognized it. The interest in the difference of textures—between silk, wood, velvet, glass, marble—was there only in relation to flesh . Flesh was the reason why oil painting was invented.” De Kooning was deeply influenced by
the work of old masters—Rubens, Titian, Veronese— who revered the carnal sensuality of the body and the flesh. And, of course, your rendition of skin and flesh through different technical devices is incredibly important; you showcase imperfections and vulnerabilities. We were looking in the other room at paintings like Montauk II and Landscape of an Armchair [1971], and we have also a great example here in terms of Boudoir, which is from 1972.
JS A particularity of de Kooning that you can see in his pictures you’ve just mentioned is how he gave form to “negative space.” He paints backgrounds in a fleshy way, and at times you’re not quite sure where the boundary of the body is, and so you look for figurative clues across the surface. Earlier we were all looking at Montauk II trying to distinguish the figurative parts. He must have had fun working wet in wet and sliding those marks together. In the seventies paintings he would often lay down transparent color like Alizarin Crimson, Ultramarine, or Sap Green and then ride a lighter tone through. The level of mix creates varying tonal passages. I’ve spent many years painting flesh in opaque, tonal flats to create the structure of a face or body, and if you want to create figurative form and space in painting there’s somewhat of a necessity to traverse form like that, and de Kooning inspired me to be more experimental and extend my vocabulary of painting.
CA I think you visited the studio in Springs, right?
JS Yes, I was fortunate to spend several hours there.
Opposite: Willem de Kooning, Woman as Landscape, 1954–55, oil and charcoal on canvas, 65 ½ × 49 3⁄8 inches (166.4 × 125.4 cm), private collection
This page: Willem de Kooning, Untitled XIX , 1984, oil on canvas, 80 × 70 inches (203.2 × 177.8 cm), Collection The Willem de Kooning Foundation
Following spread: Installation view, Willem de Kooning: Endless Painting, Gagosian, 555 West 24th Street, New York, April 15–July 11, 2025
CA Tell us about it.
JS Walking into this light-filled studio space specifically designed for painting was inspiring. There was a high level of professionalism, and it was the tangible things, like the way he used large glass palette tables, the type of easel he created, the length of brushes, color mixing cards, Pyrex bowls. It was an important day because I was able to see the environment of someone who’d spent decades painting. I work with large-scale glass palette tables because it keeps the environment clean so I can mix my paint and stay in that fluid painting zone for longer.
CA Dana, I want to ask you also to expand a little on something that Jenny mentioned, the idea that de Kooning often painted wet on wet. I know how important that process is for you—building layers on top of layers as a way of constructing the painterly composition.
DS Wet on wet is when the canvas is totally wet with paint or oil or turpentine. And then there’s very little friction when you’re painting, so you can move rapidly. And also, because it’s wet, the brushstrokes’ edges can be very soft and enter into the space or atmosphere of the ground. And then, depending on how you load the brush, you can make something very crisp on top. There’s this freedom in that space, and everything is malleable; colors can mix in the painting. And before I start painting I’ll mix up a ton of paint so I don’t have to stop, so there’s no distance between thinking and painting. Usually I’ll paint in bouts— letting some parts dry while I revisit others.
It’s not all wet into wet, but it’s a good way to have atmosphere.
CA John, have you ever painted wet on wet?
JC Yeah, this morning [laughter ]. I was holding, as it happens, a Van Eyck in my hands—you know, as one does [laughter ].
CA Of course, every morning.
JC It was the Van Eyck Crucifixion [c. 1436–38] at the Met. And it was out of its frame and I had it in my hands and had this crazy revelation of seeing that it was mostly painted directly wet in wet. Like that little gold shield in the middle of the painting is done with yellow-orange just blended together like it’s a Monet painting. All painting is wet in wet, in a way, even paintings that seem to have been laboriously layered and prepared. Generally, the better the artist, the more direct and wet in wet it is. So I aspire to always be painting wet in wet.
CA Is there a specific skill de Kooning mastered that you admire?
JC I think Jenny was bringing this up: there’s something about the use of a different viscosity of white, especially in the ’50s, where it’s building form but it’s also a sort of slashing. It’s hard to explain. I’ve seen it a million times in de Kooning and I still can’t quite understand what’s happening, whether it’s a form-building thing or a guitar solo or a temper tantrum—it’s all those things. The difference in viscosity between what’s going on and what’s underneath is kind of perfect. In fact he would press newspaper into the paintings as a way to change the viscosity of the underlying still-wet layer, to make it waxier so that white digs in a little
They feel like a wild animal in the room. His works are confrontational, they feel alive; there’s so much going on in the pictorial space and interior of the painting that they always look back at you.
Dana Schutz
bit as it goes on. It’s sort of silly to talk about him doing it like it’s some high technique, but it is. And really, he’s kind of the only one. Speaking as someone who tried to imitate it, it’s hard to do and it’s one of those things where it’s not just that de Kooning’s good at it, although he is, there’s something personal to it, which makes it his. I think that’s true of a lot of artists who do something magic: It’s not that they’re so good at that thing, it’s that it has some other place, maybe in their childhood; it’s that it’s the only way they can paint.
CA Dana, your work seems to hover between abstraction and figuration. You’ve spoken about being drawn to someone like Vasily Kandinsky, who embraced a form of intuitive abstraction, but your work is also populated by creatures and figures that are distorted, mutilated, dismembered. How do you balance a sense of playfulness and humor with a sense of violence?
DS It’s interesting because it depends on the subject. But for something to be either violent or humorous, it tends to be a surprise to the maker—it comes out of this rupture in the logic of the painting that you can’t really predict. Like if you try to make something funny, it’s not funny.
CA It’s not going to work.
DS It’s horrible. And with my paintings, a lot of the earlier subjects were almost subjects of paintings generally, things that could remake themselves. So I thought of them as more plastic than necessarily subject-matter-wise violent. But there can be, in a gesture, a kind of disruption, or it can hit in a certain way. I just made a painting with a face that was so off-kilter and the girl in it looked really dopey. And I laughed in the studio and I thought, Should I get rid of her in the painting? Is she ruining the painting? She’s just too dopey. But I kept her because I thought, Well, there’s something actually interesting in being surprised by the painting. And she had something very unexpected. It’s hard to find a painting that’s actually funny. John, I think your paintings are hilarious, like really funny, but I think in
most paintings, humor is kind of like a sweater, where you pull a thread and the whole thing starts to unravel.
JC That’s all that happens to me nowadays [laughter ]. It’s like staying in the casino until four in the morning putting the same damn silver dollar in the slot machine over and over again.
CA Jenny, do you want to expand on the notion of violence? Some of de Kooning’s paintings have been controversial because they were read as aggressive in terms of content and even technique.
JS There’s the notion that’s lingered for many years about the Woman series, that they’re a misogynistic attack on women. I found these paintings active, full of life. You could say the Women were dynamic, full of presence, but I didn’t read them as violent or misogynistic.
CA And John, do you think the controversy around this series of work, especially the Woman series, is justifiable?
JC Well, who exactly was so upset about it? Perhaps Clement Greenberg and the losers that hung around with him [laughter ]. Greenberg’s influence was pervasive at that moment and he just didn’t like that he wasn’t going to be the boss of Bill de Kooning. It was a fake kind of shock, in the same category as when Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring [1913] was first performed. “There was a riot in the theater”: I don’t think so. I think some guy took his walking stick and slapped something and walked out and that was it. I’m not ridiculing your question, I just mean that I wonder how deep that controversy actually was and whether it’s more of a retroactive thing, where a controversy is sort of imagined to have happened because the paintings are surprising. And de Kooning, to me, would be the last person to react either positively or negatively to social or critical influences.
JS I don’t think he was trying to be controversial; he was exploring painting and didn’t overthink it. He went from using more angular mark-making to having softer hands and looping gestures. If you watch basketball and see a
player moving a ball as their wrist turns around and goes up to the basket, there’s poetic, physical movement and he used a brush like that, which helps your eye travel through the painterly space. When I’m painting, I often twist the brush and push with an upwards motion through a wet body of underpainting. It creates a different tension on the surface, the bristles spread outwards and create half-tones.
DS I agree with Jenny and John about the idea of the controversy around those paintings; they never felt to me as though they were somehow attacking the woman or something. The painting is the woman and the woman is the painting and it feels almost like the painting is a monster in a great way. So much of the experience of the painter involves being at once embodied and disembodied, in that you’re responding in real time and the subjects become like real living things. They look back at you. They feel like goddesses and fierce and take on different characteristics.
CA De Kooning said he struggled very much when he was trying to reconcile the figure and the background, or the foreground and the background. And we have two examples in the show, Woman as Landscape [1954–55] and then also in the last room of the show, Woman in a Garden , from 1971. What are your reflections on the relationship between the figure and the background—the surrounding, the landscape—and how he may have reconciled it?
JS If you look at the top-right-hand corner of Woman as Landscape , there’s an obvious sky section, and a green section below is clearly the grass. It’s reminiscent of Renaissance paintings where behind the foreground figure there might be a village and sky section; you’re aware of a landscape behind the figure. As de Kooning becomes more abstract in his figure/landscapes, he just uses color-tinted space in the corners of the canvas or just beyond the shoulders of figures. This horizontal interplay between blue/green conjures space and landscape.
CA And do you read the 1980s paintings in the same way, where a white background dialogues with his line?
JS The older I get, the more appreciation I have for those spartan paintings. The later works have a lightness of touch. The white areas explore form and space, which journeys you around the canvas.
JC Like you, Jenny, it took me a while to come around to the later paintings, but it occurred to me that if I had to imitate anything here, I think these would be the hardest to copy. I have no idea how he made them.
CA Dana, could we talk about sculpture? De Kooning was best known for paintings, but also experimented with sculpture starting in the late ’60s, when he spent time in Rome. He made these little figures and eventually some of them were enlarged to monumental scale. We have Standing Figure [1969–84] in the middle of the second room of the gallery. I know you’ve been also experimenting with incredible sculptures, and I’m curious to hear about your transition from painting to sculpture.
DS It’s been amazing. I started making sculpture about six years ago; my husband is a sculptor, and for the longest time I had wanted to make sculpture, and he just said, “Well, why don’t you make an armature and use clay, because it’s really cheap and if it doesn’t work we can just knock it all down.” And the material was so responsive. Unlike
painting, there’s no mess. I mean, it is a mess, the whole thing is just a gooey pile, but the form can change so easily. With painting I would always be really aware of the format of the canvas, and then the figure would be structured within this format. But with sculpture it would grow out. That really changed how I was painting, because I was now thinking the forms could billow in and out of the space. And it’s interesting with de Kooning because I heard that he made those smaller sculptures with his eyes closed. I don’t know if that’s true, but it’s just a fantastic way of thinking about art, with something that’s made from touch instead of from vision. Using a blindness to build the form.
CA De Kooning often struggled to declare a painting finished. There are lots of stories about friends and critics visiting the studio to rescue a painting from his hands, because otherwise he would have worked on it for weeks and months and sometimes years. That’s been inspirational in the way I put this show together: it’s not a description of indecision but a manifesto for his love of painting. I’m curious if you also struggle with where to finish a painting?
JS I’ve worked on a painting for months, even years, and felt that it’s finished before carrying on with it to reach a greater level. Sometimes a painting can come together quickly and it’s fluid and fresh. It’s good to stay open-minded about painting.
Opposite: Willem de Kooning, Untitled I , 1976, oil on canvas, 77 × 88 inches (195.6 × 223.5 cm), Sarofim Foundation
This page: Willem de Kooning, Untitled X , 1985, oil on canvas, 70 × 80 inches (177.8 × 203.2 cm), Collection The Willem de Kooning Foundation
Ismail knew this story—the witch’s many proclamations, how his wife fled her country shortly after that night, how she’d left her love for Dominica forever unfulfilled—but now that Nile was listening, Tomasa was telling it differently, with more detail, as his new and questioning attention loosened old bits of memory.
And the witch told me something about why women fall in love with women but she stopped there, remembering how she much she felt like a ghost in her life back then, in that small town that kept getting smaller.
And what was it? Nile asked, and Tomasa hesitated a moment more, looking at him as if he already knew the story and might tell it himself.
She told me it’s such a relief to finally be with someone who also knows how tragic it is to love men.
At this, Nile’s delighted laughter burst outward and upward in the café, and Ismail and Tomasa laughed too, softer, as all three of them understood this tragedy in different ways.
A young woman at the table to Tomasa’s left overheard this line—how tragic it is to love men—and immediately felt more beaten down than usual, as if she finally realized that she’d been living on the wrong end of some grand joke. Tomasa’s unplaceable accent gave this idea more weight, more truth, and it cast a sinister light on the man who was sitting next to her. The man was eating pancakes as fast as it seemed possible to eat pancakes, and all at once it was clear that he was unable to understand how hard she was working on the unsolvable problem of reaching him, of loving him, of being finally and imperfectly yet totally with him. She blinked a few times as the truth settled in, then stood slowly, smoothed the skirt of her best yellow dress, and left. The man was chewing the last bite of his pancakes, entirely unaware of the contents of his own heart. He watched her pass through the glass doors and walk steadily out of view.
As Nile contained his laughter, Ismail caught his eye for a moment, and each of them wondered what other men, what other nights in their lives (besides the two they’d shared), might have demonstrated this tragedy.
Neither Nile nor Ismail would have believed how the other had, all those years ago, felt himself to be standing outside an impossible door inside the other, not permitted to truly feel love or loved in that tent, not permitted to even ask himself whether he wanted anything more than sex in the dark with an almost total stranger. During that night and the next day and the second night, each man inferred what he could about the other, then reacted to what he thought the other wanted, and in the moments they shared a gaze in the dark, neither detected anything beyond an urgent carnality, though at the same time each man feared there was something substantial present, something larger than physical desire. Yet they each feared they were alone in that feeling, so neither suggested
meeting up again in the city after the camping was done, and both of them felt, while hiking out of the woods on their own, in different directions, that it was simply impossible for him to receive a man’s love, no matter how intensely he may have felt, internally, for the other.
And now Tomasa had described the problem exactly, had transformed what felt like a private pain into a comic aphorism, a party anecdote that anyone could mention to anyone without shame—well, there it is again, that unavoidable tragedy of loving men.
Tomasa continued with her story—how she simply vanished one midnight, walked alone to the train station, leaving a note for her brother explaining that no one should come looking for her.
Nile got the sense, all at once, that Ismail had never told his wife how he’d met Nile, how Ismail had essentially saved Nile from freezing to death when his tent sprung a leak, how they’d kept warm in Ismail’s tent that night, then the next. And if their night was secret then perhaps Ismail knew nothing about the late summer weeks that Tomasa and Nile had spent together, how she misheard almost everything Nile said and was always asking him to repeat himself, something Nile found endearing at first and exhausting as the days went on.
Was it possible, Nile wondered, that this marriage had been formed as a kind of conspiracy, something meant to both exclude and include him at once? In order not to dwell on it, he kept asking questions—
But when the witch said you had to go, he asked, was that really the first time you really thought about leaving your country? The idea had never occurred to you?
Tomasa took her time to answer this question, her eyes darting upward, searching the past for the correct answer. The waiter arrived during her silence to take their empty plates, unable to decipher the charge between these three, nor the relationships present here, though this particular waiter had long prided himself on being able to read people as if they were neon signs—that simple, that clear.
The night I visited the witch, Tomasa finally said, must have been the first time it felt possible to leave , and Ismail noticed how his wife was speaking with that slow, searching pace of an old woman, the voice she might use decades into the future, the voice she’ll use as she’s trying to remember a detail from a past that perhaps hasn’t yet happened.
Yes, it was, Tomasa said at last, as if setting down something heavy. For some reason I hadn’t been able to see that far ahead, you know, and the engagement itself already felt like a permanent thing. It’s easier to say yes to an engagement than it should be, don’t you think? Even when you just give that simple answer, you’ve already passed through a portal.
When Ismail had asked Tomasa to marry him she’d also said yes urgently. Was it easy for her to accept his proposal, he wondered now, because it was the truth, or was yes simply the expected response? He felt a momentary panic over the sincerity of their years together, yet the doubt was re-engulfed just as swiftly, still present but undetectable.
When I was a child I sometimes imagined getting on one of those boats way up north in the harbor, but when it came to having a destination, of living somewhere else—I could never see it. Then the witch told me I had to leave, and it felt like a reminder of something I’d been putting off, that leaving was more important than wherever I went.
Ismail had read somewhere that the subconscious didn’t differentiate between the present and the past, that it was a crepe cake of everything you’d ever known or seen or dreamed, pressed together, and the moments he felt most in love had this quality, too—a feeling that all past and future versions of Tomasa were overlaid across her present form, silvery holograms moving out of sync.
Nile then began asking questions about Dominica—was there a particular moment she’d fallen in love with her, and did she know if Dominica loved her in return, and what else drew her to Dominica other than the power she had over Tomasa?
But Tomasa didn’t know how to answer. I never really knew what she felt. Maybe I never really knew anything about her. It was a long time ago. It was such a very long time ago.
What Nile really wanted to know, as usual, was something it wasn’t possible to know. He wanted to know what Dominica saw when she looked at Tomasa, the weight or lightness in that gaze, and did one or the other or both of the women ever imagine a life together? But it was not possible to know any of this so instead he asked Tomasa, But isn’t it always true that loving someone means accepting the possibility of being hurt, the power the other has over you?
Tomasa and Ismail each took this question in, silently, and just then the waiter happened to pass by, still vexed by why were they lingering so long, and what had held their attention so completely.
Dominica had been two years younger than Tomasa but had the withering stare and authoritative posture of someone much older. Her pale amber hair had set her apart from her many brothers and sisters, so they joked that their father wasn’t really her father, a taunt that didn’t bother Dominica, though her parents never repeated it because it was true. Aside from the dark, mean eyes she’d inherited from her mother, she looked like an uneasy hostage in that family home, a foreigner plotting her escape. Dominica refused to do the housework that her sisters were all expected to carry out, and for this her mother’s husband beat her,
strategically sparing her beautiful face, a dowry someday. Dominica learned to fight back, to block strikes, to fell her false father like a tree.
All the girls avoided Dominica in the schoolyard, and when she wasn’t looking they mocked the way she held her head high and looked down her nose at the world. Yet Dominica’s stare seemed to tell Tomasa exactly where she should be—below her, forever looking upward at her flexed and muscular neck.
But the problem was not that loving someone makes you vulnerable to suffering. . . . The problem was that I loved Dominica because she could hurt me so easily. I wanted to be smaller, to be controlled. That’s what I had to unlearn.
Nile considered asking if she had unlearned it now, with Ismail, but it felt accusatory. What did he know of the complex trades of pain and love that passed within a marriage?
Yet even as Tomasa recalled the pleasurable fear she felt of Dominica, she was beginning to see how her repeated recollection had rubbed this rough and complicated memory into something artificially smooth. How long had it been? Eight, nine years—could it have been ten years already?
They paid the check for their breakfast, waved once at the analyst and her lover, and set out toward the park as if they’d planned it, passing by the fountain with the centaur where all of this had begun, and talking all the while about how anyone could ever know the true reasons they had to love anyone. Maybe reason has nothing to do with it, Ismail finally suggested, maybe love is exempt from reason.
Do you love me for no reason, then, or against all reason , Tomasa asked, playing, briefly touching his hip, then backing off, at once hesitant to perform their bond for an audience.
And were there other women like that, Nile asked. I mean back home—was it something you knew was possible?
There were two women who’d left their husbands and moved in together. Everyone said they were just close friends, but of course we all knew, Tomasa said. And the witch, of course. The witch had a wife since she was a witch. They were both witches, actually, but the main witch was the older one.
Then Ismail, unprompted, told Nile about the men in his hometown who met in the woods to camp, some of them married, some of them fathers; there was a vow of silence around those weekends, secrecy protecting all the desire and anger and tenderness between them, and sex, and sudden flares of violence. The brutality gave that parallel world its order, its rules, its pain.
And suddenly Tomasa knew, without language or a conscious thought, why they seemed unable to part from one another’s company, why Nile had been asking the questions he’d been asking, why they were walking aimlessly yet decidedly aimed toward Nile’s apartment, and if a thermometer had been held up
between these three, it would have registered an atmosphere four degrees warmer than it was beyond them that winter day.
Nile lived a twenty-six-minute walk east and south of the fountain, in a neighborhood where many of those antique lampposts still stood, the ones the city had been phasing out, the ones with slightly green glass that lent the night streets a transporting patina, something from an earlier era or a different country.
Ismail bought a bag of pomelos from a street vendor simply because the old man selling them had shouted Fruit for sale with such a compacted pain that Ismail felt he had no choice, and a few minutes later the three of them stood at Nile’s door, the fruit heavy in the brown paper bag, and though their conversation had been moving steadily for the forty minutes they’d been walking since they’d left the café—as if they were three children playing a game of keeping a balloon aloft—the moment they entered Nile’s building, they seemed to have run out of things to say.
They listened to each other breathing as they ascended the three flights of stairs, then, just as Tomasa passed through the door and into Nile’s living room, he said Welcome back.
Ismail heard this and smiled, both knowing and not knowing what Nile meant. He set the bag of pomelos on the floor, and Nile shut and locked the door but made no move toward the light switches or lamps, and the three of them idled there, still in their coats. The insufficient afternoon light drifted in from the room’s small windows. No one knew what to say.
Then Nile turned away from them, lifted a metal key that hung from a long red string, and began winding a small wooden clock by the door.
You haven’t told each other, he said, about how and when we each first met.
Neither Tomasa nor Ismail replied. They listened to Nile cranking the gears.
Do you keep secrets from each other?
Secrets? Ismail asked, as if the word were new to him, as if he didn’t understand its meaning. No—not like that.
Done with the clock, Nile turned back toward them, holding his hands behind his back.
Not like what? he asked, but they had no reply to this either, so all three of them stood there full of tension, breathing shallowly.
It’s like the play about the boat, Tomasa finally said, with warmth. All that silence.
But there’s nothing to be silent about, Nile said, feeling awkward and immediately unsure of what he meant, though his tone conveyed certainty.
Later that day—after they’d finally crossed the boundary of touching each other, after they’d given their nervous urgency somewhere to go and something to do—they would all feel so far from this uneasy moment by the door that it would seem nearly impossible that a single afternoon could contain two states of mind and states of body so distinct.
But there by the door in all that tension, Nile simply reached out to help Tomasa out of her coat, and she accepted, then Ismail helped Nile out of his coat, then Tomasa helped Ismail out of his coat, each of them laughing at this little game, relieved to have broken the odd pressure, and though the entrance of Nile’s apartment featured that strange antique clock with the intricately carved boats and aquatic scenes, and an oil painting he’d won long ago in a game of cards, and an empty birdcage, and stacks of books, and several horseshoes he’d collected when he found them in the street, and a canvas bag of old keys, still—Nile had never obtained a coat rack, nor installed hooks in the wall, so they piled their coats on a small chair that was already piled with the laundry he kept meaning to take to the laundress down the street.
Shall I give you the tour?
The apartment was small and not much to tour, but it was also overfilled with things Nile had found or collected—drawings and posters and objects and plants and pinecones; he could have easily taken the rest of the day to explain it all, but instead he said very little. Here’s the bathroom. Here’s the bedroom. And the kitchen is over here.
Ismail took one of the pomelos with him as he followed Tomasa and Nile down the short hallway, noticing the unmade bed through one door, the whitetiled bathroom through another. Once they’d all stepped into the galley kitchen it became clear there wasn’t enough room to get very far from one another. Nile put the kettle on and turned back to face his guests. Ismail absently pressed his fingernails into the pomelo, and Tomasa looked over the narrow room, comparing the sight of it today to her years-old memory of it.
You painted the cabinets, she said, and Nile reached out and touched one of the doors as if to be sure.
Midnight Jade, he said, but Tomasa had already turned her attention to the part of the wall where the rotary phone was mounted, where Nile wrote numbers in pencil directly onto the plaster. There was Tomasa’s name and number, the one she no longer had.
Ismail handed the pomelo to Nile as if cued to do so and Nile began peeling it, letting the yellow rind drop to the floor, his gaze fixed on Ismail, perhaps in challenge, perhaps in surrender—it simply wasn’t clear—then he took a section of the fruit and peeled away the translucent skin so it was all just pale golden jewels clinging to each other. Ismail took a section, too, as did Tomasa, and they all ate the fruit in silence as the sharp scent of it filled the room.
Why did it seem natural, then, for Nile to reach out and touch Tomasa’s cheek, to let his thumb drift to her lower lip? At nearly the same moment Ismail put his palm flat on Nile’s chest and from there a strange velocity took over,
waists in the crooks of elbows, legs between legs as they stood, grasping hipbones as if they were implements, tools of serious work, and all their mouths grazed all their necks, and their breath entangled. Eventually the kettle whistled, and Nile turned off the flame, then led them down the hall, single file, toward the bedroom, where the joining and unjoining and rejoining of their bodies went on, with items of clothing occasionally ejected from the mass of them until there was nothing between them but that narrow nothing that exists between the parts of an atom. Outside the sun found its early-winter escape, and the room grew darker, lit lightly by the greenish lamps outside Nile’s bedroom window. Everything kept going on between them, an inertia that somehow wouldn’t run out, and at times it would seem to be over as they all laid in a breathless mess, but after a few moments it would begin again, necks slicked with saliva, backs wet with sweat, and each of their mouths trying to consume something of the others.
Then it simply could not go on any longer. They were a wet ruin on the sheets, the translation of desire into action entirely spent. Each said something in their mother tongue that the others did not understand, and in fact it would be better if you imagine this entire story to have been translated from an original text rather than written from nothing. Assume crucial details have been lost in the process. Assume this always.
Each of them had cried at different points, for different reasons, in this first encounter of what would be many that winter and spring, and lying there then, Ismail cried again without entirely realizing it. A stream of tears moved steadily down each side of his face; he was overcome with a relief he could not yet name.
Nile was the first to get up, walking nakedly to the kitchen and coming back with a box of halvah, which they ate in bed, languid and flushed, slowly remembering the rest of the world.
Had it really been only three years, Tomasa wondered, since she’d last been in this room? No—she did the math—it had been almost six. How old was she? How long had she been living in this country, speaking this language? How long had she been married? They’d reached the age when ages begin to blend, the interchange between one phase of adulthood and another. There could be two extra years in your life that you hadn’t entirely noticed passing and only when it came time to account for yourself did you realize they were there, already in the past.
As Ismail was inefficiently trying to recount something about the play with the boat, Nile stood up and dressed himself, turning his attention away from the naked couple on his bed; it was only then that Ismail and Tomasa became aware of their nakedness and began searching for their clothes.
Nile wasn’t exactly being cold to them, but his warmth had receded, and the shift in temperature stung. The couple would have found it natural to kiss him
goodbye, but he offered only a one-armed embrace at the door, as if they hardly knew one another. Did they hardly know each other? And was it already here so quickly? The tragedy of trying to love a man?
But I’ll see you again soon , Nile asked as they were putting their coats on again, and each of them said Yes and That would be nice, to which Nile said Please with a clear and craving tone that reassured them, that left smiles on their faces as they descended the stairs.
What was that? Ismail asked, but Tomasa could not answer, as her body was too vivid for language.
Later, as they were leaving the empty park, Ismail and Tomasa came across the redhead smoking a cigarette, but without the analyst, sitting on a bench with her knees held up to her chest. Both of them avoided an interaction, intent to get home, but she spotted them and called out—
Where’s your friend?
At home, Tomasa said, struck by something strange in the young woman’s face. How do you know he’s at home?
Because we just left him there.
Well, she replied, sucking deeply on the cigarette, that explains it
Are you alright? Ismail asked.
A long pause, then—No.
Do you want to talk?
It’s just that she refuses to call herself a lesbian, but she is, and she doesn’t love her husband—how could she? She just keeps saying it’s complicated, but it’s not complicated. We’re in love—it’s the least complicated thing!
Is it? Tomasa asked—an honest question.
It is!
No one said anything for a moment, then Ismail ventured that perhaps it wasn’t a problem of terminology, as language is only ever a compromise. So perhaps it’s not about the words. Perhaps it’s something else.
The redhead stared at him for a moment, then stood, nodded—Yeah, ok, maybe—and stomped away.
In their stairwell they passed the bicycle Nile had forgotten, but inside the apartment they found a mess—Molasses had clawed their bedroom curtains and pissed on the sofa, still strewn with blankets from their visitor. They’d forgotten to feed the cat, and did so immediately, apologizing as the animal hissed at them. It was only then that they realized how famished they’d become. Ismail and Tomasa found a loaf of bread in the box on the counter and they tore into it like thieves in a hurry, ripping it apart with their hands and buttering the shards.
Thomas Demand looks at Rudolf Stingel’s Vineyard Paintings .
Not much light, foliage, a meadow in front of a forest. Spots, outlines, green on blue. The blurring of the introductory photograph in this feature already points to the fragile ambivalence of the images in this series of pictures. The paintings are obviously the result of a process of quaint gestures, without losing the sublimity of painting. Equally, it’s tempting to interpret this as a result of a mimetic action—a reproduction of vegetal forms like bark or crust. But there can be no doubt that these are abstract images, not even abstractions. The three ingredients of this process are tulle, a fabric that is actually used for costumes, like the tulle skirt of Degas’s little dancer. But here it becomes the trace of a curtain, a gauze that has been pushed aside, revealing the layer underneath: a rich green. I am familiar with this green as a background in medieval portraits by Holbein, Cranach, and Memling. And then the gold, which forms the third and final layer, is reminiscent of courtly damask, of the woven, heavy robes that were common at the time of Henry VIII. The almost fluorescent green and the gold from the can, which may be somewhat striking in a different context, mingle to create a majestic, old-masterly picture pane that is broken up by
Opening spread, right: Rudolf
Previous spread: Interior view of Rudolf Stingel’s
the gauze. Yet “broken up” is too muscular a word, because the care and embrace of chance result in a delicate pictorial space, without creating seductive effects. Neither the green nor the tulle suggest glamour. Even the gold seems trivial when compared to the gold of altars. The true marrow of these pictures, however, is not this ambivalent chord of color—even if those elements sing of somewhat feudal memory—but the complex traces, tears, furrows, and lines that are joined by the impression of the gauze to form a suite of powerful drawings. The central gesture in these paintings is that of pulling away, on which the entire structuring of the surface is based. Absence is in fact the impression that arises when looking at them. Reading the surface does not lead to a symbolic interpretation, and even if the color palette evokes a historical grandeur, the masterful splendor remains an unfulfilled promise.
Opening spread, left: Exterior view from Rudolf Stingel’s studio, Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts, 2025. Photo: Rudolf Stingel
Stingel, Untitled (Vineyard V), 2024, oil and enamel on canvas, 90 × 59 inches (228.6 × 150 cm)
studio, Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts, 2025
Opposite: Rudolf Stingel, Untitled (Vineyard XI), 2024, oil and enamel on canvas, 90 × 59 inches (228.6 × 150 cm)
Above: Interior view of Rudolf Stingel’s studio, Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts, 2025
Despite having major museum and commercial projects under construction worldwide, the Japanese architect Kengo Kuma still makes time for experiments. Meeting him in London as he took a break from his global tour, Vicky Richardson talked with him about a new relationship between building and nature.
It is the first time Kengo Kuma has seen his installation Paper Clouds , a central element of the London Design Biennale. He poses for photos with the Japanese ambassador against the backdrop of the work, which is suspended in the grand Nelson Stair at Somerset House, an arts center that was originally built as a government building in the 1770s by the neoclassical architect Sir William Chambers. Kuma seems pleased with the delicate washi-paper installation and explains that the project is really all about East-West dialogue, as if he himself were the ambassador.
Kuma is midway through a journey that will take him to at least four European countries where his practice is building a variety of projects. In Albania he will meet with the prime minister, Edi Rama, who is a friend; in Paris he has a studio working on dozens of hotels, museums, and transport and retail projects; in Italy he will visit the site of a new pavilion he is designing to mark the 800th anniversary of the death of Saint Francis of Assisi, and in Hamburg he will see Matter of Relationships , a retrospective exhibition of the work of his practice.
To visit a project that someone else has designed in your name must be a common experience for an architect with such an array of work and with employees scattered across the globe: Kengo Kuma & Associates (KKAA), the practice he established in Tokyo in 1990, has offices employing more than 400 people working on around 300 projects in 50 countries. Kuma steers this ship wisely, placing trust in his teams and collaborators and balancing the commercial and smaller experimental projects with pragmatism. “Clients of large projects tend to be very safe and just want to repeat the previous design, so the small experimental projects are very important to us,” he says, referring to Paper Clouds , which he developed with colleagues
at Sekisui House–Kuma Lab, the research department he has led at the University of Tokyo since 2009. When he turned sixty-five he was compelled to stand down as its director, but he handed over the reins to a former employee, Toshiki Hirano, whom he works with on research into materials and technology that feeds ideas into the practice.
Paper Clouds , a collaboration with the Londonbased Clare Farrow Studio, is an elegant sculptural installation made up of wafers of textured washi paper suspended on gold threads that cascade through the complex geometric space, seeming to float between the interlocking curved staircases. The outcome is poetic and ethereal, but the background research and fabrication process will play a practical role in future building projects for KKAA.
Hirano is a Kobe-born architect who is an expert in digital fabrication and last year was the guest editor of the “Post-Digitality in Architecture” issue of the journal A+U. His recent experiments have combined traditional washi paper with digital tools: 3D scanning, for example, linked to
Computer Numerically Controlled (CNC) cutters that can produce complex molds. For Paper Clouds the challenge was to produce a washi panel that was light and thin while having the lateral strength to give the appearance of floating (given by its curved form and innovative combination of plant fibers with a binding agent).
Washi is traditionally made from ko¯zo plant fiber, which comes from the inner bark of the paper mulberry tree. It has been used architecturally for centuries in Japan to form room dividers that filter light. Kuma and Hirano are interested in exploring alternative ways of using the material, potentially even as part of the structure of a building. For the past two years a washi-paper experiment—a looped strip of washi—has been hanging on the facade of Tokyo University of the Arts (a building designed by KKAA) to test the durability of a new coating that will allow the use of the paper as an outdoor construction material. Kuma Lab’s next project will be to create a 3D-printed structure using the washi pulp that was developed for the London installation.
The combination of traditional craft with new technology lies at the core of Kuma’s approach. Another large-scale experiment of his was the use of carbon fiber to create a protective curtain at the head office of the Japanese textile company Komatsu Seiten. Working in collaboration with the client, KKAA developed carbon-fiber rods that allow light to penetrate the facade while protecting the original 1970s concrete building from earthquake damage. The result is a delicate web of thin strands that look like fabric threads but have great strength. The project could be a useful prototype for upgrading earthquake protection in existing buildings.
Despite such ongoing experiments, Kuma does not speak to me in detail about technology but grounds his approach in references to human culture. Yes, Paper Clouds is experimental, he tells me, but it is really all about the dialogue between Western and European culture that has been the central theme of his practice for forty years. “To have a work made from traditional light Japanese paper hanging in a typical European classical
building, with its emphasis on solidity and verticality, is very special,” he says.
Kuma’s interest in dialogue goes back to his childhood in Nagasaki, where he grew up with a Buddhist father and a Christian mother who sent him to a European-style Christian school. He studied architecture at the University of Tokyo, and in the mid-1980s, accompanied by professors from the university, he had the chance to travel to sub-Saharan Africa, where he spent two months drawing and studying traditional buildings. He was disillusioned with modernism at the time, and during his visits to villages in Niger, Nigeria, and Ghana he became fascinated by the forms and materials used in vernacular buildings there. It was the first time he observed a direct relationship between materials, making, and place. SubSaharan Africa remains one of few regions where he hasn’t yet had the chance to build, and this remains an ambition.
Kuma’s emphasis on dialogue does not mean that he is shy of expressing strong opinions: his seminal book Anti-Object: The Dissolution
and Disintegration of Architecture (published in Japanese in 2000 and in English translation in 2008) was a powerful critique of Western architecture and its desire to impose on its surroundings. He pursued the argument in Studies in Organic in 2009, where he wrote, “I continue to detest buildings that have been designed to stand out and to be symbolic by virtue of their opposition to their respective environments.”
As Kuma develops projects across the globe, the question of dialogue between cultures has become central to his practice, marking a new phase. Aged seventy at the time of our conversation, he looks back at his career with remarkable self-awareness, identifying distinct periods and changes of direction. In the 1980s, after two years working as a researcher at Columbia University, New York, he rapidly built a successful practice in Tokyo designing postmodern commercial buildings. But when Japan’s speculation-driven “bubble economy” burst in the early 1990s, he abandoned the city to live for a decade in the countryside, where he reconnected with traditional building crafts and
Previous spread:
UCCA Clay Museum, Yixing, China, 2024, designed by Kengo Kuma & Associates.
Photo: Eiichi Kano
This spread: Kengo Kuma’s Paper Clouds presentation at Somerset House for the 2025 London Design Biennale. Photos: Toshiki Hirano
worked on small rural projects. Returning to Tokyo in the 2000s, he entered a new phase marked by an interest in developing an organic approach to contemporary architecture.
The central theme of Kuma’s practice today is to build relationships among nature, place, and people. His travels around the world have given him an awareness of demographic and political change and have led him to a new way of thinking about where and how we build: “The world is facing a fall in population. In fifty years’ time the population of Japan will be halved, and in China it will reduce from 30 to 8 million people. This is the most important shift we’re facing, and it means we can go back to nature—we won’t need cities.” He warms to this theme, continuing, “In the Gulf countries they are still thinking about the future city when they should be thinking about the future of nature.”
Perhaps Kuma’s disaffection for the city is the result of getting older, I ask as delicately as possible. No, he tells me, his friends who have children
also want to be close to nature. “Politicians are not thinking about the future—they only think of the next election. Only the mother with a child is thinking ahead. But we need to be planning for how architecture will support life in a hundred to two hundred years.”
As if to test his theories, during the covid -19 lockdown Kuma opened satellite offices in three small remote towns around Japan: in Okinawa, the country’s southernmost prefecture; Hokkaido, a northern island; and Okayama, a prefecture in the south. “I wanted to carry out an experiment about future lifestyles. The Internet and artificial intelligence mean that we don’t need to be physically together anymore.” Each satellite office has between two and four staff who have made new relationships with communities that, he says, would be impossible to build in the city. Kuma characterizes this new phase as “small things for small places.”
As for himself, he loves to spend time outside Tokyo closer to nature, but he has no plans to slow
Top left: Kengo Kuma & Associates proposal rendering for the Shanghai Industrial Museum, China
down. In fact he cites Frank Lloyd Wright as a model for his career, describing how the American architect began a new chapter in 1911 by moving from Chicago to Spring Green in Wisconsin to build his home, studio, and school Taliesin, and continued working into his nineties.
Kuma is particularly drawn to places where he feels a connection with Japan. In Scotland, for example, he discovered the diversity of British culture and landscape when designing the V&A Museum in Dundee from 2010 to 2018. He is now in the early stages of making a Chinese garden on the grounds of a Scottish castle.
Albania is another place where Kuma feels at home. He recently spoke at a gathering of two hundred architects in Tirana, the capital, organized by Rama (an artist who has led the transformation of the country since 2013). “I feel the similarity between Japan and Albania,” says Kuma. “It is a country of mountains and villages, where each valley has its own unique culture.” KKAA will soon complete a major landscape and
architectural project at the unesco World Heritage Site of Butrint, on the coast, which is due to open in September 2025. Expressing principles close to Kuma’s heart, the building is made up of a series of low-lying linear forms that follow the contours of the landscape while a layered limestone roof seems to emerge from the ground. With wooden frames and rammed-earth walls, the architecture blends traditional Japanese elements with materials that relate directly to the site.
Kuma is adept at keeping his eyes on both the past and the future. Much of his current work is in China, including the major Shanghai Industrial Museum, due to open in 2027. Compared to projects that have celebrated craft heritage or natural landscapes—the recent UCCA Clay Museum in Yixing, for example, whose design was inspired by handmade pottery from that city, “the ceramic capital” of China—the Industrial Museum takes Kuma out of his comfort zone. Construction started in late 2024 at the Jiangnan Arsenal, a former industrial and military site on the Huangpu River where
China first manufactured steel in the 1890s, and the building will be made from steel and aluminum; this, says Kuma, is a “big challenge,” as he has become used to working with stone, wood, and paper.
Kuma recognizes, however, that “industrialism is in fact already part of China’s history and I wanted to show the beauty of industry and its relationship to society. . . . I’ve been trying to find new details in metal to show the variety of its uses. If you go into the toilets, each one will be made from a different type of metal.” In an unexpected break from our weighty conversation about the future, Kuma remarks whimsically that “toilets are the best place to see the beauty of piping and building services!” Pragmatism and humor, combined with a deep commitment to the practice of architecture, are at the root of his ongoing success. Whether or not he will abandon the city once again for life in nature remains to be seen. With a KKAA project bound to be coming to a city near you, it seems unlikely.
OLGA DE AMARAL
A major retrospective of the work of the Colombian fiber artist Olga de Amaral has landed in Miami by way of Paris. Presented in collaboration with the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, this career-spanning exhibition will be on view at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, through the fall of 2025. Here, Ekaterina Juskowski delves into the six decades of Amaral’s life, work, and inspirations.
FPrevious spread: Olga de Amaral, Cenit ,
Left:
Following
Following spread,
ew forces shape the imagination of many artists more profoundly than nature. For Olga de Amaral, now ninetythree, lauded as a pioneer of fiber art and an enduring voice in postwar Latin American abstraction, the landscapes of her homeland have been a lifelong inspiration. She was born in Bogotá and raised in a family with strong ties to the countryside. Immersed in nature, her vivid imagination was impressed by Colombia’s majestic towering mountains, serene sweltering valleys, and the vast tropical plains of the llanos. Some of her most precious memories are of market days with her mother, where, as a young girl, she first encountered Andean fabrics, blankets, and ruanas handwoven and dyed by local women using pre-Columbian techniques. Decades later, in a lecture at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, Amaral reminisced with quiet reverence about the Colombia of her youth. She described it as a land of extraordinary natural beauty and inhabited by warm, solemn, dignified people, a place she poignantly referred to as the “lost country.”
Memory and place are at the heart of everything Amaral creates. With her signature gift for weaving meaning into fiber, she creates at the intersection of modernism and tradition. Deeply engaged with Colombia’s ancestral textile practices, her sophisticated abstract works simultaneously challenge the limits of modernist art. Her masterful touch transforms simple materials such as cotton, linen, horsehair, gesso, rice paper, and gold leaf into elaborate threads that become a metaphoric representation of her country’s landscapes.
This year, a landmark retrospective at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami (ICA Miami), presented in collaboration with the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, Paris, honors Amaral’s remarkable career. Tracing the evolution of her practice over six decades, the exhibition illuminates the ways in which she transcends canonical artistic categorizations. It offers a unique
opportunity to experience Amaral’s work at the nexus of art, design, craft, architecture, history, and cultural identity. Following the exhibition’s acclaimed debut in Paris, curators Marie Perennès and Stephanie Seidel have thoughtfully anchored the exhibition within Miami’s cultural pulse, while the architect Lina Ghotmeh, who orchestrated the spatial experience, beautifully reimagined it for the new setting.
For Perennès, the exhibition represents a long and deeply personal journey. Having collaborated closely with Amaral and her family for three years, she offers both an intellectual and an intimate understanding of the artist’s work, situating it within a broader historical arc of the transformation of tapestry from the realms of decorative, domestic, and female craft into an artistic, architectural, and technological force that has reshaped previously male-dominated fields. “The transition to the space-oriented approach that Amaral and her peers were leading at the time was revolutionary,” explains Perennès, referring to the pivotal shift of the 1960s when artists such as Amaral, Magdalena Abakanowicz, Sheila Hicks, Elsi Giauque, and other contemporaries boldly liberated fiber from the confines of utility and ornament. These pioneering women claimed space with their work, threading volume, architecture, and movement into a practice that inevitably transcended the fiber medium. Their creations became immersive environments.
Initially drawn to the allure of architecture, Amaral learned that obtaining a degree required a seven-year commitment. In a conversation with the poet Piedad Bonnett, she admitted that she wasn’t willing to give this much of her “living” (“7 años de vivir ”) to studying. Instead, Amaral pursued architectural drafting at the Colegio Mayor de Cundinamarca in Bogotá. Having studied drawing, color theory, mathematics, and the theory and history of architecture, working closely with architecture professionals, she graduated restless, uninspired, and uncertain about her next steps. She
2019 (detail), linen, gesso, acrylic, Japanese paper, and palladium, 78 ¾ × 78 ¾ inches (200 × 200 cm), view from Casa Amaral, Bogotá.
was thinking of broader artistic possibilities when a friend recommended the Cranbrook Academy of Art, outside Detroit—an institution offering courses in textiles, ceramics, jewelry, and architecture. In 1954 she was admitted to Cranbrook, leaving Colombia amid the escalating social unrest of La Violencia , the country’s ten-year civil war of the late 1940s and ’50s.
At the time, Cranbrook was an unlikely place for a young Colombian student. Originally conceived as an experimental artists’ colony, it rapidly evolved into a creative hub and became an incubator of American mid-century modernism. The founders, passionate about the ideals of the Arts and Crafts Movement, rejected mass production and factory-made goods in favor of culturally significant artifacts. Craftsmanship was central to the school’s academic practice and was championed as a force for change. The eighty graduate students were free to design their study paths, and Amaral joined the weaving program. Serendipitously, that was the only department accepting students without a graduate degree.
In the textile workshop at Cranbrook, Amaral didn’t simply learn how to weave. Naturally interested in the logic of numbers, she discovered in weaving the original binary system—the pattern language, thousands of years old, that ultimately laid the groundwork for the logic of computation. The mathematical structure of weaving allowed Amaral to speak the language of color, its gradients and densities, with tactile eloquence.
At the loom, the color that Amaral loved so much ceased to be mere pigment; it became a living force, something she could feel with her hands, something imbued with what she calls “the certainty of color.” The word “text” shares its origins with the word “textile,” both stemming from the Latin textere , meaning “to weave.” In this respect, it’s not
surprising that weaving is often compared to storytelling. For the first time, Amaral began to weave meaning into hue, or, as she puts it, “to speak in color.”
At the same time, in Amaral’s hands, fiber turned into the vocabulary of nature. For her, each strand carries the imprint of its origin. Cotton, she muses, is “spongy and yielding”; linen, “thin, clean and hard as a line, textureless and pure”— until, together, they create something “claylike,” a substance malleable in its resistance, shaped into woven fragments that become sentences, textiles that compose landscapes of memory, of emotion, of meaning. The warp and weft of her work capture the essence of place and feeling: the shadowy cliffs of Riscos en Sombra (Shadow cliffs, 1985), the hush of Entorno Quieto 2 (Quiet environment 2, 1992), the luminescent purity of Luz Blanco (White light, 1969), the dappled depth of Bosques (Forests, 1998).
Amaral’s lifetime devotion to her craft has yielded a staggering legacy of 1,500 works, each articulating her singular language of fiber, texture, and color. From this vast body, the curators’ collaboration has distilled fifty pieces for the ICA Miami exhibition, including private loans from local collections. During the selection process, Seidel approached Amaral’s work as a conversation between art and environment to deepen the viewer’s understanding of her boundarydefying practice. “Olga de Amaral’s bold and cutting-edge practice transcends and transforms the possibilities of textiles through innovative scales and alternative materials that defy categorization,” she explains.
Ghotmeh designed the exhibition spaces for the retrospective in both Paris and Miami. Her approach—which she calls the “archaeology of the future”—draws inspiration from the memory of spaces rooted in surrounding natural
environments. For the exhibition in ICA Miami, Ghotmeh responded to Miami’s vivid light and the cityscape’s vertical linearity. She applied the concept of permeability to connect the gallery on the third floor with the living, breathing world below. Through the visual illusion of reflective “lake” surfaces inside the galleries, Ghotmeh created a sense of porosity that allows the landscape outside the window to extend into the rooms.
Traced chronologically, Amaral’s work presents a dynamic narrative of the evolution of her ever deepening mastery of weaving techniques, her daring material experimentation, and her unrelenting expansion of scale. Ghotmeh proposes an alternative mode of engagement, placing Amaral’s work in a spatial progression that travels with the light from the window to the back of the open room. The works are suspended on vertical poles that mimic the structure of vertical looms. In this abstract forest of poles, one passes through a range of creations: small sketches in thread; a scaled-up sculptural knot ( Nudo 24 , 2015); monumental works such as Gran Muro (Great wall), created in 1976 for the lobby of the Peachtree Plaza Hotel, Atlanta; and the Alquimias (Alchemies, 1983– ), equally fascinating on both the front and the reverse side.
The centerpiece of the exhibition, and perhaps the pinnacle of Amaral’s career, lies in two striking series, Brumas (Mists, 2013– ) and Estelas (Stelae, 1996– ), located at opposite ends of a room. The Brumas , ethereal and fleeting, are placed closest to the window, dissolving into light, while the Estelas anchor the space from the back, commanding presences with shimmering solidity. Mists and stones, they inhabit contrasting realms of perception. The intricate Brumas cascade from the ceiling, hanging vertically from a wooden frame, a colorful drizzle caught mid-flight. They are made of countless cotton threads, coated in gesso and painted in acrylic with geometric patterns, transforming them into diaphanous three-dimensional compositions that exist in a liminal state—neither fully defined nor entirely formless. The Brumas linger in the air, their layered textures swaying and shifting as the viewer moves around them.
Stelae have long served as anchors for accumulated knowledge and wisdom. They are records of humanity. Traditionally inscribed with laws, decrees, and triumphs, they demarcated sacred sites, territorial boundaries, and the farthest reaches of civilization. Amaral’s Estelas , shimmering constellations of megaliths, appear suspended in space-time, defying gravity itself. These luminous monuments embody both the primordial and the futuristic. Gold leaf, with its gleaming permanence, symbolizes immortality and carries layered meanings—from the sacred radiance of pre-Columbian ritual artifacts to the opulent grandeur of Bogotá’s Baroque cathedrals.
Entering the world of Amaral’s works means traveling to the places of her past. In this intrinsic connection to memory, weaving becomes an act of preservation, where each composition is a testament to time’s imprint. Amaral’s art is not an elegy for what has vanished, instead, it is a form of return. The Miami retrospective is a portrait of an artist who has spent a lifetime reclaiming all the things she loves. Her life’s work offers a luminous affirmation of continuity, a quiet, yet resounding proof that nothing is ever truly lost, only transformed. Somewhere beyond the fabric of Amaral’s imagination, just at the edge of forgetting, her “lost country” awaits.
From dancing kwaito on the streets of Zolani in South Africa to performing a duet with Cira Robinson during British Grime artist Stormzy’s performance at the Glastonbury Festival in 2019, Mthuthuzeli November steps out of line. This Capetonian choreographer pushes well beyond the classical repertoire with his dynamic fusions of Western and African dance, intertwining elements from classical ballet, contemporary dance, and other movement forms. With recent credits with Cassa Pancho’s Ballet Black, the Royal Ballet’s Festival of New Choreography, Ballett Zürich, the Cape Town City Ballet, and Charlotte Ballet, November, now based in London, continues to bedazzle audiences across continental Europe. This autumn his Rhapsodies —an arrangement for two pianos and four fingers that riffs on George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue (1924)—and an adaptation of a previous piece for Ballett Zürich will feature in Racines/Roots , a triple bill in the 2025–26 season of the Paris Opéra, the accompanying pieces being by George Balanchine and Christopher Wheeldon.
For the Quarterly , November spoke with Maximiliane Leuschner about making work for such renowned institutions as the Paris Opéra and Ballett Zürich, and about adapting one of the bestknown compositions of the Jazz Age for the proscenium. Their conversation offers a glimpse into the thinking of South Africa’s most-sought-after emerging choreographer.
MAXIMILIANE LEUSCHNER Tell us about Rhapsodies MTHUTHUZELI NOVEMBER Rhapsodies is an existing work, a remounting of a work that I first made for Ballett Zürich. It premiered in January 2024, and its title riffs on George Gershwin’s iconic Rhapsody in Blue . I liked the idea that music envelops the dance like a collage of ideas. I wanted to explore intimate moments in people’s lives that aren’t always visible, but I also wanted to isolate each section as something that exists within a frame of its own. So, on stage, I’ve mounted these wooden frames. Sometimes they shape the space: you can see through them, but there are also lights surrounding them. And they also frame the dancers. At its core, Rhapsodies is a piece exploring love, people, and identity in a very abstract way. There isn’t a narrative per se, although you can find one if you really look for one. The piece is eighteen to
twenty minutes long, depending on how fast the orchestra plays.
ML How did you find making the work?
MN It was interesting because I found it hard to see myself in the Rhapsody in Blue melody. Perhaps because I often create my own music when I choreograph?
Halfway through the piece, there’s a moment where I abandon the score altogether to explore my own self-identity. It delves into the roots of my being African. Once the score comes back again, it continues to the end. When I was making the piece, I was capturing moments with the dancers, really just living in the moment and making sure that each section is tailored to a specific person, group, or duet. But I also wanted to be part of that process, so I put myself in there, exploring my identity within the music and the structure, and within, I guess, the organization. Ballett Zürich is a big organization, and Paris Opéra even more so. So the piece is quite close to my heart. I’ve done it for really huge houses and Rhapsody in Blue is a huge work; everyone recognizes it. To create with something like that is quite a daunting task.
ML How do you achieve this motionwise? Do you break up the middle sequence? How do you find your own identity within the movements and music?
MN The middle sequence is prerecorded: the orchestra stops playing completely while the piece dives into a completely different world. It lasts no more than two minutes, but it’s a moment when it feels like you’ve entered a completely different space. It’s quite abrupt, in the sense that there’s a flow within the Gershwin score; once you disrupt that and start adding African drums and chanting, the movement vocabulary completely changes. Maybe there’s something a little bit uncomfortable about that, at first, but it also speaks to what I am, who I stand for and what I stand for, and the place I have in the ballet world as a Black choreographer. Maybe it could feel disruptive to the ecosystem that people build when I enter art, so there’s that feeling in the piece that maybe is uncomfortable for some people. Maybe it’s not, maybe it’s a beautiful thing, but maybe it’s not, you know? I don’t know!
I often have this conversation about being one of the only Black South African choreographers making work for big ballet companies. What will
Mthuthuzeli November in conversation with Maximiliane Leuschner
CHOREOGRAPHING RHAPSODIES
it feel like for me to enter the Paris Opéra? I don’t know what that feeling is like, but I can only try. Those are the ideas I try to approach in my work, being myself as much as possible without trying to be anything else.
ML How will you approach this at Paris Opéra?
MN This is what I’m looking forward to. I don’t often restage my works, so when I do, I usually change the whole thing. Perhaps because I don’t like copying and pasting something that was made for someone else. And I think each dancer deserves their own unique take and approach to something. They deserve to feel like they have something being made on them. I’m excited to remake the entire work, to reimagine the entire idea.
ML How do you find working with classically trained ballet dancers? How do you approach the challenge of teaching them new steps outside their movement vocabulary?
MN I’m always intrigued and interested in working with classically trained ballet dancers. Luckily, dancers are intelligent in the way they move their bodies. My movement is quite grounded, heavy,
and very much inspired by South African and African dance. Really the biggest challenge sometimes is not so much that they can’t do the movement, but the time required to get them to the point where they don’t feel silly. Sometimes trying to differentiate between it looking good and feeling silly—it’s hard to get the dancers to believe that they look like they belong in the world that we created. So my approach is to try to remind them to have fun and a good time with it, so that they feel like they belong in a space, that they can try new things. We can all fail, and we can all succeed, but as long as we’re having a good time, that’s okay. I find that people pick up information much better when they’re happier, obviously. So I try my best to create a safe environment where people can look at me demonstrating a movement they’ve never done before and feel safe enough to try and dive deep into that world.
ML Fun and play are such great ways to create safe spaces, break up movements, and find new ways of interaction that don’t seem contrived. Do you give your dancers instructions?
MN I try not to spoon-feed them too much information. Again, dancers are really smart. Overdoing the information takes away the magic of them finding out what they’re capable of. And as with audiences, sometimes you don’t want to give them too much information about things. You have to let them feel it, even if it doesn’t always happen on the spot. I’ve had moments when I’ve worked with dancers and months later, after performing the work, they’ll approach me: “Oh, I get it now!” And there’s something beautiful about that. Of course, if there’s an important piece of information that somebody needs to know, I’ll give it to them, but it’s all about discovery. The piece always grows a little in dialogue with everyone. By the time people do the last show, the growth is always a beautiful thing to see.
ML I get you. As a critic, I often see a performance several times, not just once, to see how the piece develops and unfolds on stage during the course of the run; but also for myself, as an audience member, to find my way into the narrative and performance. Speaking about the narrative, when you
write the score, do you write your own music? How do you approach this in general?
MN It depends on what I’m trying to do. Sometimes, if the focus is purely on real instruments, I tend to work with collaborators who can play the instruments and have them in the studio. I’ll describe the feeling and they’ll improvise, or I’ll sing it out loud myself. I can’t actually write music myself, but I like percussion. I play a lot of drums, and there’s a lot of chanting and song, which I do by myself. I just record myself at home. But for a big orchestra, for example, I would work with a friend of mine and we’d develop it together. Then it will be orchestrated by somebody else. That’s my usual approach to music: following a feeling that I have. I try my best to gauge if it’s going in the right direction based on how I would like it to make me feel.
ML How do you set the mood?
MN I just close myself off and allow myself to be in the moment as much as I can. I go for walks a lot. Sometimes I’ll make a short sequence and then put my headphones on to listen to it for an hour or so on repeat. If that sparks new ideas, I’ll come back
to it and continue. In most cases I’m creating the music as I’m making the dance, so I’ll go into the studio and try a section, come back home and continue to work on it, and then add the new thing, which I’ll take to the studio and see if it works. If it doesn’t work, I’ll scrape it out and try another version. I like this way of working because it lets me be in that world all the time. But the problem with big orchestras is that they usually need the music about six months in advance, and it has happened that I don’t feel the music anymore by the time I have to choreograph it, so there can be a bit of an imbalance.
ML How do you deal with this imbalance?
MN Usually I work on something else in between before I return to something that was submitted a long time ago. When that happens, I take a moment and turn inward: “What was I thinking about? How do I respond to my initial idea?” Sometimes things shift, other times they don’t. But I try my best to stay true to myself and the original idea.
Some ideas come from an emotional response to something, especially in my work, and all my
works are personal. I respond in an emotional, personal way, and I usually give out my ideas to people by saying “This is what I’m thinking about now,” which may make it easy for me to go back to that moment, because it’s something that’s still very much in me, you know. But yeah, it can be difficult to plan things in advance.
ML Tell us about your movements.
MN I just stand up and do it. It’s difficult for dancers sometimes because I don’t come up with preplanned movements. I usually make a disclaimer in the beginning: “When you see it the first time, that’s when it’s happening in my head!” This can be hard because I can keep going for hours, so it’s quite a lot for dancers to constantly try to keep up.
ML But then it’s always nice when you work with people who are still practicing themselves. You can tell that they know what they’re doing.
MN I’m grateful that I can still show movement and give that to the dancers. Otherwise I would have to describe movement, and I’m not that good with words.
From Sarteano, Italy, to Allentown, Pennsylvania, Alison Castle reports on Nicola Bulgari’s collection of quintessential American automobiles, highlighting his passion and vision for the future.
In the verdant hills around Sarteano, Italy, it’s not uncommon to spot, humming along the zigzagging cypress-lined roads, a retinue of shiny vintage American cabriolets, sedans, and coupes. These nonindigenous creatures, with their voluptuous fenders, majestic hood ornaments, grandiose grilles, and spotless whitewall tires, would be cars from the Tuscan outpost of Nicola Bulgari’s automobile collection getting their “exercise,” as he calls the regular outings that keep them fit. One fine spring day not too long ago, I had the honor of partaking in one such procession, at the wheel of a 1940 DeSoto Coupe that Bulgari had handpicked for me to drive. Following the Cadillac in front of me, hands wrapped around the smooth Bakelite wheel, I let any worry about driving a museum piece be drowned out by the magnificent scenery and the throaty purr of the engine. I needn’t have worried much—not only because Bulgari’s operation includes a team of highly talented mechanics and restorers for whom repairing a dent would be routine, but simply for the fact that he wants these cars to enjoy doing what they were meant to do, preciousness be damned. And I think Bulgari would agree with me when I say that the cars do very much enjoy their lives in his care. They are treated like his adopted children.
You would be forgiven for wondering why an Italian luxury magnate (he is vice chairman of the jewelry and fashion house founded by his grandfather in 1884) has laser-focused his collection of nearly 300 cars on American models from the 1920s through the ’50s. No vintage European race cars, no flamboyant supercars for Bulgari. “There are enough Ferraris in the world,” he told me. “People
spend so much money on a Lamborghini or Pagani just to have it. This is not a vanity thing for me.” Indeed, impressive and stately as they may be, Bulgari’s cars aren’t flashy. Yet there are many stars in the collection, such as the 1940 Buick Woody featured in Now, Voyager (1942) that was acquired from the production and driven for many years by Bette Davis. Or the 1929 GMC yellow cab from It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), or the 1930 Graham Model 46 Standard Six sedan in highly original condition that was formerly owned by Peter Yarrow of Peter, Paul and Mary. (It was pictured on the cover of their 1967 LP Album 1700.)
The Woody and the Graham, which reside in Allentown, Pennsylvania, were the first of Bulgari’s cars I had the chance to drive. Allentown? Let’s rewind a bit. In 1995, Bulgari was in search of someone to repair a 1942 Buick Model 49 Special Estate Wagon (aka a “Woody,” owing to the wood siding) that had met a sad fate after being parked on a slope in the Hudson Valley without its parking brake properly engaged. He asked around for someone in the region who could help and ended up having the car sent to a restorer in Allentown who was recommended by an old friend. When the Woody came back pristine, Bulgari knew he’d found “the guy.” Keith Flickinger, who was born and raised in Allentown and describes himself as a “Pennsylvania Dutch kid with typical Ozzie and Harriet parents,” told me that it was several months after sending back the wagon before he heard from Bulgari. Flickinger was the owner of a car-restoration business with a huge waiting list of customers, but when Bulgari finally called him back (he had been out of the country), it was to ask him to take on another job, which led to another, which eventually
led to Flickinger letting go of his clients to dedicate his skills full-time to Bulgari’s endless parade of restorations. He is now chief operating officer and curator of the collection. “It’s been an amazing ride,” he told me.
Flickinger’s original shop was located near a derelict drive-in movie theater on the outskirts of Allentown. That shop is now one of many buildings on the enclosed twenty-seven-acre campus of the NB Center for American Automotive Heritage, a property including six collection buildings, three restoration buildings, a gauge-rebuilding business, a machine shop, and a full-service repair shop specifically for vintage vehicles. The drive-in screen was restored and faces a reconstructed Pennsylvania Dutch barn that houses screening rooms, a music performance space, and archives. Most thrilling, perhaps, is the fully private two-mile track on which all the cars get to stretch their legs in regular rotation. There is even a vintage Sinclair filling station with a working pump that is used to fill the cars’ tanks. Viewed on Google Earth, the campus looks like a kid’s train set. Incidentally, Bulgari had two highly detailed dioramas of the campus made, each roughly four by six feet, complete with working streetlamps, flowing creeks, and of course model cars. (One of the dioramas is in the visitor center in Allentown, the other at Bulgari’s garage in Rome.)
“Three on the tree, four on the floor,” Jonathan Klinger, executive director of the Allentown collection, told me as I prepared for my first test drive. He explained that in the late 1930s, when three gears were still the standard for American cars, manufacturers began putting the gearshift lever on the steering column, freeing up space for a third person to sit in the front bench seat. When four-speed transmissions were introduced, their gearshifts went back on the floor, and both configurations coexisted until three-on-the-tree models became
extinct in the 1980s. As this was my baptism in a three on the tree, Klinger instructed me to “picture a capital H, with the top left being reverse, first being straight down, second up and right, and third down and right.” OK! Wearing a wool scarf to stave off the late-winter chill, Bulgari watched me with genuine relish as I drove a 1939 Buick Century around the Allentown track. After I circled back around and parked it, he presented me with a 1941 Cadillac Series 61 “for comparison.” He explained that although the Buick was a lot of car for the original price, the Cadillac was considered a class above—and priced accordingly. After taking the Cadillac for a spin, I could see that Bulgari was eager for my impression. When I reported that the Buick felt as cushy, powerful, and luxurious as the Cadillac, he seemed exceedingly satisfied.
What is it about Buick that makes it Bulgari’s favorite marque? When I posed this question to Paolo Ciminiello, the curator of Bulgari’s collection in Italy, his response was that it’s like trying to explain your favorite color, which is to say you can’t. But nostalgia clearly plays a big part. Bulgari distinctly remembers seeing an ad for a 1935 Buick 96S in an old issue of National Geographic in the late 1940s (he would have been around nine years old) and thinking it was the most beautiful car he’d ever seen. Around this time, the young Roman was also noticing the cars the Vatican chose for its motorcades, for the most part 1930s and ’40s American limousines: Packards, Buicks, Cadillacs—even a Checker. Young Nicola was awed by these cars and impressed that the Vatican had opted for US cars rather than European ones. Buicks seemed to embody the American dream: outsized, affordable, dependable, top quality, big bang for your buck. It wasn’t America’s movie stars or music that appealed to Bulgari in his youth, it was its cars—the everyday workhorses that ferried people to work, to church, to the grocery store.
Bulgari doesn’t have a favorite car, or so he says, but he does admit to a special fondness for his maroon 1935 Buick 96S, the same model he had seen in National Geographic as a child. (Only fortyone were made, of which one was exported to Europe—he wonders if it’s possible he ever spied it driving around Rome.) When he was in his twenties he learned that the Vatican was updating its cars and managed to purchase a decommissioned 1938 Buick Series 90. He didn’t stop there: his collection now includes most of the existing American Vatican limousines (eleven total) from the period 1932 to 1965, including the 1947 Cadillac 75 Fleetwood (essentially the OG popemobile) that was the primary vehicle used by Popes Pius XII and John
XXIII; it had a cut-out roof to allow for waving to crowds, a precursor to the bubble-top popemobile that later became ubiquitous. Bulgari doesn’t deny the appeal of the Cadillacs of the era; although they were marketed as luxury automobiles, they were not completely out of reach for the middle class. Duesenbergs, on the other hand, don’t interest him at all—they were reserved for the wealthy and engineered more for speed than for comfort. “I love the cars that built America, not the unaffordable cars,” he told me.
When people ask Bulgari why his collection features so few Fords, widely considered the most iconic American autos, he explains that it’s because it doesn’t need to. The collection’s handful of Fords includes a Model T and a Model A and he appreciates their importance in automotive history, but he never felt a calling to acquire more. “They are overrepresented,” he told me. “The world doesn’t need more collectors to preserve them.” What does drive his decision to acquire a car? Emotion is important— he has to love it. But he also considers factors like condition, originality, and rarity, as well as input from trusted sources. Bulgari will often dispatch Flickinger to visit a newly discovered car, frequently a dilapidated barn find, to see if it’s worth saving. “Keith has a nose for analyzing a car, like a magician,” he told me. Flickinger told me, “He shines the light on the mid-range cars of the era that have been lost and forgotten and he feels a calling to restore them.” Sometimes Flickinger will balk at a car that he’s not so sure about and Bulgari will say to him, “But look, Keith, it’s crying.”
There are currently two rusty 1934 Chrysler Airflow coupes crying as they await rehabilitation in one of the restoration buildings in Allentown. Work on the Airflows will start after completion of the current project, the 1930 Studebaker President
Photos: courtesy Fondazione Nicola Bulgari
Eight seven-passenger sedan that fabricator and body-restoration-technician Scott Guranich was rebuilding from the wood frame up when I visited. The Airflows, which will be simultaneously restored side by side like twins, will take at least two years’ work. Nearby, employees were working on re-creating a floor mat from a 1934 Nash Ambassador 8 Brougham. An original in good condition being impossible to source (what some would call “unobtanium”), restoration manager Jon Haring and his team reconstructed the car’s deteriorated mats enough to be used as blanks for a silicone mold; the resulting, freshly demolded rubber mat looked (and smelled) as if it had just come off the assembly line.
What makes Bulgari’s approach so compelling is that it is a creative act in its own right—a form of craftsmanship on a par with art conservation. Just as a restorer repairing a Renaissance fresco must honor the spirit and materials of the original artist, Bulgari treats each car as a historical and aesthetic artifact. He insists on seeking out period-correct parts, reviving lost techniques, and carefully choosing when to restore and when to preserve a “survivor” in its original condition. And crucially, Bulgari does not stop at restoration and preservation; he insists on driving these cars, allowing them to perform their intended function and move about the world as living testaments to a vanished era. And move about they do: from wherever he may be at a given time, Bulgari calls his garages daily to inquire about which cars have gone out and which ones need to have a turn. He loves to hear reports of visitors to the collection. Patrik Ullman, the head of Fondazione Nicola Bulgari, told me, “Nicola shares so much passion with people, he even loves watching others
enjoy the cars, or even hearing about them enjoying his cars if he’s not there.” Indeed, though he wasn’t present for my first visit to Allentown, Bulgari called several times while I was there to ask how it was going before asking to speak to me directly about my impressions. I could sense an urgency in his curiosity, the kind that can only be driven by a passion bordering on obsession.
Now in his eighties, Bulgari increasingly focuses on spreading awareness and appreciation. As we sat together in the hall of the Allentown lodge, he spoke wistfully about the dwindling champions of American autos. He reminisced about automotive journalist and historian Beverly Rae Kimes: “I really miss that woman. She was a walking encyclopedia. She understood what I was trying to do and she was excited about it.” (She literally did write an encyclopedia of American cars from 1805 to 1942— Bulgari gave me a copy of the 1,600-page tome.) It excites him when someone “gets” his collecting ethos, which does not always happen. Some people struggle to understand the narrow focus of his collection and its complete lack of European cars. But really the collection is a work of art, and his collecting is an act of cultural stewardship, driven by a love not just for the objects but for the ideas, histories, and craftsmanship they embody.
It’s not only about spreading the gospel among car aficionados. Bulgari wants to teach the wider public, in particular younger generations, about the cars in his collection. He understands the important role that popular culture, particularly films, can play in transmitting his cars’ histories, and lending cars to film productions helps to fulfill this goal. His cars were featured most recently in Luca Guadagnino’s 2024 film Queer (with employees,
including Ciminiello, driving them in period 1950s costumes). Further, he seeks out young people to apprentice in his workshops—I met several men in their late teens and early twenties whose reverence for the cars, inspired by getting their hands dirty repairing them, seemed beyond their years.
In his commitment to passing this collection to future generations, Bulgari joins a long tradition of collectors who transform private passion into public legacy. This philosophy of active stewardship places him squarely in the company of visionary art collectors whose passions reshaped cultural landscapes. Figures like Peggy Guggenheim did not simply hoard canvases; they championed movements, spurred public dialogues, and created legacies that extended far beyond their lifetimes. In this vein, Bulgari imagines a lineage of caretakers who will not merely preserve these cars behind velvet ropes but will understand the importance of keeping them in motion, of letting their engines roar to life and their stories be shared.
In the end, Bulgari’s project is about far more than chrome and horsepower. It is a meditation on time, memory, and the beauty of things made (and remade) by human hands. He understands that preservation is not simply about freezing objects in amber but about keeping them alive—through restoration, through use, and through the transmission of knowledge and passion to those who will follow. His cars remind us of what it means to care for the past without locking it away. They remind us that a personal passion, when pursued with rigor, can open wide windows onto culture, history, and human imagination. And they challenge all of us to consider what we too will choose to preserve—and how we will keep it alive.
THE ART OF BIOGRAPHY JAMES SCHUYLER
The celebrated New York School poet and Pulitzer Prize–winner James Schuyler is the subject of Nathan Kernan’s new biography, A Day Like Any Other: The Life of James Schuyler. Kernan narrates the wild turns in the poet’s life with great skill, from his peripatetic youth, through his years in the influential circle of W. H. Auden, on to his critical friendships with poets and artists such as John Ashbery, Jane Freilicher, Frank O’Hara, and Fairfield Porter. Here Raymond Foye, a friend of Schuyler’s (and the poet’s literary executor), talks with Kernan about the genesis of the project and some of the breakthroughs and challenges he encountered in its construction.
RAYMOND FOYE Did you have a mind to write this biography when Jimmy was alive, and did you mention it to him? Or did it only take shape after he died?
NATHAN KERNAN I think I must have had the idea when he was alive, but I certainly didn’t mention it to him, no. It was in the back of my mind, if anywhere. But we did share a love for certain kinds of English literature and maybe that’s what got me thinking about him in these terms, as a person to write about. A year or two after Jimmy died, I mentioned it to his close friend and executor, the painter Darragh Park, as a possibility. Or as a question, really, because at that point I’d just about had enough with working at the Robert Miller Gallery and was seeking a way out of that situation, looking for something new to do. And Darragh said no, it was too soon to think about doing that. But then he very generously offered to let me edit the diaries [The Diary of James Schuyler, Black Sparrow Press, 1997]. So that project started it off.
RF You say you shared a love of certain kinds of English literature?
NK It turned out that a lot of the writers that I loved shared a similar sensibility with or were the same ones that Jimmy had been reading in high school: Evelyn Waugh, Somerset Maugham, Ronald Firbank, Harold Nicolson, and others, Logan Pearsall Smith and Julien Green in particular. In return, I think I introduced him to those terribly amusing 1940s diaries of James Lees-Milne, which he loved. I note in my book that most of his favorite writers in his adolescence were English and wrote with a careful attention to their prose style, which tended to be clear and elegant, if sometimes mannered. Jocelyn Brooke, Forrest Reid, and Denton Welch are other wonderful writers in that genre of semiautobiographical novels from the ’30s and ’40s that we both loved. Jimmy had “read everything,” John Ashbery used to say.
RF What is it about that kind of writing that appealed to Schuyler? There’s a certain quirkiness there, no?
NK That’s right. All these writers have a very subjective viewpoint. He loved, as I do, diaries and letters and commonplace books. All of this would find an outlet later in his poems, with their love of the quotidian, the accumulated daily experience that adds up to a life. There’s also something about Englishness that he loved—which is odd, because as far as I know Jimmy never went to England. He might have quietly slipped over there at some point, but I could find no documentary evidence that he ever did.
RF What was the biggest challenge for you in writing this biography, aside from finishing it?
NK That’s a good question. There were many challenges. I felt that I didn’t have enough material from his early life, and I simply had to resign myself to that at a certain point. Each biographer works within a certain set of circumstances and limitations and you have to deal with what you can get. Some biographers have too much material. The poet James Merrill apparently was a fanatical keeper of his own records, so Langdon Hammer I think had the opposite problem from mine, trying to figure out what to leave out. For me the early part of Jimmy’s life was full of lacunae, and I was worried about giving the shape of his childhood and his young adulthood in particular. And then finally I guess the main challenge was to make it really readable, to emulate the biographers that I myself enjoy reading, the classic ones.
RF I often cite Hammer’s biography of James Merrill as a model of literary biography; he did a magnificent job. Who else do you admire in the field of literary biography?
NK Well , it’s gone out of fashion now, but George Painter’s biography of Marcel Proust was formative for me. And I love the biography of E. M. Forster by P. N. Furbank. Of course Leon Edel’s biography of Henry James is classic. Also Edith Wharton: A Biography by R. W. B. Lewis. Those are the main ones that come to mind right away. And I was very much aware of my amazing New York School predecessors: Brad Gooch’s City Poet: The Life and Times of Frank O’Hara and Karin Roffman’s The Songs We Know Best: John Ashbery’s Early Life I must say that while I usually like to read biographies, as I was writing this one I consciously avoided reading any. I was afraid of being intimidated by other people’s excellence and also I guess I was trying not to be influenced, whatever that means.
I’ll tell you another biography that I loved but that I changed my opinion about as far as its relationship to my work, and that’s Jean Stein’s Edie: American Girl , which of course is a landmark work, a new kind of biography where the author relied entirely on unadulterated quotations from people who knew Edie Sedgwick at various times in her life. That book was compulsively readable and interesting, but I also felt it was cheating somehow. I entered into my project with the idea of doing just the opposite, of creating this sort of authorial figure who would tell you what was true and what was not true, and not have different voices confusing the reader. But as I went on I threw that idea out because I found that I loved the other voices that were coming in from the various interviews, and I wanted to keep them, even if they perhaps contradicted each other. I grew to like that. That was something I didn’t figure out until I was well into the process of writing the book.
RF Do you think knowing Jimmy made it easier for you to write this book? Or how would not knowing him have helped?
NK That’s a good question too: I don’t know. This may sound pretentious but I always sort of identified with Jimmy in a certain way, and I think that did help. I felt that I had an instinctive understanding of certain things, certain areas of his life, that helped me. But I tried not to put myself in as a character, though I kind of did a little bit at the end. I think ultimately it helped to know him.
RF I was thinking about Jimmy the other day, how he couldn’t really do anything except write a great poem. There are letters and diaries and the occasional art reviews, but the only thing he could really do in life was write a poem. And he relied on all of these wonderful people to more or less take care of him so he could do only that.
NK That’s partly true, but don’t forget, he was very good at many things when he put his mind to it. I mean, he turned out to be quite a good cook it seems, although I never tasted his cooking; and he was also a very good gardener at one point, although he let that lapse. And he was a fine photographer. All of those are skills that he picked up quickly. He was the kind of person who could pick something up very quickly and master it. But you’re right—of course those aren’t on the same level as the poems.
RF Was he good at his job at MoMA [the Museum of Modern Art, New York]?
NK Probably not. I think he had moments of being good, but it was kind of like he’d been in
school: if he was inspired he did well, but most of the time he wouldn’t respond to his teachers in school, and in a similar way I think a lot of the administrative work at MoMA was not so much to his taste. The one show that he was really responsible for was the Joseph Stella drawing show in 1960. Although there was no catalogue, there was a wall text and a checklist, and apparently that was a very successful show. That said, I think he had quite a lot of help with that from other members of the department. The impression I got was that he was a little bit of, I wouldn’t say a slacker, most of the time, but not the most diligent or consistent of workers.
RF Sadly, throughout his life, the specter of mental illness is always rearing its head at various times, more or less shattering anything that he’s built or created.
NK That’s right. It was periodic. It seems like every ten years he went into the hospital, in 1951, 1961, 1971, and then for the last time in 1985.
RF We were lucky to have known him during a period of stability, because when I read your book, even though I knew him quite well in later years, it was a revelation. I’d heard stories but I really had no idea about the madness, the drugs, the sex, the alcohol. It’s quite a harrowing tale. I think we were lucky to have known him during a period of great productivity and stability.
NK We sure were. And who knows if it would have continued had he lived longer. I ended the book with a sense that he would have continued to be well, but one doesn’t know.
RF What do you think led to this stability toward the end of his life?
NK Well, as I say in the book, Schuyler’s close friend the poet Tom Carey viewed the 1985 breakdown as a watershed moment where everything really changed. Darragh Park attributed this largely to what he called Tom’s allowing himself to be loved by Jimmy without being pressured into a sexual relationship, which Tom absolutely resisted. But by the mid-1980s, Jimmy had stopped feeling those sexual compulsions toward Tom, and their friendship, their love, was platonic. Darragh felt that it was Jimmy’s being able to love Tom in that way that saved him in the end.
RF There was also Dr. Daniel Newman and some of the new medications that came out, which may have helped a lot.
NK Yes, Dr. Newman was a lifesaver, literally, because he was the first physician who really took care of Jimmy as a person. He’d had this long-term psychiatrist, Dr. Hyman Weitzen, but Dr. Weitzen was remote once Jimmy was out of the office; he took a limited interest in him as a fully rounded person. Whereas Dr. Newman truly cared about him and always followed through with the treatment, making him stop drinking and bringing his blood sugar down—that was really key.
RF What do you think Jimmy would have thought of this biography? It’s not really a fair question. Would he have liked any biography of himself?
NK I wonder. He did consider himself a worthy subject for a biography. I think he was aware of his importance as a poet, and realized that that was part of what happened when you were an important poet: somebody would write your life. Whether he would have liked this particular take I don’t know. I hope so.
RF He didn’t talk a lot about his past but I didn’t get the feeling that there was anything in his past that he would have been particularly embarrassed
Previous spread: James Schuyler at the door of his apartment in Florence, Italy, May 1948. Photo: Chester Kallmann, courtesy Ridenour family
This page: James Schuyler with Truman Capote, Ischia, Italy, 1949. Photo: Charles Heilemann
by. He would have just said, Well, that happened, that’s the way it was. Do you think there were any areas with him that were off-limits?
NK Maybe the Navy. He really did avoid talking about that experience, especially when he deserted. I think it was still traumatic and humiliating for him, the experience of being imprisoned in the brig and then on Hart Island, and the subsequent interactions with psychiatrists and various naval officers.
RF He basically went out on shore leave and seems to have had a manic episode that also involved a several-day visit to the gay baths.
NK Right. He went awol for about a month. He overstayed his leave, got drunk, et cetera. Much later, in the 1980s, he did relate the story to Carey, but as far as I know no one else got a full picture of it. He managed to see a psychiatrist during that time, hoping for a letter excusing his desertion on the grounds of mental illness. The psychiatrist happened to be the Dadaist poet Richard Huelsenbeck, although he’d changed his name when he came to New York and began practicing psychiatry here. Unfortunately his letter turned out to be quite noncommittal, probably due to his homophobia.
RF I think in those days one had to worry about things like electric shock and lobotomy, the whole mental-hospital nightmare.
NK Yes, you did. I don’t know if Jimmy was ever subjected to shock therapy; I don’t think he was. There was an indication (which I didn’t put in the book) that Auden or somebody prevented him from being subjected to that in the 1950s. I don’t think electroshock would have been part of the Navy testing, but it could have been used if he’d been incarcerated in a hospital.
RF One thing that comes through in this book is Schuyler’s wonderful capacity for friendship. In fact everyone in his group seems to have had that great capacity for friendship. They were all so supportive of one another.
NK That was very much a particular moment in New York City. The Cedar Tavern and the San Remo Cafe, artists and poets, theater people, straight and gay men and women, a wonderful mix. I think Judith Malina’s diary gives a beautiful picture of that world. Diaries and letters written at the time were a huge resource for me in writing this biography, because people’s memories are quite fallible, even mine, or especially mine. You interview people and they tell you things with great confidence—or not. But then you look at the relevant letters from the period and you sometimes get a slightly or entirely different picture. This is especially true for dates, of course: exactly when somebody moved in, when somebody broke up. . .
RF Was there a single repository of materials that helped you more than any other in writing this book?
NK The main one was Jimmy’s own archives at the University of California, San Diego [UCSD], in La Jolla. That was huge. I was surprised that he was able to keep so many important personal documents, going pretty far back. Especially with all the troubles and movings back-and-forth in his life.
RF How did he manage that?
NK I don’t know. He must have had them in boxes and trunks. He does mention a trunk that went missing that included an Auden notebook he’d been given, but there was an amazing amount of material that he managed to hold on to. Two
other major sources for my research were the Berg Collection at the New York Public Library and the Beinecke Library at Yale. The New York Public Library has the W. H. Auden and Chester Kallman papers, Kenneth Koch’s papers, and the Howard Moss papers, which are very interesting for the early 1950s. And John Button’s papers are there. The Beinecke holds the papers of many New York poets, especially of the second generation, such as Ron Padgett.
RF The Peter Schjeldahl interview was important, wasn’t it?
NK Yes, it was incredibly important. The interview [an excerpt from it, “Not Enough about Frank: An Interview with James Schuyler,” January 1977, was published in the Paris Review no. 249, Fall 2024] was done a few months after Jimmy wrote “The Morning of the Poem,” and it seems he was still a little bit caught in that moment of grace that the poem was written in—of reflection and reminiscence.
RF Was Peter intending to write a biography of Schuyler?
NK No, he was intending to write a biography of Frank O’Hara. So he interviewed Schuyler in relation to O’Hara. As you know, it’s a wonderful interview, but any time it ventures off the subject, whenever Peter gets curious about Schuyler’s own life, Jimmy would say, “Oh, let’s not talk about that. We want to talk about Frank.” Which was slightly frustrating for me, but still the material in that interview was incredibly valuable. Schjeldahl later remarked that Jimmy was speaking in perfectly formed sentences and paragraphs, every semicolon was there in the conversation, as though he were reading from a teleprompter at the forefront of his brain.
RF You start off your biography with Schuyler’s famous reading at the Dia Art Foundation, New York, in 1988. He was sixty-five years old and had never given a poetry reading in his life. It was quite a moment: it seemed like the whole New York poetry world was there. Do you think that poetry readings were important to him in later life?
NK Very important, yes. He was terrified to give that first reading, which of course was a sensation. He hadn’t given a reading ever and he was frozen with fear about it. But thanks to you in large part, by having those two private rehearsals to a small invited audience, it turned out he read beautifully. And then he really got into giving readings. He wrote in his diary around that time, “I begin to understand how poets can become a ham reading their own work,” because he was starting to enjoy it so much. I think it really helped him.
RF At a certain point you couldn’t stop him from reading! He went from somebody who never gave a reading to someone who practically wouldn’t stop. I remember one reading he gave in a gallery space above the old Spring Street Books. I’d gotten home from work and had had a long and exhausting day, and I thought, “Oh, I’m just going to skip this one reading. Jimmy will understand.” And then I thought, “Wait a minute, this is James Schuyler, are you crazy?” So I jumped on the subway and I got down there just in time. As I walked in there was one empty seat in the front row. I sat down and he was already opening the book. He smiled at me and began to read. Suddenly I realized he was reading “The Crystal Lithium.” I’d been bugging him for a long time to read a long poem, because as much as I like the shorter poems I think he’s really at his best in the long form. And of course I didn’t have a tape recorder with me.
NK Most of his readings were of selected works, but a couple of them were of entirely new work. I think it became important for him to expose the new work to an audience when it was just finished, or when it was still being worked on.
RF What about Jimmy’s relationship to the art world? His art reviews are often little gems of description and insight.
NK Jimmy worked for Thomas Hess at Artnews , which in those days had a policy of reviewing every single show in New York—amazing! Although the reviews were very short, three hundred to four hundred words each, that was still a lot of reviewing. Hess hired poets and artists to do these little reviews and they brought to the task a freshness of language that often hadn’t been seen in art reviews up to that point. A few years later, when John Ashbery started as a reviewer, Jimmy told him, It’s very easy—just describe what you see. It was Fairfield Porter who taught him that “description is the best criticism.” I think he tried to put himself in the mindset of the artist he was looking at. He tried to identify with the artist and judge the work on its own merits through the eyes of the artist, through his understanding of what the artists themselves intended.
RF It’s inevitable now that your biography is going to be the way people approach and view Schuyler’s work, at least for some time. That’s a big responsibility. It must be a rather frightening one as well?
NK It is, yes. I tried to approach each poem that I wrote about in a fresh way. The publisher uses the word “definitive,” which I’m a little leery of, because while I suppose the book does define him, I hope it won’t be the final word. I hope it will start a whole new conversation about him. Hopefully other scholars will come along and discover new material that I missed, or new viewpoints. It’s the first biography, but I trust not the last.
RF From what you know of his oeuvre, are there areas where possible discoveries might still be made?
NK Well, there are still a number of unpublished poems, even after Other Flowers [2010], which mostly consists of what was unpublished in his archives at UCSD. But there are still a few that they missed, and there are a few from other sources that haven’t been published, either in book form or at all, but there’s not a huge amount of work of that kind. One thing that should be done is a collected plays and stories, because The Home Book that Trevor Winkfield edited in 1977, of miscellaneous poems and stories and plays, is long out of print. The poems from that book were included in the Collected Poems [1993] but the stories and plays have never been reprinted, and there are additional stories and plays that he never published at all or never collected. So that’s a book I think should happen.
RF Lately I’ve been thinking that we need another Poets Theatre, like what Bunny Lang or Diane di Prima or Ada Katz used to have.
NK It would be nice to see a production of his longest play, Presenting Jane [1952], which had been lost when Trevor Winkfield was compiling The Home Book . But I found it in the New York Public Library, so now it should be performed and published. It’s a wonderful, surreal, crazy text.
RF Were there any professional or ethical issues for you in your very frank discussions of Schuyler’s periods of mental illness?
NK I don’t think so. I ran into resistance from his psychiatrist, Dr. Weitzen, who did however agree
to be interviewed. He talked informatively about Jimmy and his condition but he wouldn’t give me any details, nor would he open his records to me. I went so far to send him Diane Middlebrook’s book about Anne Sexton, which includes material from the recordings Sexton made of her sessions with her psychiatrist. I said, You know, Jimmy’s dead. He has no direct descendants. His closest relative is a half-brother. I mostly just wanted to be accurate about his diagnosis and treatment. But he wouldn’t do it.
RF Schuyler’s manic phases would be full of energy and inspiration, but then inevitably the crash would come. Do you think the periods of madness gave him anything that he was able to put into his poetry, any useful insights?
NK Yes, I do. I mean, he said that himself. For example, the story “The Infant Jesus of Prague” [1952] was his attempt to describe a mental breakdown. It’s a beautiful story full of strange wonders that obviously come directly from his recollection of that experience. Then there’s another text called “Life, Death and Other Dreams” [1971–72]. It’s quite crazy and disturbing, really violent and sexy and lyrical. But most of his work is so quintessentially sane . My sense is that he used his poetry as a bulwark against mental illness. Eileen Myles in an interview described Schuyler writing when he was having troubles of that kind: his face was all red and he looked like he was about to explode as he was furiously writing away. But then the poem he was writing was full of what Eileen described as these quiet wonders, very domestic kinds of tranquil beauties.
RF It may not seem very radical today, but one of the things that struck me when I first started reading Schuyler was the beauty of his love poems and his openness about his homosexuality. The poems were very “out.” Frankly it always annoyed me that John Ashbery was officially in the closet all those years—all those indefinite pronouns. Kenneth Koch once said that the quintessential John Ashbery line is “It wants to go to bed with us.” I remember when Jimmy sold his archives to UCSD, John was very upset that all of his letters from Paris were available for people to read, because there were so many descriptions of cruising. He actually asked Jimmy to seal them, which Jimmy refused to do.
NK Jimmy was pretty much open about his sexuality all his life. He was amused when he was outed on the dust jacket of The Crystal Lithium [1972], which described his love poems to Bob Jordan. Keep in mind John was teaching all those years, when homosexuality was illegal in some places and you could lose your job, especially during the McCarthy era. So it was a big deal.
RF Schuyler’s work has had quite a fortunate afterlife. So many young poets read him today, admire him, and write about him. It’s so interesting to see how reputations change after a writer or artist dies. Robert Motherwell once said to me, The devastating thing about art is that the truth always comes out. That’s quite true. The generational shift is real, and once the person is no longer around and the social network and personal charisma fade, suddenly the work has to stand on its own.
NK Well, he’s very readable. One reads him for pleasure, you pick him up and you want to read something for your own enjoyment, never out of a sense of just being dutiful, or whatever.
RF In literature I think the most overlooked quality is readability. It’s so ironic.
Ana Benaroya Lilacs, False Blue 2024 Oil on canvas, 24 x 20 inches (50. 8 x 61 cm). Courtesy the Artist
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GAME CHANGER BRIAN WILSON
Brian Dillon celebrates the sonic revolutions initiated by Beach Boy Brian Wilson.
“There is no god and Brian Wilson is his son.” In 1966, for the third, Andy Warhol–designed issue of Aspen magazine, Lou Reed wrote “The View from the Bandstand,” a deadpan subjective essay on the present condition of rock music. Reed’s band the Velvet Underground were already performing such verbally and sonically harsh songs as “Heroin” and “Venus in Furs” as part of Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable multimedia show; a gushy regard for the cloudless harmonies of the Beach Boys may seem unlikely on his part, or just a camp feint. In fact, though, he had recently sung lead vocals on at least one track by the Surfsiders, the house band at Pickwick Records, who, in 1965, put out a cash-in album of Beach Boys covers with Lou adding laconic texture to the pure teen fare of “Little Deuce Coupe.” In his Aspen piece, Reed hymns the slightly antiquarian project of Wilson’s group: marrying the sweetness of doo-wop to combustible rock ’n’ roll—twin specters of the 1950s in transcendent 1960s pop. (Reed might easily be describing aspects of the Velvet Underground here, despite that band’s downtown art trappings.) But Wilson had gone further, says Reed, arguing that his main innovation was to expand or distort the harmonic structures of pop: “Will none of the powers that be realize what Brian Wilson did with the chords.”
At the time of Wilson’s death, aged eighty-two, in June 2025, he seemed to have gotten his due, enjoying with age a recognition for the complexity and daring of his music that had eluded him at the height of his musical powers and commercial success. (These had not exactly coincided.) In his last decades Wilson emerged from mental illness, addiction, and reclusive legend (blinds drawn, rising at noon to go nowhere, the Howard Hughes of sunshine pop), reconciled with feuding bandmates, and was able to revisit lost or stymied projects to renewed critical
acclaim. But with the death of an artist of Wilson’s stature, certain tensions, lapses, and longueurs—and triumphs, too—can be flattened in the aftermath. The death of David Bowie in 2016 is perhaps the most instructive and dispiriting example: highs and lows were smoothed out into a plain story of unwavering genius and implausible geniality. The extremity of Wilson’s ambitions, the monomania that seized him both in his mid-1960s pomp and during the long comedown, the hinterland wreckage of personal life and professional relations, and even the eerie beauty of the Beach Boys’ records: all of this is easily missed in celebration of a dead star’s pure love of music
Of course Reed was right about the chords—Wilson, as the group’s main songwriter and producer, took the harmonies of barbershop, doowop, and Everly Brothers–style pop and made them more massed and complex, introducing nonpop chords and buried vocal dissonances. In terms of an influence you could notate musically, aside from a well-known effect on the Beatles, people like the Band and Crosby, Stills & Nash owed him something. (The truth about the laid-back and would-be authentic sounds of the late ’60s and early ’70s is just how severely technical such music needed to be.) But as Bryan Ferry once crooned, notes could not spell out the score —Wilson’s innovations were as much sonic as musical, maybe more so. He wanted to emulate the teeming Phil Spector sound—especially the Ronettes’ “Be My Baby” (1963)— but his masterpiece Pet Sounds (1966) made Spector’s “wall of sound” seem distinctly two-dimensional. On this defiantly mono record from 1966, the palette is stretched and smeared. The best Wilson productions are often bass heavy, deploying not just the muted punch of (among others) Carol Kaye’s Fender Precision bass but an array of other low registers, whether horns or, as memorably on “I Know There’s an Answer,” bass harmonica.
This was Wilson’s game-changing gift: he was the precursor of all the musicians and producers who have seen the album as a total work of art—and of those who have paid the price for such dreams.
– Brian Dillon
Before and after Pet Sounds came a whole idiosyncratic expanse of sound and atmosphere: a keening youthful melancholy, carried high on the inshore wind, haunts songs like “The Warmth of the Sun” (1964), “Caroline, No” from Pet Sounds , and “Surf’s Up” (1967).
In conventional narratives of 1960s musical innovation, Pet Sounds is seen as an experimental foray beyond the Beatles’ Revolver of the previous year, and then a prompt to the psychedelic novelties of Sgt. Pepper. But “experiment” may not be the word. As Tom Petty once pointed out, Wilson had to book dozens of session musicians for these records, and then supply them with their parts. It wasn’t a matter of improvisation and adventure; he had to have heard it all in his head beforehand. In the long term that proved an impossible way to work; for the next projected Beach Boys album, Smile —ultimately abandoned amid internecine squabbles and Wilson’s worsening emotional
state—he developed instead a modular approach, recording instrumental and vocal passages in many different studios and collaging the whole together on tape. Both methods, and both records, produced their own forms of pristine abstraction, and contributed in their different ways to a decline in the group’s popularity. Wilson could also do ramshackle, short-order recording: Smiley Smile (1967), released in place of the botched Smile , was recorded at his home with radio-broadcast equipment. But whichever approach he took, this was Wilson’s gamechanging gift: he was the precursor of all the musicians and producers who have seen the album as a total work of art—and of those who have paid the price for such dreams. When I think of the musicians and records that Brian Wilson made possible, I don’t call to mind music that sounds remotely like the Beach Boys. Instead I think of obsessive, often solitary work in pursuit of the most extravagant sounds. Stevie Wonder’s transfiguration from Motown prodigy to studio-bound magus and futuristic visionary. Prince in his imperial phase of the mid-to-late 1980s. Kate Bush’s commercially disastrous The Dreaming (1982) and its redeemed, more popular twin Hounds of Love (1985). Almost any solo album by Björk, but especially later records like Biophilia (2011). All joyous, giddy versions of a songwriter’s expansive fantasy, yet manifesting total control of sound and structure. Wilson is also the patron saint of all who suffer from the rigors of such ecstasy. He made the svelte span of an album—a mere thirty-five minutes in the case of Pet Sounds —the vehicle for one artist’s ambiguous state of mind: childlike, romantic, anxious, nostalgic, obsessive. And he provided a template for the pain that may ensue when that’s not enough, or the world doesn’t (yet) want to know.
Brian Wilson during the recording of Pet Sounds , 1966, Los Angeles. Photo: Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images
