Gagosian Quarterly, Summer 2025 by Gagosian Quarterly

GAGOSIAN QUARTERLY ONLINE

Studio visits, public art installations, interviews, and more on gagosian.com/quarterly

Video In Conversation:

Setsuko and Peter Marino

To coincide with her exhibition Setsuko: Kingdom of Cats at Gagosian, New York, the artist speaks with architect Peter Marino about her recent sculptures, paintings, and works on paper.

Video Thomas Schütte: Major Sculptures

On the occasion of the exhibition

Thomas Schütte: Major Sculptures at Gagosian, New York, Gagosian Art Advisory’s Bernard Lagrange talks about the sculptures featured in the show. The installation includes six sculptures from the Frauen (Women) series and the related Torso (2005).

Video In Conversation:

Derrick Adams and Ekow Eshun

Join Gagosian for a conversation between Derrick Adams and Ekow Eshun, author, curator, and chair of the commissioning group for the Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square, London. The pair discuss Adams’s latest paintings depicting visions of Black Americana—featured in the exhibition Situation Comedy at Gagosian, Davies Street, London— within the context of British contemporary culture.

Essay

The World as Playground: Arte Povera

Bartolomeo Sala considers the brief yet revolutionary dreams of Arte Povera. On the occasion of a retrospective at the Bourse de Commerce, Paris, he explores the historical conditions that gave rise to the radical midcentury movement.

Gagosian Quarterly, Summer 2025

Editor-in-chief

Alison McDonald

Managing Editor

Wyatt Allgeier

Editor, Online and Print

Gillian Jakab

Text Editor

David Frankel

Executive Editor

Derek C. Blasberg

Digital and Video

Production Assistant

Alanis Santiago-Rodriguez

Design Director

Paul Neale

Design Alexander Ecob

Graphic Thought Facility

Website

Wolfram Wiedner Studio

Proofreading

Lindsey Westbrook

Cover Pablo Picasso

Founder Larry Gagosian

Publisher Jorge Garcia

Published by Gagosian Media For Advertising and Sponsorship Inquiries

Advertising@gagosian.com

Distribution David Renard

Distributed by Magazine Heaven

Distribution Manager Alexandra Samaras

Prepress DL Imaging

Printed by Pureprint Group

Contributors

Yoon Ahn

Francesco Bonami

Louise Bonnet

Susannah Cahalan

Michael Cary

David Chipperfield

Joshua Chuang

Hélène Cixous

John Corbett

Julie Curtiss

Harry G. David

Fiona Duncan

Lauren Elkin

Walton Ford

Romuald Hazoumè

Stefanie Hessler

Elizabeth King

Catherine Lacey

Myles Mellor

William Middleton

Gavin Morrison

Álvaro Negro

Jenn Nkiru

DK Nnuro

Hans Ulrich Obrist

Albert Oehlen

Péjú Oshin

Gillian Pistell

Vicky Richardson

Sydney Stutterheim

Louis Vaccara

Carlos Valladares

Rachel Whiteread

Andrew Winer

Karen Wong

Thanks

Richard Alwyn Fisher

Julia Arena

Laurent Asscher

Jin Auh

Andisheh Avini

Lisa Ballard

Chris Berkery

Priya Bhatnagar

Olivia Lawrence Bright

Sloane Cameron

Serena Cattaneo Adorno

Maurizio Cattelan

TF Chan

Celeste Chipperfield

Vittoria Ciaraldi

Emily Cooper

Ursula Davila-Villa

Maggie Dubinski

Elsa Favreau

Jill Feldman

Andie Fialkoff

Paatela Fraga

Mark Francis

Hallie Freer

Brett Garde

Eleanor Gibson

Beryl Gilothwest

Lauren Gioia

Darlina Goldak

Lauren Halsey

Freja Harrell

Andrew Heyward

Daphne Honeybone-Bonfield

Nicholas Huckle

Delphine Huisinga

Sarah Jones

Shiori Kawasaki

Léa Khayata

Sabyrzhan Madi

Lauren Mahony

François Mairé

Emma McKee

Bennett Miller

Adele Minardi

Olivia Mull

Christina Papadopoulou

Eric Prenowitz

Kelly Quinn

Stefan Ratibor

Helen Redmond

Abram Scharf

Patrick Seguin

Chandler Sterling

Putri Tan

Harry Thorne

Kelsey Tyler

Adriana Varejão

Timothée Viale

Millicent Wilner

Jordan Wolfson

Penny Yeung

Romeo Zendejas

HIGH JEWE LRY

SUMMER 2025 FROM THE EDITOR

In June 1932, when Pablo Picasso installed a retrospective of his work, the first in his career, at the Galerie Georges Petit in Paris, his groupings diverged from the curatorial categories conventionally applied to him—the Blue Period, the Rose Period, the Cubist period, and so on. Instead he created unexpected dialogues among his works, showcasing visual associations he himself saw. In that spirit, Picasso: Tête-à-tête , an exhibition organized in collaboration with the artist’s daughter, Paloma Picasso, presents fifty rare works from across her father’s career, nearly a dozen of them unseen in public since they left his studio. Here, that show is introduced by Michael Cary, one of its organizers. This issue profiles female visionaries, including the remarkable Lorraine O’Grady, a trailblazer who fearlessly challenged conventions. Rachel Whiteread speaks about the challenges of creating public sculpture while respecting and channeling a deep engagement with emotional and historical complexities. We celebrate the work of Kay Bearman, whose influence helped shape the Metropolitan Museum of Art during her fifty-year tenure there. We explore the rebellious life of Rosemary Woodruff Leary, who helped shape the psychedelic movement of the 1960s. Walton Ford reflects on the wild world of Marchesa Luisa Casati and the cheetahs she kept as pets, animals that inspired his latest series. Jenn Nkiru discusses her most recent film, an exploration of Black history and architecture in Manchester, England, with Péjú Oshin. And the inimitable Hélène Cixous answers Hans Ulrich Obrist’s questionnaire.

Joshua Chuang delves into a group of recently discovered photographs taken by Paul McCartney between December 1963 and February 1964, images providing a behind-the-scenes view into Beatlemania and the massive cultural shift that catapulted the band’s rise to unprecedented fame. Recollections of that same era permeate a trio of large-scale paintings by Richard Prince that follow Bob Dylan in progressively softer focus, gradually obscuring the great songwriter; using that work as a starting point, Sydney Stutterheim examines Prince’s enduring fascination with American music and counterculture. We also highlight Francesco Bonami’s “autobiography” of Maurizio Cattelan, in which the curator traces Cattelan’s journey to becoming an artist with imagination and humor. A special section on architecture examines its engagement with art, design, and community, from twentieth-century Tbilisi to present-day Shanghai. A Gagosian exhibition on Willem de Kooning, curated by Cecilia Alemani, traces the shifting appearance of the figure throughout his career, countered by the gravitational pull of abstraction; on this occasion we look into our archives to share a conversation between Albert Oehlen and John Corbett on their shared affinities for de Kooning’s paintings. We also explore the films of Mike Leigh, the photographs of Bennett Miller, new fiction by Catherine Lacey, and fashion with Yoon Ahn.

Alison McDonald, Editor-in-chief

Willem de Kooning

Albert Oehlen and John Corbett discuss Willem de Kooning’s late paintings, how they discovered the artist’s work, and its lasting influence on them.

Picasso: Tête-à-tête

On April 18, the exhibition Picasso: Tête-à-tête opened at Gagosian, New York. Including works from 1896 to 1972, the full span of the artist’s career, the show is presented in partnership with Paloma Picasso, the artist’s daughter. Here, Michael Cary, one of the organizers of the exhibition, traces the historical precedents that informed the conversational nature of the curation and introduces an English translation of a 1932 interview with Picasso by the publisher and critic E. Tériade.

SUMMER 2025 TABLE OF CONTENTS

54 Paul McCartney: December 1963–February 1964

Joshua Chuang unpacks the history behind a selection of Paul McCartney’s photographs that went on view at Gagosian, Beverly Hills, on April 25.

62 AMA Venezia

William Middleton celebrates the collector Laurent Asscher’s new art space in Venice, and underscores the richness of Asscher’s relationships with artists.

Stuck: The Unauthorized Autobiography of Maurizio Cattelan by Francesco Bonami

Coinciding with an exhibition at Gagosian, London, of new work by Maurizio Cattelan, a new English translation of Francesco Bonami’s 2011 “autobiography” of the artist is being published. Here, we share an excerpt that recounts—or reimagines, shall we say—Cattelan’s childhood and his decision to become an artist.

76 Art Is . . . (On Lorraine O’Grady’s Transcreations)

Last December, the world lost the fearless and trailblazing artist and writer Lorraine O’Grady. Working across forms, O’Grady challenged conventions, celebrated beauty, and altered the cultural landscape. Here, DK Nnuro considers her work through the lens of translation and transcreation.

82 Hans Ulrich Obrist’s Questionnaire: Hélène Cixous

For the second installment of 2025, we are honored to present the feminist critic, literary theorist, and playwright Hélène Cixous.

Rollin’ High and Mighty Traps: Richard Prince

Sydney Stutterheim traces the linkages and affinities between the work of Richard Prince and that of Bob Dylan. Using Prince’s Untitled (Dylan) as a starting point, she considers the artist’s enduring interest in questions of originality and authorship, as well as his sustained relationship with the worlds of American music and counterculture.

90 Architecture Section

A collection of features that take architects as their subject, including Alexander Calder, David Chipperfield, Berthold Lubetkin, Wutopia Lab, and more.

110

Julie Curtiss

On April 3, an exhibition of new paintings by Julie Curtiss opened at Gagosian, Paris. Ahead of the show’s debut, Curtiss met with the writer Lauren Elkin to discuss the work’s relationship to the Florida suburbs, the power of juxtaposition, and what it means to leave a painting open for the viewer.

116 The Art of Biography: The Acid Queen

Fiona Duncan interviews Susannah Cahalan, author of the newly released Acid Queen: The Psychedelic Life and Counterculture Rebellion of Rosemary Woodruff Leary

120 On Mike Leigh

Carlos Valladares writes on the British director’s unconventional methods and piercing character studies, including those in his latest film, Hard Truths (2024).

126

The Art of Bennett Miller

Andrew Winer writes on the philosophical implications of the artist and filmmaker Bennett Miller’s experiments with artificial intelligence.

132 A Foreign Language: Part

Two

The second installment of a short story by Catherine Lacey.

142 Rachel Whiteread: Casting History

From her Judenplatz Holocaust Memorial in Vienna (2000) to her casting of George Orwell’s World War II office at the BBC (2003), the sculptor Rachel Whiteread has deeply engaged with emotional and historical complexities. Here she speaks with the Quarterly ’s Alison McDonald.

146 Tutto

Deep in the wild world of Marchesa Luisa Casati, Walton Ford continues to reflect on the bon vivant subject of his recent Gagosian exhibition Tutto Depicting the exotic animals that she kept, Ford portrays her years in Venice shortly before World War I.

150 Fashion and Art, Part 22: Yoon Ahn

Yoon Ahn and her partner Verbal established their jewelry and design line Ambush in 2008. Since then they have collaborated with renowned musicians, artists, and other luminaries on projects for the brand. Here, the Quarterly ’s Derek C. Blasberg speaks with Ahn about her peripatetic childhood, pivotal moments in her design education, and the evolution of the Ambush universe.

156 Louise Bonnet and Elizabeth King

Swiss Institute, New York, is staging an exhibition that places the paintings of Louise Bonnet and the sculptures and videos of Elizabeth King in dialogue. Before the exhibition’s opening this May, Stefanie Hessler—the show’s curator and the Institute’s director— met with the two artists to discuss animacy, gesture, and the liminal space between life and lifelikeness.

160 Jenn Nkiru: THE GREAT NORTH

Jenn Nkiru’s capacious career spans from directing music videos for Beyoncé to participating in the Whitney Biennial. Here, Péjú Oshin interviews Nkiru about her latest film, the great north , an exploration of the Black history and architecture of Manchester, England.

166 Adriana Varejão: Don’t Forget, We Come from the Tropics

Through June 22, the Hispanic Society Museum & Library, New York, is presenting an exhibition of the work of Adriana Varejão. Here, Louis Vaccara details the conceptual and formal references and evolutions in these works.

172 Romuald Hazoumè and Harry G. David

A conversation between Harry G. David, collector of contemporary African art, and the artist Romuald Hazoumè in advance of his exhibition Les fleurs du mâle at Gagosian, Athens.

Previous spread, left to right: Image: courtesy Maurizio Cattelan

Casa RIA. Photo: © Adriàn Capelo

Drawing by Francesco Bonami

Above: Flats in Holford Square, Finsbury, London: the central spiral staircase of Bevin Court, 1994, designed by Skinner Bailey & Lubetkin in 1954. Photo: Aardvark/Alamy Stock Photo

186 Game Changer: Kay Bearman

Gillian Pistell celebrates the life and work of Kay Bearman.

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

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 (2023) and What Where , featuring models of Sala Beckett, Barcelona, by Flores & Prats (2019).

SUMMER 2025 CONTRIBUTORS

Gavin Morrison

Gavin Morrison is a Scottish writer and curator currently living in Dallas, Texas. He is presently writing a book on Donald Judd’s relationship with Iceland for Lars Müller Publishers, Zürich.

Karen Wong

Karen Wong is a cultural producer and educator developing platforms to serve creatives by providing new opportunities, marketplaces, and business models. As the current chief brand officer and former deputy director of the New Museum, New York, Wong cofounded the initiatives ideas city, new inc , and onx Studio.

DK Nnuro

DK Nnuro is a writer born in Ghana. He is currently curator of special projects at the Stanley Museum of Art at the University of Iowa and adjunct assistant professor in the English department there. His debut novel, What Napoleon Could Not Do (Riverhead, 2023), was one of Barack Obama’s 2023 Summer Reading List picks.

Andrew Winer

Andrew Winer is the author of the novels The Marriage Artist (2010) and The Color Midnight Made (2002). He writes and lectures on art, philosophy, and literature. A recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in fiction, he is presently completing a novel and a book on the contemporary relevance of Friedrich Nietzsche’s central philosophical idea, the affirmation of life.

Sydney Stutterheim

Sydney Stutterheim is an art historian and writer whose research focuses on postwar and contemporary art. She joined Gagosian in 2018. Photo: Graham Tolbert

Harry G. David

Harry G. David grew up in Nigeria and Greece and now lives between Nicosia, Lagos, and Athens. He has been collecting contemporary art for the past thirty years. For the past fifteen years, he and his wife Lana have focused their collecting on art and artists from Africa and its diaspora.

Álvaro Negro

Álvaro Negro’s painting feeds on both the Spanish and the Italian pictorial tradition, tending toward abstraction but making more or less explicit references to reality, and assuming the experiential as a foundation from which to reach the cognitive. Photo: Thomas Struth

Péjú Oshin

Péjú Oshin is a British-Nigerian curator, writer, and lecturer. As an associate director at Gagosian she curated the exhibition Rites of Passage (2023). She has previously worked as a curator at Tate, London, an associate lecturer at Central Saint Martins – University of the Arts, London, and elsewhere. She is the author of Between Words & Space (2021). Photo: Jake Green

Lauren Elkin

Lauren Elkin’s most recent books are Scaffolding: A Novel (2024) and Art Monsters: Unruly Bodies in Feminist Art (2023). Other books of hers include No. 91/92: Notes on a Parisian Commute (2021) and Flâneuse: Women Walk the City, which was a New York Times Notable Book of 2017 and a finalist for the PEN/DiamonsteinSpielvogel award for the art of the essay. She lives in London.

David Chipperfield

David Chipperfield is an architect whose work includes celebrated cultural, residential, educational, retail, workplace, and civic projects. Among the major completed works of his practice are the rebuilding of the Neues Museum, Berlin, an extension for the Kunsthaus Zurich, Turner Contemporary in Margate, England, the Amorepacific headquarters in Seoul, and the Bryant in New York. Rather than embracing fixed formal ideas, Chipperfield focuses on the quality of the process and discourse from which design emerges. He currently divides his time between projects in the practice’s five offices and the nonprofit research initiative Fundación RIA, which he established in the Spanish autonomous community of Galicia in 2017. Photo: Adrián Capelo

Jenn Nkiru

Jenn Nkiru is a London-born artist and director whose practice spans film, music, and contemporary art, exploring time, rhythm, and the poetics of Blackness. Her work has been exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Tate Modern, London; the ICA, London; and the Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane. It appeared in the 2019 Whitney Biennial and is held in MoMA’s archives. Last year she launched her imprint mothership alongside the international premiere of the great north , her feature documentary debut, continuing her inquiry into form, process, and the radical possibilities of the moving image. Photo: Rosaline Shahnavaz/ AUGUST

Julie Curtiss

Julie Curtiss was born in 1982 in Paris and lives and works in New York.

Associating humor with darkness and the mundane with the uncanny, Curtiss employs a visual language of vivid colors and forms that are at once seductive and grotesque, exploring the puzzle of identity and extending an invitation to reflect on the idea of an unfixed, ever-changing self. Photo: Dan MacMahon

Hans Ulrich Obrist

Hans Ulrich Obrist is artistic director of the 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 1991, he has curated more than 350 exhibitions. Photo: Tyler Mitchell

Michael Cary

Michael Cary organizes exhibitions for Gagosian, including nine Picasso exhibitions in collaboration with John Richardson and members of the Picasso family. He joined Gagosian in 2008 after six years working with the late Kynaston McShine, then chief curator at large at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Photo: Clive Smith

William Middleton

The Paris-based writer William Middleton is the author of Double Vision , a biography of the legendary art patrons and collectors Dominique and John de Menil, published in 2018 by Alfred A. Knopf. He has contributed to such publications as W, Vogue , Harper’s Bazaar, Architectural Digest , House & Garden , Departures , Town & Country, the New York Times , and T

Hélène Cixous

Hélène Cixous was born in 1937 in Algeria, then a French colony, into a multilingual Sephardic-Ashkenazi Algerian-German Jewish family. At the age of eighteen, she moved to metropolitan France to continue her studies. Primarily a writer of poetic fiction, having published nearly sixty full-length books of fiction, she is also a celebrated playwright and a prolific theorist and literary critic, author of “The Laugh of the Medusa” (1975) among many other essays. She has also worked closely on and with a range of visual artists. She has been a professor of literature and literary theory since the 1960s and was responsible for establishing the experimental University of Vincennes in 1968 and the first European doctoral program in women’s studies in 1974.

Photo: Sophie Bassouls

Francesco Bonami

Francesco Bonami has curated more than a hundred exhibitions, among them the Venice Biennale of 2003 and the Whitney Biennial of 2010. He writes for ARTnews and Vogue Italia . His most recent books include Bello, sembra un quadro. Controstoria dell’arte (2022) and The Spinster’s Poems: 101 Bonaku , which has a foreword by Richard Prince (2023).

Rachel Whiteread

Rachel Whiteread’s sculptures and drawings transform everyday objects and surfaces into ghostly replicas that are eerily familiar. Through her use of the casting process, her subject matter—ranging from beds, tables, and boxes to water towers and entire houses—is freed from practical use, suggesting a new permanence imbued with memory. Photo: Dan Kitwood/ Getty Images

Fiona Duncan

Fiona Duncan is a CanadianAmerican author and organizer and the founder of the social literary practice Hard to Read. Duncan’s debut novel, Exquisite Mariposa , won a 2020 Lambda Award. She is currently developing a narrative biography and critical study of the transdisciplinary American artist Pippa Garner.

Gillian Pistell

Gillian Pistell joined Gagosian in May 2017 as a researcher and writer. She received her doctorate in art history from the Graduate Center, CUNY, in February 2019. She previously worked as a research assistant in the Modern and Contemporary Art Department at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and has contributed to scholarly publications.

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

Susannah Cahalan

Susannah Cahalan is a journalist, public speaker, and New York Times best-selling author. Her first book, Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness (2012), has sold over a million copies and has been translated into over twenty languages. Her second book, The Great Pretender: The Undercover Mission That Changed Our Understanding of Madness , was shortlisted for the Royal Society’s 2020 Science Books Prize. She lives in New Jersey with her family.

Walton Ford

Walton Ford recasts, reverses, and rearranges the conventions of animal art. He is a devout researcher, responding to everything from Hollywood horror movies to Indian fables, medieval bestiaries, colonial hunting narratives, and zookeepers’ manuals. He grew up in the Hudson Valley, graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design, and currently lives and works in New York.

Romuald Hazoumè

Romuald Hazoumè’s art reflects on the legacies of colonialism and the realities of contemporary Africa. Born in 1962 in Porto-Novo, Benin, where he still lives and works, Hazoumè is from a Catholic family of Yoruba origin. He carries on the historical Benin tradition of the arè , an itinerant artist who transmitted the country’s culture to other realms. Drawing from Yoruba traditions and global histories, Hazoumè reflects on themes of survival, migration, and cultural identity, using symbolic reinterpretations and social commentary to explore the lasting effects of historical and economic change. Photo: Charles Placide Tossou

Joshua Chuang

Joshua Chuang is a director of photography at Gagosian. He was formerly Miriam & Ira D. Wallach Associate Director for Art, Prints, and Photographs and Robert B. Menschel Senior Curator of Photography at the New York Public Library.

Stefanie Hessler

Stefanie Hessler is the director of Swiss Institute, New York. Her work centers artists and ideas through new commissions, transdisciplinary collaborations, and experimental formats. At SI, Hessler cocurated Spora , which invited artists to transform the institution through “environmental institutional critique,” as well as solo shows with artists.

Photo: Lila Barth

Louis Vaccara

Louis Vaccara joined Gagosian in 2019, and is based in New York. He works on sales and exhibition development with several artists at the gallery, including Adriana Varejão, Nan Goldin, Oscar Murillo, Cady Noland, Sabine Moritz, Gerhard Richter, and Emily Kame Kngwarreye.

Catherine Lacey

Catherine Lacey is the author of The Möbius Book , forthcoming from Farrar, Straus and Giroux in June 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 Book Prize, and a Lambda Literary Award, and her work has been translated into a dozen languages.

Louise Bonnet

Through softly luminous portraits of bulging, distorted figures, Louise Bonnet probes the experience of what it means to inhabit a body. Her protagonists walk a line between beauty and ugliness, between absurdist, knockabout comedy and extreme psychological and physiological tension. Inhabiting sparse landscapes and boxed in by the edges of the canvas or the page, they act out dramas of profound discomfort that plumb the depths of the artist’s subconscious. Photo: Jeff McLane

Elizabeth King

Elizabeth King works in wood, porcelain, and bronze, and often animates her precisely movable sculptures on stop-motion film. Her work is in permanent collections of the Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, DC; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond; and Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, among others. She is the author of Attention’s Loop: A Sculptor’s Reverie on the Coexistence of Substance and Spirit (Abrams, 1999) and coauthor, with W. David Todd, of Miracles and Machines: A Sixteenth-Century Automaton and Its Legend (Getty Publications, 2023).

A documentary film about her work by Olympia Stone was released in 2018: Double Take: The Art of Elizabeth King Photo: Olympia Stone

IN SEASON

Gagosian Quarterly presents a selection of new releases coming this summer.

Asked and Answered Giuseppe Penone and Alain Elkann: 474 Answers

474 Answers brings together a series of conversations between Giuseppe Penone and the novelist and journalist Alain Elkann that took place in the artist’s studio in Turin, Italy, between August and October 2020. The book was first published in Italian by Bompiani in 2022 with the title 474 Risposte. Brought to life by ample illustrations drawn from both Penone’s personal and his studio archives, the artist’s answers offer extensive insights into his inquiring mind and the passions that have motivated him throughout his more than fifty-year career.

474 Answers (Gagosian, 2025)

Art at Home Living with Chamberlain

Newly released by Assouline, Living with Chamberlain takes readers around the world to see John Chamberlain’s work on location in the homes of numerous notables. Including text by Julie Belcove and a foreword by Rick Owens, the book also contains stories from people who live with the artist’s work, including Urs Fischer, Larry Gagosian, Rainer Judd, Solange Knowles, Helen Marden, Craig Robins, Robert Stilin, Vera Wang, and many more.

Edition

Sarah Crowner: Pastoral (Greens) Print

Working in a variety of media, Sarah Crowner abuts geometry and gesture, merges materiality with composition, and confronts the graphic with the handmade. Her sewn canvases incorporate the varied directionality and texture of hand painting, emphasizing active, tactile surfaces. Now, working at the celebrated print workshop Universal Limited Art Editions, Crowner has created Pastoral (Greens), an intaglio print in two shades of green. Here, curvilinear shapes of green interconnect around the tapered forms of the white paper support, creating a dynamic composition.

This page, clockwise from right: Tom Wesselmann: The Great American Nude (Gagosian/Rizzoli, 2025)

Sarah Crowner, Pastoral (Greens), 2025, twocolor intaglio on paper, 33 × 26 ⅛ inches (83.8 × 66.4 cm) © Sarah Crowner

Living with Chamberlain (Assouline, 2025)

A John Chamberlain sculpture in a private residence. Photo: © Jason Schmidt

Monograph Tom Wesselmann: The Great American Nude

Tom Wesselmann: The Great American Nude is the first monograph dedicated to the artist’s most famous body of work, Great American Nudes (1961–73). Written by Susan Davidson, Rachel Middleman, and Lauren Mahony, the book includes full-color reproductions of each of the hundred works in the series, as well as of studies, drawings, and comparative works.

Memoir

The Tell by Amy Griffin

Known for her pioneering work as the founder of G9 Ventures, Amy Griffin has written a vulnerable, challenging, and poignant memoir. The Tell grapples with the complexities of memory, the effects of abuse, the aspiration toward perfection, and what it means to heal and grow in the face of trauma. This harrowing and important story is told with great sensitivity and an eye toward justice.

This page, clockwise from right: Jean Prouvé in front of his house in Nancy, France, c. 1963. Photo: Centre Pompidou–MNAM/ CCI–Bibliothèque Kandinsky–Dist. RMN–Grand Palais

Crumb: A Cartoonist’s Life (Scribner, 2025)

Amoako Boafo: Proper Love (Walther König, 2024)

The Tell: A Memoir (Dial Press, 2025)

Architecture & Design

Jean Prouvé: From Furniture to Architecture

The latest publication in a series of scholarly monographs published by Galerie Patrick Seguin pays tribute to the work of the designer and architect Jean Prouvé through the lens of Laurence and Patrick Seguin’s private collection. The book covers relatively little-known prototypes, rare pieces, and archival drawings, and its rich trove of contemporary photography brings new light to Prouvé’s incredible oeuvre. In French and English.

Exhibition Catalogue Amoako Boafo: Proper Love

This book was published on the occasion of Amoako Boafo: Proper Love at the Belvedere, Vienna—the artist’s first museum exhibition in Europe. Boafo’s portraits of friends, acquaintances, public figures, and himself redefine contemporary figure painting, celebrating Black identity in light of the African diaspora and emancipatory movements. The catalogue reproduces over fifty paintings dating from 2016 through 2024; Sergey Harutoonian, Mahret Ifeoma Kupka, Stella Rollig, Taiye Selasi, and Vasilena Stoyanova contribute texts, and there is also a conversation between Boafo and Ekow Eshun.

Trail of Crumb Crumb: A Cartoonist’s Life

by Dan Nadel

The first biography of the countercultural comic book artist, Dan Nadel’s book draws from extensive research and first-person interviews to paint an unflinching portrait of the inimitable Robert Crumb.

Just in Time Lady Arpels Pont des Amoureux Watch

Debuting at Watches and Wonders, Geneva, Van Cleef & Arpels’s new watches pay homage to Paris, the city of the house’s birth. Marrying precious materials with mechanical expertise, the latest additions to the Maison’s Poetic Complications collection puts a romantic rendezvous in motion on one of the city’s famous bridges over the Seine.

Dior Decor Dior Maison: CD Entrelacé Collection

Cordelia de Castellane, the creative director of Dior Maison and Baby Dior, has released a limited-edition collection of new homeware inspired by the initials of the house’s founder. The interwoven motif, captured in bright hues, is utilized across a range of domestic items, including bowls, jewelry boxes, cushions, trays, and more.

On the Nose

Dualité, Crystal Edition Perfume by Brioni and Lalique

Brioni and Lalique have partnered to produce a limited-edition scent in a beautifully sculpted flacon. This crystalline objet d’art contains a luxurious modern perfume blend concocted by the master perfumer Michel Almairac. Combining amber warmth with fresh notes of green apple and powdery florals of violet and iris butter, the scent embodies the duality of earth and air.

Left: Photo: courtesy Van Cleef & Arpels

Below, left: Photo: © Eduard Sanchez-Ribot, courtesy Dior

Below, right: Photo: courtesy Brioni

Debut Re-View

The Virgin Suicides

by Sofia Coppola

This new book takes its name from Sofia Coppola’s debut feature film, The Virgin Suicides (1999). Edited by the director, the publication includes a collection of the photographs commissioned for the film from Corinne Day, here printed from the original negatives. The book captures the intimate and collaborative environment of the shoot and offers a unique insight into Coppola’s portrayal of the Lisbon sisters and their suburban world. Coppola and Jeffrey Eugenides, the author of the novel the film was made from, contribute texts.

For the Record Saint Laurent Turntable

Extending their long-term collaboration, Saint Laurent Rive Droite and Bang & Olufsen have restored and revamped the classic Beogram 4000 Series turntable. Re-created in an edition of ten, this 1970s collector’s item is now supplied with cutting-edge contemporary audio design. Each turntable lives in an elegant ziricote wood case with aluminum accents as part of this limited release.

The Eye Life Loro Piana Sunglasses

For the Spring/Summer 2025 season, Loro Piana introduces a new sunglasses collection that combines sophisticated style with high-performance technology. Crafted in Japan, each piece features antireflection mineral lenses with hydrophobic and oleophobic treatments. Models such as the André, the Icer, and the Roadster are designed with superior clarity and 100 percent UV protection. The Traveller sunglasses, celebrating Loro Piana’s centennial, come in a limited-edition run. The collection blends classic design with innovative details, offering a timeless aesthetic.

Right:

Photo: courtesy Saint Laurent

Below: Photo: courtesy Loro Piana

ONLINE WILLEM DE KOONING

On the occasion of the exhibition Willem de Kooning: Endless Painting , curated by Cecilia Alemani, we revisit a conversation between Albert Oehlen and John Corbett from 2013. The pair reflect on de Kooning’s late works in this excerpt. To read the full interview, visit gagosian.com/quarterly.

JOHN CORBETT How and when did you first find out about Willem de Kooning’s paintings?

ALBERT OEHLEN As soon as I started painting seriously I immediately became very interested. He quickly became my favorite painter, especially the wild paintings with the wide brush from the ’50s and ’60s.

JC How did you feel about de Kooning’s 1980s paintings when you first saw them, and has your appreciation for them changed since?

AO I remember in ’96 there was a big show of his paintings in Bonn [Willem de Kooning: The Late Paintings, The 1980s ], and it completely impressed me; however, it didn’t get much attention. When I heard the response was not overwhelmingly

positive, I thought that was impossible, because this work is so great. It was after that when I started thinking more about his work, forming an opinion.

JC It seems like the general consensus on those paintings has changed pretty dramatically since they were made. When they were made they were initially well received, and afterward there was some feeling that maybe this work represented a weak moment in his career or that maybe his late work would not be remembered as a great ending for him. But it seems that’s been reversed.

AO I hope so, but some people just don’t see it, and they think the late work is graphic, meaning not so much painting. That is wrong.

JC Would you characterize the works as reductive?

AO Yes, in a technical sense you can say that because he reduced the fat brushstrokes to thinner lines. But that ignores the important fact that the spaces in between the lines have meaning and that there is a lot of painterly stuff happening in those spaces. There are traces of the work that he kept, so a little bit of color from below seems to shine through the white, and that’s all still there and that’s what gives the painting a sense of volume. I don’t think it’s graphic— in fact, these are just as intense as any works that are covered with brushstrokes.

JC You’ve spoken about de Kooning’s influence upon your own

art-making process. Can you discuss specifically what interests you?

AO As students, when we were confronted with these wildly intense paintings of his, we were first overwhelmed by their energy and power. It sounds naive, but we were trying to do something that dealt with that aspect of painting. For me this came to an end almost right away—there was nothing interesting for me to pursue without making the whole process of working more complicated or bringing in other ideas. And then, when I read the biography, I saw how much time he spent developing each painting, which was really interesting for me.

JC Notoriously, he would spend a lot of time looking at each painting while he was working on it, and there are lots of films that feature him making a small gesture and then backing up to spend a long time just looking. Is that something you relate to?

AO I didn’t know that, but I work exactly the same way. I spend my working days mostly on the sofa, just looking. There’s also a story about when he was teaching at Black Mountain College and he had his students work on a single piece of paper for three weeks—now that’s real torture. But that is the essence of painting for me also, to get into that object, into a single painting, for a long time and just go deeper and deeper and torture yourself.

JC Is there a specific de Kooning work that is particularly meaningful to you?

AO Well, I have my favorites, and sometimes a favorite is a painting that makes you think the most, and the paintings that are making me think the most at the moment are the late ones.

1 Japanese artist known for her tactile ceramics

5 The biggest Grammy winner of all time who sang “Crazy in Love”

10 According to, two words

CROSSWORD

19 The Lord of the Rings star Blanchett

20 The Wizard of Oz man 21 Courage

24 Art collector and art philanthropist based in LA, first name

11 Historian and critic of art and architecture who published Building Culture in 2024, Julian 12 Life-size statue created by Bernini, and Daphne 14 TV biopic about one of the first supermodels, starring Angelina Jolie 16 2001 computer 17 Marked by complexity and richness of detail

25 Former partner

26 Top-of-the-line hotel

27 Chief architect of the John F. Kennedy Library in Massachusetts

28 Subject for an art historian when verifying a painting’s authenticity

29 The Help star Davis

30 red color

31 Connect

34 Compass direction, abbr.

35 “At Last” singer James

38 Famous subject for Andy Warhol, Marilyn

40 Same old, same old

41 Dadaist Jean

43 U.S.N. officer, abbr.

44 Concealed

45 Incredibly detailed feature in Jan van Eyck’s Arnolfini Portrait

48 White wine that originated in the Rhine region

49 Slow, in music

Down

1 Rubens title and first name, two words

2 Great Italian conductor who conducted the world opera premieres for Pagliacci and La Bohème , Arturo

3 “Move on !” Curtis Mayfield

4 Sci-fi TV series based on cloning, Black

5 Degas subject in Little Dancer of Fourteen Years

6 Pipe joint

7 Ming who played for the Houston Rockets

8 Edward Hopper’s hawks

9 Almighty, comedy that includes God as a character

13 Western movie

15 Celebrated tenor Andrea

18 Rapper Kim

19 French post-impressionist who painted A Modern Olympia

22 Vermont, abbr.

23 Statue in NYC created by Frédéric Bartholdi

27 Artist who evokes a luminescent New York in his painting Night Playground, two words

32 Streak in the sky

33 American visual artist working with video and film in sculptural installations and in virtual reality, Wolfson

36 Discrimination in aesthetic values

37 Little Rock’s state, abbr.

39 Location of the Galleria Borghese

42 TV doc

46 The Studio by Henri Matisse

47 Leave

This puzzle, written by Myles Mellor, brings together clues from the worlds of art, dance, music, poetry, film, and beyond. Solution

Picasso Tête -àtête

Previous spread:

Pablo Picasso, Femme au vase de houx (MarieThérèse), 1937, oil and charcoal on canvas, 28 ¾ × 23 5⁄8 inches (73 × 60 cm), private collection. Photo: Sandra Pointet

Opposite: Pablo Picasso, Femme au béret bleu assise dans un fauteuil gris, manches rouges (Marie-Thérèse), 1937, oil on canvas, 39 3⁄8 × 31 ½ inches (100 × 80 cm), private collection. Photo: Sandra Pointet

This page: Pablo Picasso, Portrait de Femme (Marie-Thérèse), 1936, pencil, watercolor, and pastel on paper, 13 3⁄8 × 10 inches (34 × 25.5 cm), private collection. Photo: Sandra Pointet

Following spread:

Installation view of the exhibition of work by Pablo Picasso at the Galerie

Petit, Paris. Photograph annotated by Margaret Scolari Barr and Alfred H. Barr Jr., 1932. Alfred H. Barr Jr. Papers, 12.a.8. The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York © G-P. F. Dauberville & Archives, Bernheim-Jeune. Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, New York

On April 18, the exhibition Picasso: Tête-à-tête opened at Gagosian, New York. Including works from 1896 to 1972, the full span of the artist’s career, the show is presented in partnership with Paloma Picasso, the artist’s daughter. Here, Michael Cary, one of the organizers of the exhibition, traces the historical precedents that informed the conversational nature of the curation. He also introduces a translation of a 1932 interview with Picasso by the publisher and critic E. Tériade, often quoted in English in part but not in full.

When Picasso was a young painting student in Madrid, he was alarmed by the pressure within the academy to settle on a style and join a “school” of painting. He wrote to a friend in 1897, “I don’t believe in following any particular school, for all it leads to is mannerism and affectation in the painters who do it.”1 It was a radical insight for the young artist, and marked the first inspired turn in a career that would produce the twistiest oeuvre of any painter in history.

The intuitive leap Picasso took was to adopt “no style” as his style. His natural talents and training gave him virtuosity in both mimicry and improvisation, so the young Picasso engaged in what scholars Yves-Alain Bois and Elizabeth Cowling have called a “metaphoric seeing-as”—creating wholly original compositions, but playing them in the key of Velázquez one day, El Greco the next, van Gogh the week after. 2 “What does it mean for a painter to paint in the manner of So-and-So or to actually imitate someone else?” Picasso is reported to have asked his friend Hélène Parmelin. “What’s wrong with that? On the contrary, it’s a good idea. You should constantly try to paint like someone else.

But the thing is, you can’t! You would like to. You try. But it turns out to be a botch. . . . And it’s at the very moment you make a botch of it that you’re yourself.”3 The essential element of Picasso’s lifelong practice, precisely what keeps his work both relevant and timeless, is his ability to stay fluid, in contradiction, always in restless anxiety and flirting with making a failure of it all.

As history has proved, the gambit was far from a failure. The success of this approach pushed Picasso never to rest on his laurels, never to stop mixing it up, constantly inventing new styles. “Basically I am probably a painter without style. . . . I shift about too much, I move too often,” Picasso told André Verdet in 1963. “You see me here, and yet I’ve already changed, I’m already elsewhere. I never stay in one place and that’s why I have no style.”4 This was evident in Picasso’s very first exhibition, a show of sixty-four paintings and an unknown number of drawings at Ambroise Vollard’s Paris gallery in 1901. In his review of that show, the critic Félicien Fagus wrote, “One can easily discern . . . numerous probable influences. . . . Each is fleeting, no sooner caught than dropped. . . .

Georges

“Someone asked me how I was going to organize this exhibition. I replied, ‘Badly.’ For an exhibition, like a painting, well or badly ‘organized,’ it all comes down to the same thing. What counts is a certain consistency in the ideas. And when this consistency exists, as with even the most incompatible couples, things always work out.”

The danger for him lies in this very impetuousness, which could so easily lead to facile virtuosity and easy success.”5

Impetuous, yes; but the staggering complexity of Picasso’s oeuvre wasn’t achieved with ease. The truth is, a Picasso exhibition can often be mistaken for a group show—it can appear to be the output of a dozen different artists, rather than of the single prolific polymath that he was. The vastness of his oeuvre underlines the work , the Herculean effort, that it took for one human being to create. Picasso saw this vastness as something not to be tamed but to be exploited and celebrated.

Picasso insisted on choosing the works and arranging the installation of his first retrospective himself. In 1932, the Galerie Georges Petit, on the rue de Sèze, Paris, was old-fashioned, stuffy, déclassé, and long past its heyday. According to Picasso’s biographer John Richardson, though, the artist was thrilled with the venue because the gallery’s “Beaux-Arts look made the shock of the new all the more shocking.”6 Alongside several new paintings created expressly for the show, he secured loans from friends and dealers and included many works taken out of storage that had

never been publicly exhibited. When he hung the show, he juxtaposed works of wildly different dates and styles so that they could “talk” to each other. “The mismatching was strategic: Picasso wanted his disparate oeuvre to be seen as an organic whole and not chopped up into arbitrary ‘periods’ by critics and academics, without his authorization,” Richardson writes. “He saw his work as an ongoing family, but members of the same family don’t always look identical.” 7 It was a strategy that particularly struck Alfred H. Barr Jr., the young director of New York’s Museum of Modern Art, who annotated his photographs of Picasso’s installation to document this phenomenon. “Picasso chose to present his career as one marked by dramatic and irrational changes and extraordinary diversity,” Cowling states, “and as moving not in progressive, linear fashion, but to and fro and round and round, like memory.” 8 This is how Picasso intended us to encounter his works—not separated by period or style but in conversation with each other. Richardson liked to say that with anything one could state about Picasso that was absolutely true, the opposite was equally true. The unpindownable nature of his output also extends to how he

This page: Pablo Picasso, Nu drapé, assis dans un fauteuil , 1923, oil on canvas, 51 ¼ × 38 ¼ inches (130 × 97 cm), private collection. Photo: Sandra Pointet

Opposite: Pablo Picasso, Femme assise au fauteuil rouge, c. 1918, oil on canvas, originally without stretcher, 52 5 8 × 39 3⁄8 inches (133.5 × 100 cm), private collection. Photo: Sandra Pointet

Following spread: Installation view of the exhibition of work by Pablo Picasso at the Galerie Georges Petit, Paris. Photograph annotated by Margaret Scolari Barr and Alfred H. Barr Jr., 1932. Alfred H. Barr Jr. Papers, 12.a.8. The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York © G-P. F. Dauberville & Archives, Bernheim-Jeune. Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, New York

spoke about his work. Much as he preferred the provisional, raw-plaster states of his sculptures to their bronze casts, seeing bronze as making them too formal, too set, too “museumy,” he disdained academic critics who set about “explaining” his art with stiff interpretations and concrete categories. A playful confounding of “explanation” is evident in his comments to his friend and publisher E. Tériade while he was in the process of hanging this 1932 retrospective, first published in L’Intransigeant and reproduced here in translation by Nicholas Huckle.

1. Pablo Picasso, quoted in Elizabeth Cowling, Picasso: Style and Meaning (London: Phaidon Press, 2002), 53.

2. Ibid., 30, referencing Yves-Alain Bois, Matisse and Picasso, exh. cat. (Paris: Flammarion, for the Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, 1987), 27. 3. Picasso, quoted in Hélène Parmelin, Picasso: The Artist and His Model, and Other Recent Works (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1965), 43.

4. Picasso, quoted in André Verdet, Picasso, exh. cat. (Geneva: Musée de L’Athenée, 1963), n.p.

5. Félicien Fagus, “L’Invasion espagnole: Picasso,” La Revue blanche , July 15, 1901, quoted here from Cowling, Style and Meaning , 17. 6. John Richardson with the collaboration of Marilyn McCully, A Life of Picasso, vol. 3, The Triumphant Years: 1917–1932 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007), 475.

7. Ibid., 477.

8. Cowling, Style and Meaning , 15.

In Conversation with Picasso: A Few Thoughts from the Painter and the Man

This Thursday will see the opening of an exhibition bringing together more than two hundred paintings, works of sculpture, and engravings by Picasso.

The importance of this painter in the pictorial movement of the past thirty years is well known, as are his audacious experiments in the field of forms.

Picasso has had an impact not only through his artistic work but also through his sparkling intelligence and inventive wit. We include here just a few of his statements, the expression not just of an artist but also of a man.

We were fortunate enough to be able to speak with him as he witnessed his paintings being hung, and we were able to catch a few of his brilliant thoughts as they fell from his lips.

—E. Tériade

I visited the retrospective at the Salon the other day. This is what I noticed. A good painting in the midst of bad paintings becomes a bad painting. And a bad painting among good paintings ends up being a good one.

Someone asked me how I was going to organize this exhibition. I replied, “Badly.” For an exhibition, like a painting, well or badly “organized,” it all comes down to the same thing. What counts is a certain consistency in the ideas. And when this consistency exists, as with even the most incompatible couples, things always work out.

How many times, when I was about to apply some blue, I realized I didn’t have any. So I took some red and put it down instead of the blue. The mind’s vanity.

Essentially, everything is tied to the self. It is a sun in the belly with a thousand rays. The rest is nothing. It is for that alone, for example, that [Henri] Matisse is Matisse. Because he carries this sun in his belly. And it is also because of this that from time to time something happens.

Painting is a way of keeping a diary.

One always makes paintings the way princes make their children: with shepherd girls. One never does a portrait of the Parthenon; one never paints a Louis XV fauteuil. One paints a shack in the Midi, a packet of tobacco, an old chair.

At bottom there is only love. Whatever it might be. They ought to put out painters’ eyes as they do goldfinches so that they can sing better.

One of the ugliest things in art is sincerity. It has always soiled the best works because it expresses obedience to everyone.

A friend of mine who is now writing a book about my sculptures begins it like this: “Picasso told me one day that a straight line is the shortest distance between two points.” Naturally I was quite astonished, and I asked him, “Are you sure that it was me who found that out?”

When one starts from a portrait and seeks, by successive eliminations, the pure form, the most reduced and essential volume, one inevitably ends up with the egg. Likewise, starting from the egg and following the opposite path and goal, one reaches the portrait. But art, I believe, escapes this overly simplistic journey from one extreme to the other. Above all, you have to be able to stop in time.

The whole interest of art is in the beginning. After the beginning, it is already the end.

I don’t paint following nature, but in front of nature, with her.

Nothing can be done without solitude. I have created a solitude for myself that no one suspects. It is very hard to be alone today because we have watches. Have you ever seen a saint with a watch? And yet I have looked for one everywhere, even among the supposed patron saints of clockmakers. So, how happy we are right now, engaged in conversation! We might be able to stay like this for years and still find things to say! Ten years from now we would be still here, happy to be here, still talking . . .

For a painter at an exhibition who, like me today, sees some of his canvases coming back to him from far away, they seem like prodigal children, returning home clothed in gold.

Whereupon Picasso took out his watch, saying, “Goodbye, see you soon, I’m expected at lunch.”

PAUL McCARTNEY DECEMBER 1963FEBRUARY 1964

Joshua Chuang unpacks the history behind a selection of Paul McCartney’s photographs that went on view at Gagosian, Beverly Hills, on April 25.

Brian Epstein wasn’t sure what to expect as he descended the dark, greasy steps of Liverpool’s Cavern Club in November 1961 to see a young band he’d read about in the pages of Mersey Beat , the city’s own chronicle of its burgeoning music scene. As the proprietor of a music shop near the city center, he’d noted unusual enthusiasm for a Tony Sheridan record issued in Germany and backed by a local group called The Beatles. After learning that they played regular gigs less than 200 yards away, Epstein arranged to attend one of their lunchtime performances. “They were not very tidy and not very clean. . . . They smoked as they played and they ate and talked and pretended to hit each other. They turned their backs on the audience and shouted at them and laughed at private jokes,” he recalled. “But they gave a captivating and honest show and they had very considerable magnetism. . . . I was fascinated by this, to me, new music with its pounding bass beat and its vast engulfing sound.”1

A few weeks later, spurred by a fortuitous mix of restlessness, naivete, and absolute conviction of The Beatles’ potential, Epstein proposed to the band that he manage them, to which they agreed. Although Epstein had no experience whatsoever in talent development, his training in the theater and his entrepreneurial ambition served the scruffy foursome well. To improve the band’s stage presence, he emphasized punctuality and tightly orchestrated, preplanned sets, insisting that their casual behavior and slapstick antics on stage limited their appeal. He commissioned a local wedding photographer to take the group’s first studio portrait, just in time for it to appear underneath a Mersey Beat headline that proclaimed The Beatles the top act of 1961. Epstein also encouraged the band to trade their black leather jackets and slim-fitting jeans, which had become a kind of uniform for them during their months-long residencies in Hamburg’s Reeperbahn district, for a more refined appearance of sweaters and eventually, with some resistance, matching tailored suits. A distinctive aspect of The Beatles’ preprofessional image that was preserved, however, was the mid-length, swept-

across-the-forehead hairstyle adopted from German art students who had befriended them in Hamburg. Epstein’s shrewd management of the band yielded undeniable momentum that built over the course of 1962. In February The Beatles were granted an audition with the BBC, which led to their national radio debut a few weeks later. That same month, Epstein traveled to London to meet EMI label-head George Martin, who, despite being underwhelmed by The Beatles’ demo, was eventually convinced to offer the band their first solo recording contract with his Parlophone imprint. After striking out with virtually every other major label, this was the band’s first big break. In early September, The Beatles (now joined by Ringo Starr, who had been recruited to replace Pete Best, the band’s original drummer) recorded “Love Me Do,” an original Paul McCartney/John Lennon composition that would become the band’s first single, peaking at number 17 on the UK charts. By the end of the year, The Beatles had more than tripled their previous year’s income.

With the final iteration of the Fab Four (a nickname coined in an early press release) now set, The Beatles’ continued ascent paved the way for not only greater creative exploration but also a rebranding of their visual identity—in large part through photography. As their second single, “Please Please Me,” climbed the UK charts, the band recorded its first LP, composed of newly written McCartney/Lennon originals, the bulk of them recorded in a single marathon session at London’s Abbey Road Studios in February 1963. Portraying the band for the album’s cover was a separate creative endeavor: after a few failed attempts (including a photoshoot at the London Zoo), Martin and the group settled on a picture that photographer Angus McBean improvised by lying flat on his back at EMI’s London headquarters and pointing his camera toward an upper-floor landing from which the foursome peered down, smiling. Despite being “done in an almighty rush, like the music,” the picture became instantly iconic, registering each member’s personality while collectively conveying

the playful, clean-cut professionalism that Epstein felt was so important to their success. 2

As the band’s popularity soared, so did demand for memorable pictures of them. Some derived from one-off magazine assignments, such as Fiona Adams’s portrait of The Beatles on a World War II bomb site near Euston Square, commissioned by the teenage-girl magazine Boyfriend and later used for the cover of Twist and Shout , the band’s first EP. “They came outside, and there was this great pit in the ground,” recalled Adams. “I had the idea of getting them to jump. They were wearing Cuban-heeled boots and there was lots of rubble around up there, so it probably wasn’t very safe, but they did it beautifully. Each of them jumped in a different style, as if they’d been practicing.”3 Others came from seasoned professionals such as Dezo Hoffmann and Robert Freeman, both of whom were captivated by the young lads from Liverpool, earned their and Epstein’s trust, and continued to portray them throughout their rise.

On the way to becoming the most photographed figures of their era—so ubiquitous was the presence of photographers in The Beatles’ lives that a giant faux “Beatax” camera was created for one of their sets—John, Paul, Ringo, and George began to cultivate their own interest in photography, each acquiring a 35mm camera at some point between 1963 and early 1964. “Now there was the opportunity to do all this stuff we’d been dreaming of, we could actually take pictures ourselves,” McCartney has said. “Everywhere I went I just took pictures.”4

As much as is already known about The Beatles’ breathtaking rise from regional act to universal superstardom, a unique perspective has emerged in the form of the photographs McCartney recorded with his Asahi Pentax more than six decades ago. Their recent rediscovery adds an indispensable layer to the visual narrative of that time. Free of guile, the pictures are a revelation—the ultimate insider’s account of one of the most buoyant and significant cultural movements of the past century, acutely observed by one of the story’s central figures.

Self-portrait in my room at the Asher family home, Wimpole Street, London, December 1963

In the summer of 1963, The Beatles moved their base of operations from Liverpool to London, initially sharing a three-bedroom flat in Mayfair. Paul McCartney found himself spending more time, however, at 57 Wimpole Street in Marylebone, where his girlfriend Jane Asher, an actress, lived with her parents and two siblings. Filled with interesting guests and domestic warmth, the distinguished six-story Georgian house became McCartney’s home away from home. Eventually Jane’s mother, Margaret, invited Paul to live with them, which he did until the end of 1966. McCartney took this “selfie” with his new Pentax soon after moving into the garret room at the back of the house.

In addition to teaching at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, Margaret Asher, an accomplished oboist, gave private lessons in a music room in their cellar; one of her former pupils was George Martin, who in 1962 had signed The Beatles to EMI’s Parlophone label. John Lennon would come by the Asher home often to work with McCartney; there they composed many of The Beatles’ hits, among them “I Want to Hold Your Hand.”

One day McCartney awoke in his attic room with a melody lodged in his head. “I fell out of bed and the piano was right there, just to the side. I thought I’d try to work out how it went. I thought it had to be some old standard I’d heard years earlier and had forgotten. . . . And to solidify it in my memory I blocked it out with some dummy words: ‘scrambled eggs, oh my baby how I love your legs. . . . ’” After more than a year of tinkering, McCartney recalls that the lyrics finally came to him on May 27, 1965, during a holiday drive with Asher to southern Portugal: “Yesterday / All my troubles seemed so far away . . . ”

Previous spread: Self-portrait in a mirror at the Hotel George V, Paris, January 1964 (detail)

John and George during a photo shoot with Dezo Hoffmann, Paris, January 1964

The Beatles’ time in Paris in early 1964 was a crucial prelude to their international rise. During their three-week residency at the Olympia, the group played to a different kind of audience from the ones they had grown accustomed to, one that skewed older, male, and reserved, rather than the throngs of teenage girls whose screams drowned out their performances. Their initial reviews in the French press were also lukewarm.

Yet the band was seduced by the charm of the city, exploring it between performances and absorbing its culture. Without being mobbed, they could walk in public and go on impromptu photoshoots, including this one staged by their trusted photographer Dezo Hoffmann, whose color picture from the session was eventually made into a poster. In contrast, McCartney’s outtake has a hushed intimacy recalling the cinematic language of French New Wave auteurs such as Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut, who shot films on the street with handheld cameras for a more immediate and naturalistic feel.

The Beatles’ fortune in Paris began to turn shortly after news broke on January 17 that “I Want to Hold Your Hand” had reached number 1 on the US Cash Box chart. By the time they arrived in America a few short weeks later, they were poised for the explosive success that for better or worse would help define them.

Previous spread:

Being chased by fans on West 58th Street, New York City, 12 February 1964

The morning after their first concert in the United States, a raucous affair at the Coliseum in Washington, DC, The Beatles boarded a train back to New York, where they were slated to perform that evening at Carnegie Hall as the first rock act ever to play at the esteemed venue. Their arrival at Penn Station was met with chaos as several thousand fans—many of whom had the day off due to a public holiday—engulfed the concourses searching for their idols. Anticipating this, railroad officials detached the band’s private car and diverted it to an isolated platform, but fans were waiting there also. The Fab Four were ultimately spirited into a taxi on Seventh Avenue, and along the way were transferred to a limousine that took them across the canyons of midtown Manhattan to the Plaza Hotel.

Depicting a handful of people excitedly sprinting after his vehicle in impromptu pursuit—one man appears to sport a waiter’s jacket—the photograph McCartney took through the back window of his car also records a particular moment in time when pop culture and fandom collided in unprecedented ways.

Arriving at the Deauville (me in the rearview mirror), Miami Beach, 13 February 1964

Especially after their appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show on February 9, 1964, The Beatles’ every move was closely tracked by fans, who rushed to various points along the band’s anticipated route. At the Miami International Airport, an estimated crowd of several thousand, alerted by local radio hosts, greeted the band and their entourage as they deplaned. As The Beatles’ convoy left the airport, fans followed in their own cars, some racing alongside to catch a glimpse of the Fab Four as they made their way along the Julia Tuttle Causeway to the beachfront Deauville Hotel.

The Deauville, built in 1957, was designed by Melvin Grossman in a subtropical adaptation of the International Style known as Miami Modern. The resort had previously hosted high-profile figures such as Frank Sinatra, Judy Garland, Sammy Davis Jr., and John F. Kennedy, but The Beatles’ stay and performance in the hotel’s Napoleon Ballroom catapulted it to even greater renown.

Shot through a windshield, McCartney’s photograph of the spectacle that awaited him and his bandmates as they arrived at the Deauville is perhaps his most formally and spatially complex. A horde of mostly teenage fans—their expressions a kaleidoscope of giddiness, adoration, disbelief, and ecstasy, rendered in sharp detail and bathed in late afternoon light—are improbably held in check by a handful of uniformed police officers. Hovering above the scene in the rearview mirror is the shadowy reflection of McCartney himself, coolly observing the unfolding drama with his camera eye.

1. Brian Epstein, A Cellarful of Noise (London: Souvenir Press, 1964), 47.

2. See George Martin with William Pearson, With a Little Help from My Friends: The Making of Sgt. Pepper (New York: Little Brown, 1994), 121.

3. Fiona Adams, quoted in “Fiona Adams, photographer who took a celebrated shot of the Beatles—obituary,” London Telegraph , July 24, 2020. Available online at https://www.telegraph.co.uk/ obituaries/2020/07/24/fiona-adams-photographer-took-celebratedshot-beatles-obituary/

4. Paul McCartney, quoted in Rosie Broadley, “Another Lens,” in McCartney, 1964: Eyes of the Storm (New York: Liveright, 2023), 313.

George relaxing poolside at the Pollaks’, Miami, 15 February 1964

On Valentine’s Day, The Beatles’ first full day in Miami, Life magazine had scheduled a photo shoot at the Deauville, where the group was slated to perform live on The Ed Sullivan Show for the second time. But the fans who swarmed the hotel forced a change in plans. Instead, a now iconic black-and-white shot of the four moptops bobbing in a frigid pool was staged several miles away at the gated North Bay home of Jerri Kruger Pollak, a former big-band singer; her husband, Paul, a hotel developer; and their four kids. Jerri liked the young lads so much that she gave them an open invitation to drop by again while they were in town.

The next morning they took Mrs. Pollak up on her generous offer and showed up, unannounced, with their entourage. Besides the Pollaks’ maid, who answered the door, the only person home at the time was fifteen-year-old Linda Pollak, who frantically called her mother to ask if she could invite The Beatles in, receiving both permission and advice: “Offer the boys a drink [and] call a few of your friends, but don’t let it get out of hand.” Lunch was ordered, Linda’s brothers returned from the beach, and friends came over for a few unforgettable hours of dancing, basketball, and relaxing by the pool. McCartney’s photographs of the impromptu house party exude the unscripted joy and downto-earth normalcy the foursome was able to experience during a rare moment away from the public eye during peak Beatlemania.

Celebrating the collector Laurent Asscher’s new art space in Venice, William Middleton underscores the richness of Asscher’s relationships with artists.

AMA VENEZIA

The artist Jordan Wolfson, in his car on the way from his Los Angeles studio to pick up some particularly healthy food for his dogs, has pulled over on the side of one of those Southern California highways. Wolfson has agreed to spend a moment on the phone discussing the Franco/Belgian collector Laurent Asscher and his new art space, AMA Venezia, which opened this spring in a historic redbrick building in Venice, Italy. (The inaugural exhibition began April 9 and runs through June 29.) “He’s not afraid of challenging works,” Wolfson says of Asscher. “He’s not afraid of challenging content, or of work that’s technically challenging. He’s a very brave collector—I think he’s the best collector in Europe right now.”

In just the past decade, Asscher has assembled an astounding collection of paintings and sculpture, some two hundred works by such masters as Jean-Michel Basquiat, Alexander Calder, David Hammons, Brice Marden, Pablo Picasso, Ed Ruscha, Richard Serra, and Cy Twombly as well as bold contemporary artists including Lauren Halsey, Elizabeth Peyton, Charles Ray, Jenny Saville, Rudolf Stingel, and Christopher Wool. “The art community, in general, is enormously enthusiastic about Laurent,” Wolfson continues. “And it’s not just because he’s buying art: he’s someone who really has a vision, who has taste, who’s got integrity. He’s not a trophy collector—this isn’t a speculative collection. He’s responding to works that move him. His collection is authentic, highly personal to him and his experience, and you can feel that. He’s very much the author of his collection.”

Asscher owns four of Wolfson’s pieces, including Female Figure (2014), displayed in the inaugural show in Venice. This mixed-media animatronic sculpture has to be one of the most startling works of art of recent decades: a figure with long blond hair, a stainless-steel rod piercing her torso, it stands in a sterile, brightly lit white room in front of a mirror. A horrific mask covering much of her face, she gyrates to bursts of music and spits out cryptic dialogue: “My mother’s dead. My father’s dead. I’m gay. I’d like to be a poet. This is my house!” Female Figure uses facial-recognition software to make eye contact with the viewer, forcing a confrontation with such issues as misogyny, objectification, consent, hypersexualization, and the “society of the spectacle.” To present the work in Venice, Asscher built a special soundproof room for it. “As an artist, you become used to work that often trades hands,” Wolfson points out. “On this occasion, I could not be happier—he’s definitely the right person to have this piece.”

A distinctive element of Asscher’s collecting is that he makes a serious effort to build personal relationships with artists. He visits studios around the world, invites artists to his home in Monte Carlo or his apartment in Venice, and travels with them. Asked about Asscher’s interest in getting to know artists, Wolfson feigns outrage. “He does?” Wolfson demands. “Who else does he talk to? I thought I was the only one!”

The Paris design dealer Patrick Seguin, who has worked with some of the leading collectors in the world, has been a firsthand witness to Asscher’s approach to art. Seguin met the collector in 2012, just as he was beginning to buy. “In just over ten years, his commitment has been quite incredible,” Seguin observes. “He has made solid choices, unconventional, and shown real courage. Laurent listens and he lets things settle. He learns quickly but doesn’t let himself be influenced—the final decision is his. You don’t often meet such enthusiastic,

passionate people. I’ve seen him have long conversations, real exchanges, with great artists like Jenny Saville, Christopher Wool, Brice Marden, Wade Guyton.”

Asscher’s collection contains several paintings by Saville and he has established a warm reciprocal relationship with her. “Laurent is one of the world’s most important collectors and the opening of his foundation in Venice is an important cultural moment internationally,” Saville explains. “His deep interest in art matches the friendships he’s developed with artists, their lives and concerns. Laurent is one of those precious collectors with a great eye combined with the energy and willingness to support the artistic visions of our time.”

Asscher also owns works by the Los Angeles–based Halsey, including friends feeding friends (2024), a large mixed-media piece on foil-insulated foam and wood, that will be in the first installation at AMA Venezia. “The foil work pays homage to community-based organizations and leaders who have worked tirelessly to foster tangible change for black and brown communities in south central Los Angeles, Compton, and Watts,” Halsey writes in an e-mail from her LA studio. “Their perseverance, resilience, and legacy deserve to be recognized, and I’m thrilled that audiences in Venice will have the opportunity to experience the unsung heroes of my neighborhood.” Halsey is another artist whom Asscher knows personally. “Laurent is a cool and mellow guy,” she continues. “I admire that he places value on developing long-term relationships with artists, which allows for a deeper, more nuanced understanding of one’s vision, holistically. It’s unique that he finds it important to get to know me both in and outside of my practice. On top of that, he’s also a great host! His dinner parties are the best!”

Larry Gagosian, who has made Asscher a member of the board of trustees of the Gagosian Gallery, is enthusiastic about the collector’s new

Previous spread: Installation view, Jeff Koons’s Hulk Elvis (Rock) (2004–13) in AMA Collection , AMA Venezia, April 9–June 29, 2025. Artwork © Jeff Koons. Photo: © Sebastiano Pellion di Persano

This page: Installation view, Brice Marden’s Free Painting 1 (2017) in AMA Collection , AMA Venezia, April 9–June 29, 2025. Artwork © 2025 Brice Marden/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: © De Pasquale + Maffini

Opposite: Jordan Wolfson, Female Figure, 2014, mixed media, 90 ½ × 72 × 29 inches (229.9 × 182.9 × 73.7 cm) © Jordan Wolfson. Photo: © Sebastiano Pellion di Persano

Following spread, left: Lauren Halsey, friends feeding friends , 2024, mixed media on foil-insulated foam and wood, 130 ¾ × 129 ¼ × 29 inches (332.1 × 328.3 × 73.7 cm) © Lauren Halsey. Photo: © De Pasquale + Maffini

Following spread, right: Installation view, Wade Guyton’s Four Fires (WG1082, 2006) (2021) in AMA Collection , AMA Venezia, April 9–June 29, 2025. Artwork © Wade Guyton. Photo: © Sebastiano Pellion di Persano

All photos: courtesy AMA Venezia

engagement with the city of Venice. “With the opening of the AMA Venezia, Laurent Asscher adds his own unique verse to centuries of patronage in one the world’s most relevant cities for art,” Gagosian states. “At a time when the role of collectors is evolving, Laurent has become a partner for artists, supporting their vision, fostering meaningful exchanges, investing in their careers, and dedicating his time and resources to promoting and sharing their work with us all.”

The object of all of this praise, Laurent Asscher, fifty-five years old, is sitting in a chic Japanese restaurant on the Right Bank. Soft Paris light streams down into the soaring space, all white walls and natural woods. Asscher is warm, charming, and quick with a laugh. There is an easygoing humility about him, qualities not always associated with important art collectors. In order to explain what he wants to do in Venice, he pulls out his phone to scroll through his installation photos. His enthusiasm is palpable and this mission is clearly personal for him. AMA Venezia is named after his three children, Andrea, Matteo, and Alessandro, while he notes that the word “ama ” also means “he loves” in Italian. The collector personally curated the first exhibition in his new space.

Asscher has worked in venture capital and private equity for three decades, primarily in high tech, and he sees connections between his professional life and his collecting. One link is the importance of specializing. “Even if I do now have a lot, I try not to collect too many artists,” he explains. “Instead, I like to concentrate and go deeper into each artist. For example, I have four Twombly paintings, from 1961, 1967, 2001, and 2008. This allows you to see the range of his work, which I think is very interesting.”

Asscher’s career and his collecting also share a focus on inventiveness. “The parallel that I see between technology and art is innovation,” Asscher says. “In business, you cannot survive if you are not innovative. If you look at all the companies today that are successful, like nvidia or Apple, it’s all about innovation. What do they do that the others don’t? And I think it’s the same with art. If you have an artist who is redoing what others did in the past, it’s not so good.” Asscher suggests that he is often encouraged to make a purchase because of that sense that an artist is breaking new ground. “What obsesses me the most, although it is very difficult to describe, is when you are seeing something that you have not seen anywhere else. For the opening exhibition in Venice, a good example is Jordan Wolfson’s Female Figure . It is not the art of painting; it is the art of robotics. But if you have a chance to come to Venice, you will see Female Figure . It’s amazing. You are obsessed with it. Are you obsessed with the technology or are you obsessed with the message it gives? I think it’s the message and the way the message is communicated. So it’s always about innovation and what the artist is doing that no one else has done.”

Asscher was born in France but moved with his family to Belgium when he was thirty-four years old. His artistic awareness began at home, with paintings owned by his parents. “They were important collectors but not addicted, like I am,” Asscher says with a laugh. “There was a Basquiat, a Sam Francis, a Joan Mitchell—those kinds of paintings. So that helped me learn about American artists. But they would buy one painting every four or five years. My grandfather also had some Pissarros, so I grew up around a good collection, with artists that I started to know and to love.”

In the summer of 2012, Asscher had a significant financial windfall and, remembering his parents’ collection, decided that he wanted to buy a work by Basquiat. “I knew nothing about how to do it but I knew someone who worked at Christie’s and she said, ‘Oh you should buy this Basquiat painting.’ I was the only bidder and I bought it. The next day I saw at Phillips that they were selling Irony of Negro Policeman [1981]. The estimate was low but it ended up going for more than double the estimate, far beyond any price I thought I would pay. That ended up being one of the best acquisitions of my collection because it is one of the most important Basquiats.”

Asscher’s third purchase, marking the official birth of a new collector, was a Twombly painting, and he set off to educate himself. “You can learn a lot about art on the Internet,” he says. “There’s a lot of documentation and I started to be obsessed. I started to go a lot to museums, which are, of course, the best place to see art. I went to classic institutions, MoMA and the Beaubourg, and also to private museums. The Menil Collection, where I went because of Twombly, is a very good example, and the Broad, in another style, and Glenstone. In Venice, I think what [François] Pinault does at La Dogana and Palazzo Grassi is very inspiring.”

Asscher has also informed himself through his personal exchanges with artists. “At one point, when you start collecting living artists, you have the possibility of visiting artists’ studios. And then, when you collect them in depth, you create a relationship with the artist. It may not always be a deep relationship but it is a relationship. And you can understand where they come from, where they’re going, why they do what they do, which is always super interesting. I think you’re never disappointed when you meet artists.”

Another advantage of Asscher’s relationships with artists is gaining a better sense of artistic intention. “Lauren Halsey’s studio in LA is huge,” he points out, “Maybe 5,000 square meters, or 50,000 square feet. It’s fascinating to see how she conceives of the work, how she builds it, how she takes bits from everywhere. Remember, she’s not a painter—it’s assembly. So you can begin to see how she creates her own world.”

Personal contact also gives the collector a better perspective on the artist. “I wouldn’t necessarily say that I have a relationship with Christopher Wool but we’ve met three or four times,” says Asscher, who owns a dozen paintings by Wool. “He has come to my house and I’m a big fan of his work. I think he’s the next great American abstract painter. The last living one was Brice Marden and the next one is Wool.” Asscher also takes the time to learn details about the works he acquires. “I have a color painting by Wool, Untitled [1993], that reads ‘ fuckem if they cant take a joke.’ The story is that Wool was at a Titian exhibition in Paris and he bumped into Martin Kippenberger, who said, ‘Why are you here? You understand nothing about color— you’re a black and white guy.’ Kippenberger challenged him to make a color painting. Wool made two and Kippenberger chose one. In exchange, Kippenberger gave him a painting, which I’ve heard that Wool still has in his living room. But Kippenberger kept the Wool painting all his life, and that’s the one that I have.”

When considering opening his own art space, Asscher knew that it would have to be in Venice. Real estate in Monte Carlo is far too expensive and he feels that there is no great need for more art venues in Paris. “I see Venice as an art hub, the capital of all foundations for private collection,” Asscher says. “When you think that you have the Guggenheim, Pinault, Prada, Patrizia Sandretto,

Berggruen. . . . In a few years you’ll have ten or twenty private foundations in Venice. So that attracts more of a public for art, and creates pressure on you to do high-quality things, which is good for you and good for the public.” Asscher also believes that the dreamy setting of Venice, with its centuries of great art and architecture, is uniquely suited to the role of art destination. “I think it’s magic,” he explains. “When you buy a place in Venice, it’s already like buying a piece of art. When you’re in Venice, there are no cars, so people have time. In Paris you go to the Bourse de Commerce between lunch and another meeting. In Venice there isn’t that pressure—you say, ‘Tomorrow I’ll do three or four foundations.’ People take their time and that makes a big difference.”

Asscher selected a onetime industrial building that dates from before 1500. Offering about 10,000 square feet, or 1,000 square meters, of exhibition space, it lies in a central location near the Scuola Grande della Misericordia in Cannaregio, just across the Grand Canal from the Fondazione Prada. Asscher worked closely with a Venetian architecture firm—Torsello Architettura, specialists in historical renovation—to completely restore the building and convert it into a singular art space, with polished dark floors, weathered walls of red brick, and ceilings with big rough beams in dark woods. “The building was long used as a soap factory and the idea with the architects was to change and remove only what was necessary. We want people to feel that this is a building that’s five hundred years old. It’s a new place in a very old building.”

The inaugural exhibition comprises twenty-one works, including paintings, works on paper, and sculptures. “The goal was to show living artists, which all are, except for Brice Marden, whom I had chosen before he passed away,” Asscher explains. “In every gallery I wanted to put only one or two works. You don’t have to show a lot to be very good—you just have to show the good ones.”

A massive sculpture by Jeff Koons, Hulk Elvis (Rock) (2004–13), depicts the green superhero in purple shorts, lifting a boulder and flexing. It stands in front of a monumental grouping of four bright panels by Guyton, Four Fires (2021). Just on the other side of a wall is an imposing piece by Hammons, Untitled (2009), in which two tall graphite-on-paper panels are stacked perilously on a pile of broken concrete boulders. Peyton’s The Age of Innocence (2007), a modest-sized painting of a couple about to kiss, hangs in an intimate space on a rough old wall, glowing above the dark floors. “The idea of this exhibition is going from super-handmade painting like [the work of] Florian Krewer, a young German artist who I think is very talented; Mohammed Sami, an artist I love who paints from his memories of Iraq; Avery Singer, a young female painter who is very innovative; and Elizabeth Peyton, a painter I love, and [hers is] one of the only figurative works that I own. You go from there to work where the hand of the artist barely touches the piece: Jeff Koons, Lauren Halsey, who assembles but makes only some light retouches, and Wade Guyton, who prints his works. So it goes from the gesture of painting to its opposite, like Jordan Wolfson, who is very conceptual. I don’t

think one is better than the other—they are simply two different ways.”

Although Asscher curated and installed this exhibition himself, he does not intend to do that with every show. “At the beginning, I wanted to have only works from my collection,” he explains. “But in the next stage it will be whatever is needed to have the best show. If I have to take loans, take a curator, I will do whatever is best for each exhibit. When you start to make a deep study on a single subject, or have paintings that are not in your collection, you need an outside curator. I think I’ll do something at some point with Christopher Wool, with Jenny Saville, with Twombly, and with young artists. I hope that this will become a space mostly for young artists, living artists, to show what they do.”

Wolfson was the only artist able to visit AMA Venezia before it opened. “It is very beautiful because it has a combination of very large spaces and more intimate spaces,” Wolfson points out. “It’s a very flexible space, so that you can show small paintings by someone like Elizabeth Peyton or larger paintings by Wade Guyton or sculptures by me or Jeff Koons. It’s very beautiful, but it’s not overdone—it’s just a very appropriate space.”

Wolfson, still sitting in his car on the side of the highway, underscores the personal relationship that he enjoys with Asscher. “I love Laurent. He’s like my pal. He’s actually a friend of mine, like I could go on vacation with him and not feel like I’m singing for my supper, if you understand what I mean. He’s hilarious. He’s got a good heart and a good eye and he’s motivated. I love this guy— he’s cool.”

Stuck The Unauthorized Autobiography of Maurizio Cattelan by Francesco Bonami

Coinciding with an exhibition at Gagosian, London, of new work by Maurizio Cattelan, a new English translation of Francesco Bonami’s 2011 “autobiography” of the artist is being published by Gagosian. Here, we share an excerpt that recounts—or reimagines, shall we say—Cattelan’s childhood and decision to become an artist.

Drawings throughout by Francesco Bonami

Left: Installation view, Maurizio Cattelan: Sunday, Gagosian, West 21st Street, New York, April 30–June 29, 2024 © Maurizio Cattelan. Photo: Maris Hutchinson

Are You Talking to Me?

This book is a myopic biopic of the life and art of Maurizio Cattelan, written by me, after listening to him for more than thirty years. Some events are semifictional, some are real, and some are pure imagination, based on what I have guessed Cattelan was thinking, feeling, or hiding. It is a book about an unlikely and unfinished friendship, about respect, lies, and truth. It is about communicating art, and the art of communication, about the skills of an artist that kills. This book is about an unforeseen chapter in

the history of art in which a banana ended up inside a fountain— that is, Marcel Duchamp’s urinal. You may choose to call him a prankster, a joker, a comedian, or a clown, but Cattelan has redefined the concept of being a “master.” Here is my story of his story. You can believe it or not—it doesn’t much matter, just as long as you enjoy it, that’s enough. If cultivating “doubt” is essential to life . . . well, Maurizio Cattelan harvests doubts like nobody else.

—Francesco Bonami

The Liar’s Calling

One day I came home from school, and climbing the stairs at Via dell’Ospedale in Padua I saw my mother waiting for me at the door. She never waited for me like that. Actually, I was often the one waiting for her on the landing, when she got back late from work. But this time she was standing there. Actually it was not my mom, but Signora Pierina Brillo who was waiting for Signor Maurizio Cattelan. Mom was inside. As soon as I came within reach she hauled me up and tried to whack me one, but I nimbly avoided the blow. “You broke the chair, you good-for-nothing!” she shouted. She didn’t usually smack me or yell at me, but this time she did. Also because there were five of us in the house—me, my two sisters, and my parents—and we had exactly five chairs, if one of them was broken, somebody would have to eat standing up or sitting on the couch. “But I didn’t break it,” I answered. “Don’t lie to me!” she yelled.

I really didn’t break the chair, but she didn’t believe me, and kept on asking me how it happened. I told her over and over that I hadn’t done anything, that somebody else must have broken the chair, maybe one of my sisters, who was heavier than me.

The more I denied it, and the more I tried to find someone else to blame, the more furious she became. “Breaking a chair is already bad enough, but continuing to lie to me and accuse other people, that’s just plain wretched!” I understood her viewpoint, but I didn’t know what to do about it, since I hadn’t done anything wrong. But the more I denied it the more Mom made it into a big deal. To try to make me confess, at a certain point she even started to cry, carrying

on about one of her brothers who had died, I can’t remember how, who had told so many lies that no one would give him a job anymore. She didn’t want me to turn out like him, so she begged me to confess to the evil deed. I stood my ground, and though it wasn’t easy—tears have never come easily to me—I was forced to start crying to make her believe me. For Mrs. Brillo, instead of proving my innocence, my tears were a sure sign of my guilt. “He doesn’t just tell lies, he even cries about it! Scoundrel!” she yelled with all the anger she could muster. I sobbed and took the fifth, since I had no evidence, no proof, no alibi, though I really hadn’t committed the crime. She wasn’t about to change her mind. At a certain point, seeing no way out of the situation, I just decided to take the blame and put an end to it. “Yes Mom, I broke the chair. I stood on it and the leg bent; I tried to straighten it out and it broke off in my hand.” Hearing that, Mom sat down limply on the shabby sofa and sighed, “So you’ve finally made up your mind to tell the truth . . . come over here.” She pulled me to her and gave me a kiss of forgiveness, which I didn’t deserve, since there was nothing to forgive. It goes without saying that I was the one who had to eat dinner standing up. Later, in bed, under the covers, breath fogging the cold air, I had a sort of vision, or I heard a voice that came out of the wall and said: “Maurizio, from this day forth you will be a lifelong liar. Truth is more dangerous than falsehood.” Ever since that day I have constructed most of my life around lies, climbing them as if they were ivy, covering them up to hide them from the world that was watching me.

On the Road to Vernasca

In Padua the fog smells fishy. When it comes down and you can’t see anything in the streets, I have always smelled the stench of fish, which doesn’t happen when it is sunny. My sisters said I was dumb, that fog has no smell, and Padua is not on the sea, so the stink I was talking about was all in my mind. Maybe there is a bad smell in my head. I almost never open the windows of my cranium because I am afraid that the few ideas I’ve got up there will fly away like parakeets that find the cage door open. Anyway, when I woke up that day in my rented flat on Via Foscolo, outside the window the fog was thick and there was the usual fishy odor. Not the smell of the sea, mind you, but the smell of fish. I had left my last job, determined to never work again in my life. Or, more precisely, to never work for anyone except myself. Down in the street, wreathed in fog, like a horse awaiting its master, was my Motobi 125 Sport. I thought I heard it whinny. I’ve always been obsessed with horses, even though I have never been on one. The 125 Sport neighed because of the cold, or maybe to tell me to get up, go out, go somewhere, to give its poor carburetor a chance to breathe. I dipped a big slice of rustic bread into a cup of caffè latte, and when I pulled it out, dripping, I was already seated on the scooter, motor running, and ready to go, wearing an orange windbreaker. I had no idea where I was going. The only thing I had decided was to go west, to get as far from the sea as possible, away from the stench of fish that had plagued me my whole life. The cod our mother made us eat with vegetable oil every damned blessed Friday.

I drove into the dense mist of the Po Valley plains—damp but

finally aromatic. I crossed the border of Emilia Romagna and stopped for a mortadella sandwich. Back on the scooter, the fog was lifting and the flat landscape was becoming visible. The road was empty, but as soon as I passed the sign for Vernasca the motor of the 125 let out a dreadful moan and stopped. The scooter stuttered. I put it in neutral and pushed it, running, for a few dozen meters. Then I quit. I tried to start it, but nothing doing. My horse was done for. I too collapsed by the road, with no idea how to fix the situation.

The sun started to warm things up a bit. Every so often, a truck or a car went by. I thought about the art exhibition I had seen in Padua. I knew nothing, but what came to mind in just that moment, with almost no lire in my pocket and a dead scooter, were the works of an artist called Pistoletto. Mirrors with figures and objects. I remember seeing myself reflected in one panel, an unwitting and temporary character in an artwork, and it made an impression on me. It was hard to recall if the sensation was one of pleasure or curiosity. Anyway, lying there with nothing to do, nothing to hope for, nothing to look at—that was the sensation that made me decide that maybe art could become a job, the job that would give me the chance to work only for myself.

The only art I knew about was what I had found in an art history book by Argan, which I had bought secondhand after seeing the mirror exhibition. No one ever talked about art at home. The only music we listened to was on the radio, which played from morning to night, even when the house was empty. My mother said it would discourage burglars. Though no burglars would ever have targeted

our building. If anything, they lived there. Had they shown up, the only thing of value they might have stolen was precisely that radio. So art was not part of my vocabulary. And yet now, sitting by the road, something inside me had stimulated my appetite for it. I closed my eyes and thought about what it would be like to feel like an artist. I thought maybe musicians understand they are musicians because inside them they can hear music playing, like the radio in our house. But an artist? What can a person who has to make things hear inside? To be an artist, I thought, maybe you have to be able to see things inside you that don’t exist elsewhere. But that didn’t work, because the mirrors I had seen, with my image reflected in them, had certainly not been invented by that chap there. So what had that guy done, anyway? How had he become an artist? I just couldn’t understand it. But the less I understood it, the more I wanted to be an artist. Did people become artists just like that, in one stroke, without even knowing it? Your scooter breaks down and you realize you have to be an artist.

I wondered how the mirror guy had figured out that he was an artist. If I had had his phone number I would have called him from the first payphone and asked: “Sorry, but could you tell me exactly when you decided to be an artist, or to make art?” Because actually, I was also wondering something else: Do you become an artist, or are you simply an artist? The becoming option, that one chooses to be an artist, was better for my purposes. Because I definitely

didn’t feel like an artist. The only artistic thing I had ever done was to use a marker to put mustaches on little statues of St. Anthony at the church where I was an altar boy on Sundays. When the pastor found out, he sent me home and didn’t allow me to be an altar boy anymore. That was the first time in my life that I got fired. At home I got the silent treatment that evening at dinner. I think that deep inside, my parents, Pierina and Paolo, sort of hoped I would become a priest, go to the seminary, and get rid of all their worries. My mother hoped I had a vocation. My expulsion from the parish sent all their dreams up in smoke. Well, maybe being an artist is a bit like becoming a priest or a monk. You have to have a vocation. So I was in trouble. Because I didn’t feel any calling, there on the ground on the road to Vernasca. Anything but St. Paul, I’m St. Peabrain, I said to myself. Even so, the image kept returning to my mind of my face, peering out from behind the shoulders of the two black-and-white figures on the mirror. I had been a work of art, but I couldn’t be an artist.

I was sitting there pondering these things when I heard a female voice with a Romagnolo accent: “Are you OK? Did you hurt yourself?” From the window of a Fiat 500 a young woman was worried about me, she thought I might have had an accident. Her name was Fabrizia. She offered to give me a lift, and since I didn’t really know where I was going she took me with her to Forlì.

The Devil’s Building

Fabrizia was sexy as hell at the wheel of her 500. She asked me what I did before she asked my name. I thought that was weird enough— someone who cares more about what you do than who you are. “I’m an artist,” I answered. And she turned to look at me, I can’t remember if it was with amazement or suspicion. I had decided to be an artist, there, beside the road, thinking about that guy’s mirrors. Fabrizia was my first chance to see if I could state my new profession. It just popped out of my mouth, “I’m an artist,” and I didn’t even know what it meant.

Things got problematic when after the amazement or suspicion, Fabrizia asked me what kind of art I made. Paintings? Sculpture? She had caught me off guard. “I make useless objects,” I replied. She didn’t get it and asked me to give her an example. I said I didn’t like to tell people about my ideas, that I was afraid they’d steal them and make the artwork in my place. Fabrizia called me an idiot, more than once, and said she couldn’t care less about my ideas and my art. She said she had other things on her mind. I figured she was talking about sex, but I was so shy when it came to such things

that I made out I didn’t understand. In the end, Fabrizia kept on questioning me, so I had to come up with something. I told her the last thing I’d made was an old hat I had transformed into a pot by attaching the handle of a real pot. Fabrizia was really enthusiastic about this sculpture of mine, she said it was really cool, that I would have lots of success, and that one day I would have to show her that pot-hat. I don’t know if that was the moment, maybe it wasn’t, but it definitely came shortly after: I thought I would like to invent things that are usually useful for something, but then wind up serving another purpose. Not even I really understood what I was thinking, but it seemed like a good first step in my career as an artist. In fact, then and there, I decided to hire myself as an artist. It would be my new job. Then I asked Fabrizia where we were headed. Forlì, she said. She lived there. I’d never been there. Fabrizia lived in a place known as the Devil’s Building. I had wound up there, already in hell, without having done anything wrong.

Forlì is Not New York

I could say that Forlì put me under a spell. I had just decided to be an artist and there I was, having to prove it. In Forlì. Proving you are an artist in Forlì is not as hard as doing it in New York, but it isn’t all that simple either. In the Italian provinces, “artist” is a synonym for “dunce.” And in fact everyone looked at me as if I were stupid. The person who looked at me the most like a dunce was a photographer who did portraits and weddings. I would go to his shop every day, without fail, to get him to photograph what I thought might be art but actually was not, never has been, and never will be, though today some people would like to believe that what I did back then had to be, must be, should be art.

The trouble is, to make art, it is not enough to be an artist. I didn’t know that when I was in Forlì. I rode around on my bicycle all day, without imagining that I would make art for my whole life. It is no coincidence that my first sculptures were assembled bicycle frames. I thought they were just great. Even today I think they are great. But they seemed even better when, one day, I entered a wellknown gallery in New York and found a sculpture by a famous artist made just like my bicycles. I felt both honored and sad. Really sad to have been so close to art and not taken advantage of it—in Forlì, not in New York. But I had already learned that before making art you have to find it, maybe steal it, never copy it. Picasso

was right. Only the competent copy. Geniuses and failures steal. I added the failures because it’ll come in handy, but also because I think it’s true. The failed artist is closer to the genius than the good artist is. The good artist understands everything and tries to do the best thing that comes into his or her head. The genius and the failure understand nothing, absolutely nothing. They just do it. Still, not knowing I was a genius, I did it. I did, did, did.

But one day I got tired of doing. I was tired of the Devil’s Building, tired of Forlì, its streets. I got tired of the wedding photographer. I felt the temptation to be good. I decided on the day and the time. As I had already done before on my 125 Sport, and before that on my Califfo moped, I decided to set off for Barcelona. No matter what the weather, I would leave. But this time I was a pauper. No more 125, no more Califfo. Just my bicycle, the only one I hadn’t turned into a sculpture.

Seven in the morning on the appointed day. A hurricane outside. I ate my usual breakfast with the usual slice of bread, the usual cup of caffè latte. I looked at the yellow Formica kitchen table. My girlfriend had damaged it with a hot iron. I had fixed it by taking out the hole and joining the two halves. It was really small now. It was depressing. Everything was depressing. I made myself sad. The only thing that wasn’t depressing was my bike, waiting for me

Installation view, Charlie (2003) in Biennale di Venezia, 2003 © Maurizio Cattelan. Photo: Zeno Zotti, courtesy Maurizio Cattelan Archive

Installation view, Lessico familiar (1989) in Not Afraid of Love, Monnaie de Paris, 2016 © Maurizio Cattelan.

Photo: Zeno Zotti, courtesy Maurizio Cattelan Archive

outside, like a faithful dog. Even if I had found it as a stray, abandoned on a street corner.

I put on my hooded rain cape and went outside. The bike was looking at me from the other side of the street, chained to a lamppost. I looked back. The rain was pouring down. It must have been a Tuesday. It must have been eight in the morning.

At noon I was still out in the rain, on the Adriatic state highway, pedaling. Every time a truck passed it drenched me with water and made me swerve. But I forged on. At 1:30 p.m . I stopped for a bite to eat. The rain kept on. I kept on pedaling. I arrived someplace. The rain was over. The air was squeaky clean. The sea was choppy. The sun had come out. I remember that just like the time I was sitting by the road with my broken-down scooter, I thought again about the artist with the mirrors. Then I thought about a horrid fiberglass cactus that was supposed to be a fountain, called

Adelina’s Anxiety, I had shown in my first exhibition, in a bar in Bologna. I don’t remember who Adelina was, but I remember the anxiety, which was my own. For the first time in my life as an artist, I felt a sense of shame. I would later feel ashamed, many times, looking at one of my works that had ended up in a museum or maybe the home of some collector.

Bad ideas have a more enticing voice than good ones. It is easier to listen to them. But when you go to bed with them you can never break free. I imagined one of those mirrors, and inside it, together with the figures seen from behind, there I was, in black and white, bare chested, looking back at myself with scorn. It started to get dark. The steam from my soaked clothing entered my nostrils. I sneezed violently. After that I spent a week in bed, with a high fever. When I next saw the sun, I was in Milan.

Intelligent Design

Nobody. I knew nobody in Milan at the end of the 1980s. I had “found” a bicycle as usual and I rode around the city like a poor jerk. Art, I thought, is bigger than I am. Being an artist, I reasoned, was a job I took without a contract, and now I didn’t know how to resign from it. At the time, the hottest thing in Milan was “design.”

My cactus-fountain in Bologna was really design. Or at least the Bolognese critics who had seen it thought so.

I remember seeing my image reflected in the window of a design store in Milan. The window did something similar to the mirrors by that artist, whose first and last name I now knew: Michelangelo Pistoletto. They told me that I too could be part of this world of created and creative things and knickknacks. I looked at myself in the glass and it seemed like I was inside the store, in the midst of all those objects, furniture, sofas, tables, lamps, chairs. Those objects looked simple enough to think up and make. Then I saw the light. I had become an artist, and there was no need to resign from my job. I could just transfer to a new department. I remain an artist, but I become a designer. Which for me was more or less the same thing.

The problem wasn’t art, the problem was ideas, and it seemed easier to get an idea for a seat or a table than for a sculpture or a painting. I had always been around tables and chairs. I knew how tables talked and how chairs kept quiet. It was much harder to listen to a painting. Very hard indeed. In the end, when I had removed the hole made by the hot iron on the Formica table, I had done a design operation. Though the most designer-type thing I had seen was precisely the form of the iron that had made the hole. So my first creation as a designer was a series of placemats with the form of an imprint from an iron. Six burned imprints on which to set dishes. An American-style table service. I gave it a title: Sergio. What did that have to do with anything? Well, my girlfriend had cheated on me with a guy called Sergio. When she forgot the iron on the table in our kitchen, I think it was because she was dreaming about him.

I produced Sergio myself. I bought plastic and an iron, and I left the hot iron on the plastic until it burned, and the brand remained. I repeated the operation six times.

I returned to the store that had given me the idea. I went in and found the owner. He was affable enough, a little strange, but willing to listen. He ended up listening to me for the rest of his life, because from that day on, that gentleman became my manager, agent, and friend—the ideal spectator with whom I would test every artwork, every title, every dumbass idea that came into my head. As luck would have it, he too was named Sergio. He liked the idea, but thought the production was terrible, so he proposed doing a prototype. “Where do you live?” he asked me. “No place,” I replied. “If you like, when the store is closed you can sleep in here.” He showed me a storeroom with a window, full of sofas and beds. I chose the most comfortable of the lot. I lived in that store for one year. I kept on designing objects. Some of them, to my amazement, even sold. Others just sat there. I had become the company’s designer. Alongside the more conventional and commercial things, something more creative was needed. Milan was all creativity in those years, and if you didn’t give the impression

of wanting to make something fun, light, humorous, brilliant, no one paid any attention to you.

Then at a certain point people stopped buying things in our store, and Sergio had to close. That was a big relief, because I had understood that I was no designer, or at least if I were, I was finding it boring. I had gone back to flirting with art, and things seemed to be coming out better than before. Society was changing around me. The magnificent 1980s were over. I was becoming more middle class. Middle-class girlfriends, middle-class friend-friends, middle-class needs, like a house to live in. Mamma mia, I thought at a certain point: if I keep it up, I’ll end up tying the knot. If I get married, that’s the end of everything.

I didn’t marry, but I did make my first real work of art. It was about love, but at the same time it told love to go fuck itself. That bourgeois love, made of hypocrisy and little rules to be broken whenever necessary. Like holding hands—the signal in code to tell the others, the loners, the losers, the widows and widowers: “Look how much we’re in love . . . the two of us.” This physical, public, artificial union, with the illusion and the hope that thoughts would also go hand in hand, along with desires. I wasn’t cut out for that kind of love. Girls left me or I left them because I didn’t want to hold hands. I needed my hands to carry my bicycle, my true companion from which I could not be separated. Without the bike I felt really alone, truly disarmed. The bicycle was the best escape route from a relationship, an argument, a discussion. As soon as things went sour, I was already on the bike and pedaling for all I was worth, never looking back, deaf to insults, shouts, and sobs. Girls hated the fact that I showed up on dates with my bike. They always asked me to park it someplace, and I would invent all kinds of excuses to avoid the separation. Once, one of my girlfriends managed to chain the bicycle to a pole and steal the key, which she returned to me only the next morning. In short, the bike was my way of defying familiar, intimate, bourgeois conventions.

This is why the first work of art I made was called Lessico familiare (Family Syntax). That was in 1989. The Berlin Wall had been knocked down the previous evening. I stripped, and a friend of mine took a photograph of me holding my hands in front of my chest, imitating the form of a heart. Then one day I went to one of my girlfriends’ parents’ homes and saw an empty silver frame on a cabinet—one of those things people get as a wedding present. I stuck it in my bag and took it home. When I got back I inserted the black-and-white photo of me with my hands making a heart.

That was my first work of art. It was so simple. So immediate. So banal. It was 100% me—as I could never be again. The wall that divided my identity in two had been knocked down. On one side, the free loser, on the other, the artist, who would be chained to his ambitions from that moment on. Two Cattelans became one inside that silver frame. The silver frame was art, or the conventions of art, and I had put myself in there. I would always be trapped inside that frame. Two souls had become one. But I have always missed that twin who lived inside me, that second, wiser Cattelan who was hidden in my gut. As an artist, I would always talk to him. That Mini-Me, which would later also become one of my sculptures.

ART IS ...

Last December, the world lost the fearless and trailblazing artist and writer Lorraine O’Grady. Working across forms, she challenged conventions, celebrated beauty, and altered the cultural landscape. Here, DK Nnuro considers her work through the lens of translation and transcreation.

John Singer Sargent, we know, is widely considered the foremost portraitist of late-nineteenthcentury America, the period dubbed the Gilded Age. And according to Boston’s Apollo: Thomas McKeller and John Singer Sargent , a 2020 exhibition at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston, this celebrated artist was also responsible for erasing the relevance of a certain Black man to the work of his later years. Here for the first time was an exhibition devoted to that Black man, Thomas Eugene McKeller, as Sargent captured him in nine charcoal drawings and a lithograph, all made between 1916 and 1921. In each, a mid-twenties McKeller, roughly thirty-five years younger than Sargent and his secret paramour, luxuriates homoerotically in muscular nude (hence the Apollo of the exhibition’s title). For his popular murals in the rotunda at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and subsequent major works, Sargent would also appropriate McKeller’s body, transforming it into the figures of classical gods and goddesses, both male and female but always white, keeping McKeller himself in the shadows. As told by Boston’s Apollo , this erasure was informed by Sargent’s casual racism and internalized homophobia.

A month before the show, the Gardner launched an installation on its building’s facade: The Strange Taxi, Stretched , an enlargement of an autobiographical photomontage from 1991 by

the groundbreaking conceptual artist Lorraine O’Grady. The work features four elegantly dressed Black women—O’Grady’s mother and three maternal and paternal aunts—seemingly rising into the sky from a New England mansion equipped with wheels. In the early twentieth century these women emigrated from Jamaica to Boston, where they worked as maids in homes like this one. In the large-scale 2020 version of The Strange Taxi , the sky is stretched to suggest the limitless possibilities of the women’s postdomestic existence. But all is not redeemed: as they ascend, the wheeled mansion trundles along another Black woman’s back. In this commentary on Black female subjectivity from one of its leading philosophers, both white prosperity and Black prosperity happen on the backs of Black women.

These simultaneous Black-themed exhibitions at the Gardner occasioned an essay by O’Grady in the catalogue for the McKeller/Sargent show. At first blush, the title of her text, “Notes on Living a Translated Life,” suggests a piece grounded in her résumé as a translator: a late-’60s tenure at a Chicago-based translation firm, then her own late’80s founding of another that counted Citibank as a client. Perhaps most impressive is their precedent, the publication of the Chilean writer José Donoso’s novel Este domingo (1966) in O’Grady’s English translation as This Sunday (Knopf, 1967). O’Grady and Donoso, student and instructor respectively, had cultivated a friendship and working relationship after meeting at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in 1965. O’Grady would complete her translation of the novel within a year. In a letter to Donoso dated December 29, 1966, Knopf editor Angus Cameron outlined his impressions of the manuscript: “let me say that your translator did a very good job. . . . The novel has illuminated that mysterious business of the living of the simultaneous lives of the generation in one family.”1

It turns out that O’Grady’s association with “that mysterious business of the living of simultaneous lives” would hold fifty-four years later: her 2020 catalogue essay concerns the simultaneous lives of Thomas McKeller and Edwin O’Grady, O’Grady’s father, both newly arrived in early-twentiethcentury Boston. The “Translated” of the title refers,

as O’Grady put it, to “a young Black gay man translating himself from North Carolina to Boston, and a guy who translated himself from Kingston to Boston.”2 This focus on relocation suggests a definition of “translated” in strict mathematical terms: geometry informs us that a figure becomes “translated” when all of its points are moved in the same distance and direction without change to its size, shape, or orientation. We quickly learn, though, that O’Grady is more interested in a translation that involves change, especially the changes to McKeller’s physique after he moves to Boston. “Translated,” then, evolves into “transformation,” an expansion of the word seemingly better aligned with O’Grady’s background as a translator. As the literary critic George Steiner writes in his canonical After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation (1975), “no language . . . imports without risk of being transformed.” 3

Indeed, more significant than Sargent’s recreations of McKeller in Boston, O’Grady insists, was McKeller’s self-orchestrated transformation of his own body. McKeller was in his midteens when he moved to Boston, during the Great Migration of the early 1900s. By the time he met Sargent, in the spring of 1916, he was possessed of “a physique which [the artist] perceived would be of artistic value,” in the words of Thomas Fox, the architect who collaborated with Sargent on the

Photo: courtesy Lorraine O’Grady Trust and Mariane Ibrahim (Chicago, Paris, Mexico City)

1917–21,

Above: Lorraine O’Grady, The Strange Taxi: From Africa to Jamaica to Boston in 200 Years , 1991/2019 © 2025 Lorraine O’Grady/ Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: courtesy Lorraine O’Grady Trust and Mariane Ibrahim (Chicago, Paris, Mexico City)

Opposite:

Lorraine O’Grady, Crowd Watches Mlle Bourgeoise Noire Whipping Herself, 1980–83/2009 © 2025 Lorraine O’Grady/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: courtesy Lorraine O’Grady Trust and Mariane Ibrahim (Chicago, Paris, Mexico City)

Left: John Singer Sargent, Thomas McKeller,

museum murals. 4 It is this physique that O’Grady studies closely in Sargent’s drawings of McKeller, describing it as “not accidental.”5 “It must have taken relentless work,” she adds, “to make a delicate frame that strong.” (McKeller’s World War I draft card describes him as “short.”) 6 In this way McKeller’s transformed physicality recalls some modern gay men’s obsession with achieving perfect bodies, engaging in, as Mark Harris writes, “a calculatedly self-aware physical performance of straight masculinity, with a flourish or two of ironic detailing . . . [that] subverted straight culture by reinventing it as something gay.”7 This is translation that transforms creatively. Unencumbered, it pushes its source material into new conceptual territories.

The academic field of translation studies features a mode it calls “transcreation.” Emerging in the 1950s, the concept is posited to have been developed by the Brazilian concrete poets Haroldo and Augusto de Campos, brothers who pioneered the Brazilian school of literary translation. Others find transcreation’s origins in the scholar and translator Purushottama Lal’s argument that “the translator must edit, reconcile, and transmute.”8 Inherent to transcreation is its accommodation of a more imaginative process than literal translation. How a source material is edited, reconciled, and transmuted is often informed by the translator’s selfhood. This is why, according to Samantha Schnee, translator from Spanish to English and founding editor of the online magazine Words without Borders: The Home for International Literature , “no two translators would ever create the same translation from the same text.”9 The Brazilian-born Bruna Dantas Lobato, who translates Brazilian literature, conveys her singularity in her rejection of translation as “some white person from [Western] culture who goes into another culture and imports these artifacts.” 10 As a translator of her own culture, she is able to bring to her English translations an insider’s “flourish,” to use Harris’s word.

The title “Notes on Living a Translated Life” is every bit the equivoque. It states a fact—the essay is about how two Black men remade themselves in early-twentieth-century Boston—but also signals other interpretations. One announces a chief principle of transcreation: translation inherently involves the self. Another returns to our earlier supposition that the text explores O’Grady’s background as a

translator. This proves true in spirit and by extension: although O’Grady abandoned the business of translation in the early ’90s because she “didn’t want to live [her] life as a translator,” a sampling of her work as a conceptual artist—a portmanteau of Black female subjectivity expressed through photomontage, performance, collage, video—reveals the inflections of transcreation. 11

In American culture today, the sociologist Musa al-Gharbi charges, “elites from [non-white] groups are often passed over in silence or are explicitly exempted from critique (and even celebrated!).”12 O’Grady’s debut as a performance artist—in 1980, at the age of forty-five—marked a historic disruption of such celebrations, intent as she was on supplying the criticism al-Gharbi finds absent, delivering it through a theatrical self-presentation that rebuked the Black elite. As the now-iconic persona Mlle Bourgeoise Noire, O’Grady invaded the opening of Outlaw Aesthetics , a June show at Just Above Midtown (or JAM), a New York haven of Black avant-garde expression. “Mlle Bourgeoise Noire”— “Miss Black bourgeoise”—is a nom de plume invoking O’Grady’s own Black-middle-class upbringing and the origins of the persona, which she placed in Cayenne, French Guiana. The character is clearly a beauty queen, wearing an evening gown and cape fashioned from 180 pairs of white dinner gloves and a congratulatory tiara and sash. In place of a scepter, she carries a white whip adorned with chrysanthemums. Transcreation theory pervades this initial offering in O’Grady’s performance-art practice: there is the resonance of the centering of the transcreator’s lived experience—after all, Mlle Bourgeoise Noire embodies O’Grady’s membership among Boston’s Black elites. As well there is O’Grady’s precisely ironic flourish: the flapping white gloves satirize the troubling respectability politics of upwardly mobile Blacks, the whip the twin histories of colonialism and enslavement that have cemented an adherence to a socially acceptable order. This is high camp! The praxis of Black prosperity is reinvented as drag.

O’Grady’s critique at JAM also set its sights on those present: while Mlle Bourgeoise Noire flagellated herself with the whip, she railed against the conformity of the Black artists and Black art around her in the gallery. She enacted her rage through a poem, which opened on a charged note—“That’s enough!”—and ended with a clarion call: “Black

Hybridity puts process on view. Process becomes the essential thing. O’Grady is notorious for reworking her creations and these repeats, with their self-evident alterations, invite us into her process.

art must take more risks!” In another ambience of irony, the same woman who whipped herself and declaimed revolutionary poetry sweetly distributed flowers to the opening’s guests. And applying transcreation in the literal sense of translation, the poem was an adaptation of the Francophone writer LéonGontran Damas’s poem “Trêve ” (1972), which translates as “Enough.” Damas, fittingly, was originally from Cayenne, French Guiana.

Mlle Bourgeoise Noire repeated her performance a year later at the opening of the exhibition Persona at the New Museum, New York, in September 1981. There, her rage poem had a new ring: “Now is the time for invasion,” this one ended, a clarion call for Black artists to take up space in New York’s lily-white galleries and museums. Mlle Bourgeoise Noire’s theater would continue until 1983, documented through photographs that today enliven museum collections. Alongside these treasures are photographs of another performance, the one-time staging of Rivers, First Draft , in the woods of northern Central Park on August 18, 1982. The “rivers” of the title cite, to a degree, the stream in the site where scenes from O’Grady’s life—she was then forty-seven—played out. Featuring O’Grady and a group of actors, the photographed scenes are exhibited with discrete captions, including “Rivers, First Draft: The stove becomes more and more red,” a surrealist interpretation of a crossroads moment for O’Grady, when she responded to a disagreeable art world with a healthy dose of artistic fury. In “Rivers, First Draft: A Little Girl with Pink Sash memorizes her Latin lesson,” we bear witness to the respectable little Black girl whom Mlle Bourgeoise Noire sought to exorcise: white dress with pink sash—you are not wrong to imagine a Black JonBenét—dutifully memorizing Latin by reciting it through a megaphone. We will never see the before of McKeller’s transcreation; all we will ever know is the after we find in Sargent’s renderings. In the connective tissue of O’Grady’s before/after, though, we can locate some of the satisfaction of robust knowing.

During the Central Park staging of Rivers , the Little Girl also recited a poem pulsing with memory (“back home deep in the woods of Vermont”) and mood (“Isn’t it time you took a vacation?”). One senses a precocious childhood, presaging the newspaper poems O’Grady started to make in 1977, and of course Mlle Bourgeoise Noire’s later

recitations. The newspaper-poem practice fruited from a biopsy O’Grady sought mental escape from by reading André Breton, lord of Surrealist theory, who defined Surrealism as “psychic automatism in its pure state.”13 How, O’Grady wondered, might she artistically capture her own memories and moods, and with more conscious control and thought than automatism allows? In response she started to create collages of words cut out from the New York Times , achieving large canvases of leaping, animated texts. The conventional analytical framework for these works buckets them as Dada poems, and indeed O’Grady herself talked of hues of Dada in her work. 14 Self-styled Dada “president” Tristan Tzara said of Dada poetry, “The poem will resemble you,” and the resemblances here are reflections of O’Grady’s own moods and memories. 15 Also, the newspaper poems vividly exhibit the features of concrete poetry, which the Campos brothers developed in Brazil under the taxonomy of transcreation. In the poems’ inventive arrangement of language, one finds meaning. Call it word art, if you must.

Left: Lorraine O’Grady, Miscegenated Family Album (Sisters IV), L: Devonia’s sister, Lorraine; R: Nefertiti’s sister, Mutnedjmet , 1980/1994 © 2025 Lorraine O’Grady/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Photo: courtesy Lorraine O’Grady Trust and Mariane Ibrahim (Chicago, Paris, Mexico City)

Below:

Lorraine O’Grady, Cutting Out CONYT 03, 1977/2017 © 2025 Lorraine O’Grady/ Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: courtesy Lorraine O’Grady Trust and Mariane Ibrahim (Chicago, Paris, Mexico City)

Opposite:

Lorraine O’Grady, Rivers, First Draft: The Young Man in Green rouses the Teenager from depression , 1982/2015 © 2025 Lorraine O’Grady/ Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: courtesy Lorraine O’Grady Trust and Mariane Ibrahim (Chicago, Paris, Mexico City)

Before/after is itself a kind of concrete poem in its illustrative diptychness, and O’Grady in fact favors the diptych as a creative format. The Clearing: or Cortés and La Malinche, Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, N. and Me (1991/2019), for instance, is a pair of collocated black-and-white fêtes galantes elucidating, through title and image, the inescapable perniciousness of romances between white men and Black women. The left-hand photomontage (another favored format, as in Strange Taxi ) shows two obviously biracial siblings frolicking, their Black mother and white father hovering in the air above them in the throes of lovemaking, a gun lying casually on the grass. Perhaps the gun’s meaning is to be found in the right panel, where the children have disappeared; the lovemakers now lie on the grass, and— possibly the now-vanished gun’s association—the white man has become a living corpse.

Perhaps the most famous diptychs appear in the series Miscegenated Family Album (1980/94)—note the word “miscegenated,” the interracial subject

a thematic preoccupation of O’Grady’s that she roundly classified as “hybridity.” She herself was a hodgepodge of ancestries, legacies of Blackness and whiteness. Miscegenated Family Album , which she called a “novel in space,” includes sixteen diptychs; most show on one side various family members—O’Grady’s older sister, Devonia, and niece, Candace, for example—and on the other the ancient Egyptian queen Nefertiti and family, summoning a purported Egyptian lineage. One diptych offers a more direct before/after of O’Grady (better the horse’s mouth than this critic’s appetite for connections): in Sisters IV (L: Devonia’s sister, Lorraine, R: Nefertiti’s sister, Mutnedjmet), a youthful O’Grady on the left faces an Egyptian princess on the right. The resemblance between the two is uncanny, which is the point. This depiction sports irony: typically, the left-hand panel would boast a “before” (circa ancient Egypt), the right-hand one an “after” (circa the young O’Grady). This is the temporal flow of most of the series’ diptychs, but not this one.

Underlying this overt centering of the transcreator is attendant flourish.

Writing in Babel , a scholarly journal for translators, Oliver Carreira describes transcreation as “a form of hybridization of different existing creative practices.”16 The transcreator’s output, then, is a fundamentally hybridized thing; so how natural that hybridity is a trademark of O’Grady’s. One feature of hybridity: it outs its parts, outs itself as a constructed being. Consider how a person of mixed ancestry betrays the unlike parts that have made them whole; and the counterpoint that is the phenomenon of passing, literature especially tells us, was often made possible by the onlooker’s choice to ignore the nagging signs. Therefore hybridity puts process on view. Process becomes the essential thing. O’Grady is notorious for reworking her creations—again, recall Strange Taxi —and these repeats, with their self-evident alterations, invite us into her process. The diptychs and photomontages do the same thing: What but a matter of process is the experience of their union of synecdoches? Doubtless that the most famous of these invitations, indeed more overt than the others, is 1983’s Art Is . . . During that year’s African American Day Parade in Harlem, O’Grady and friends appeared on an unauthorized float flourishing a large gold picture frame. Soon, her co-conspirators started working the crowd with smaller frames, into which paradegoers stuck their heads, instantly becoming art. The message? “Art Is . . . whatever you make it.” It is an assertion of multivalence echoing the transcreator’s creed: translation inherently involves the self.

1. Angus Cameron, letter to José Donoso, December 29, 1966. MsC 340, Box 5, José Donoso Papers, 1951–1967, The University of Iowa Libraries.

2. Lorraine O’Grady, in Malik Gaines and O’Grady, “Lorraine O’Grady Is Making Deep Cuts,” Frieze 218 (April 2021). Available online at www.frieze.com/article/lorraine-ogrady-interview-2021 (accessed December 26, 2024).

3. George Steiner, “The Hermeneutic Motion,” in Steiner, After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation (London, Oxford, and New York: Oxford University Press, 1975), 299. Quoted here from Lawrence Venuti, ed., The Translation Studies Reader (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), 188.

4. Thomas A. Fox, quoted in Paul Silver, “Atlas, with the World on His Shoulders, This Was My Body: Thomas E. McKeller and His Work with John Singer Sargent,” in Nathaniel Silver, ed., Boston’s Apollo: Thomas McKeller and John Singer Sargent , exh. cat. (Boston: Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, 2020), 43.

5. O’Grady, “Notes on Living a Translated Life,” in Nathaniel Silver, ed., Boston’s Apollo, 88. Repr. in and quoted here from Hyperallergic October 11, 2020. Available online at https://hyperallergic. com/589872/notes-on-living-a-translated-life/ (accessed December 26, 2024).

6. O’Grady, “Notes on Living a Translated Life,” in ibid.

7. Mark Harris, “Gay Men Have Long Been Obsessed with Their Muscles. Now Everyone Is,” New York Times Style Magazine . August 16, 2024. Available online at https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/09/ t-magazine/gay-men-muscles-body-culture.html (accessed December 26, 2024)

8. P. Lal, “Shakuntala: Preface,” in Great Sanskrit Plays in New English Translations (New York: New Directions, 1957), 5.

9. Samantha Schnee, in Juliana Barbassa, “‘Building Something Together’: Translators Discuss Their Art,” New York Times Book Review, July 2, 2023. Available online at www.nytimes. com/2023/06/28/books/review/literary-translator-roundtablediscussion.html (accessed December 27, 2024).

10. Bruna Dantas Lobato, in ibid.

11. O’Grady, “Job History (from a feminist ‘retrospective’),” 2004. Available online at https://lorraineogrady.com/wp-content/ uploads/2015/11/OGrady_Work_Experience_Bio.pdf (accessed December 28, 2024).

12. Musa al-Gharbi, We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2024), 16.

13. André Breton, “Manifesto of Surrealism,” 1924, in Breton, Manifestoes of Surrealism , trans. Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1969), 26.

14. O’Grady, “Cutting Out CONYT, 1977/2017/2024,” 2024. Available online at https://lorraineogrady.com/wp-content/ uploads/2025/01/241030_LOG-Cutting-Out-CONYT-Quads_ Copyright.pdf (accessed March 2025).

15. Tristan Tzara, “To Make a Dadaist Poem,” 1920. Available online at https://www.oxfordartonline.com/page/Modern-Art-and-IdeasUnit-5-1913-1936 (accessed March 7, 2025).

16. Oliver Carreira, “Is Transcreation a Service or a Strategy? A Social Study into the Perceptions of Language Professionals,” Babel 68, no. 4 (2022): 501.

Hélène Cixous Hans Ulrich Obrist’s Questionnaire

In this ongoing series, the curator Hans Ulrich Obrist 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 second installment of 2025, we are honored to present the philosopher and playwright .

18. Are there any quotes you live by?

A: No, but what comes to mind is “Man kann doch nicht nichtleben” [One cannot not-live]. That’s Kafka.

10. Are there historical figures that you admire?

A: The characters who are constantly present for me and whom I adore, whom I cherish, are always great writers. Like Kafka, Shakespeare, Montaigne. And then there are those who are like characters in a grand play. For example, I have been fascinated recently with the character of Victor Hugo, whom I don’t love as a poet. But from his birth until the end, he is the main character of the nineteenth century. It’s extraordinary. Or take Napoleon at Jena, with Hegel in a corner observing him.

Hans Ulrich Obrist Hélène Cixous

8. What was your first museum visit as a child?

A: If you say “museum” to me, it conjures a very strong and fantastic image. It’s linked to my childhood in Algiers, Algeria, and to my father. There was a museum, but it’s as if it was in a fairytale. The museum was a very white building in the middle of a forest. There were forests in Algiers, and we lived on the heights, in an Arab neighborhood. And to reach the city, sometimes we walked down through the forest. One day on foot we crossed the forest and arrived at this building, like in an Oriental fable. And what I discovered was not so much the artworks hung on the walls, it was the museum itself that was an artwork, this white object in the green of the forest. But as in a German or Oriental fable, what remained with me was this place with a treasure, though we only went one time. But what stood in for a museum for me when I was young was something else. As a doctor, my father received a small salary, and he subscribed to a little art magazine. You can’t imagine how ugly it was! Bad paper, bad images. During the war there was nothing. There were none of the marvelous catalogues we have now. It was in black and white on awful yellow paper. But it enthralled me. I studied this magazine and I was in love with the images, the paintings, the silhouettes. Retrospectively I realize I didn’t have terribly good taste. For example, I had an infinite passion for Ingres. I looked at those bodies of women and I thought, “They are so beautiful!”

20. What ought to change?

22. Do you have rituals?

A: That depends on what you mean by rituals . . .

A: One can’t give a single response, especially as things ought to change all the time. That’s to say across centuries and millennia. In the first place, things change, except we’re not always aware of it, we don’t realize it. Then I think the answers can only be concrete and local. The obvious question that arises is the question of politics. Every government is supposed to change something. For me, you know, I always tell myself: everything has changed, nothing has changed.

What is time?

A: Time?! [laughs] Actually, I ask myself this question every day. And sometimes I say to myself, “Right here, I believe I sense time, I feel time.” But what it is I have not yet been able to say. First, because there isn’t “time,” there are incessant mutations, and maybe time is simply this kind of atmosphere that doesn’t have materiality and where we continuously encounter transformations of perception. It’s something I feel extremely strongly all the time. So for example with letters: you receive a letter, you read the letter, the next day you can reread it, but you’ve already read something else. But then, at least in my case, when it enters a universe where there is a population of letters, not one, but thirty, forty, fifty, two hundred letters, this no longer has a relation to the letter that arrived just now, because everything says different things in different ways. For me, that is the work of time. But what is time? Time is perhaps this kind of supernatural machine that metamorphizes without stopping, without stopping, without stopping, everything that happened once and then returns.

9. What keeps artists coming back to the studio? What makes you come back to writing every day?

A: It’s exactly the same for the writer as for the artist: it’s a workshop. What is the workshop? You take the boat, the magic boat. It’s a little like “The Hunter Gracchus” [1917], you know, in Kafka. You must take the boat to go where things will happen, things that you don’t yet know.

6. What is your unrealized project?

A: It’s a good question. I don’t think I have one. That probably means I only have a project when it’s achievable. That is to say, it’s a challenge. But I could say one thing: What’s not realized is the ultimate book. Because my whole life, I’ve told myself I must write the book that I haven’t yet written. And I used to think, it’s going to happen one of these days; it will end up happening. But, no it didn’t happen. Sometimes I think it won’t happen.

41. In what guise does your worst nightmare appear? (added by Joy Williams)

A: I can’t say that I have the worst nightmare, because then it would actually not be a nightmare, it would be reality. And reality offers hundreds, thousands, of nightmares, each one worse than the last. For example, I was reading in the newspaper the other day about a recently liberated prison in Damascus, Syria. The journalists give some details and say it’s the worst thing they’ve ever seen. And I ask myself a thousand questions. What’s the worst? The worst place of torture? Because I think of the prisons at the time of Lenin, Stalin: it was horrible, horrible. . . . Is it possible to say something is the worst thing in all of history?

21. What achievements of yours are you especially proud of?

A: I think I’m never proud, it isn’t possible for me. I would like to be but it’s not given to me. I have the feeling of being relieved when I have carried, created, procreated a book, a text. I have the feeling that something has happened that could not happen, it’s the seventh day. But I rest only for it to begin again right away. I have a law, like it or not, that I must act, I must do. All the time, all the time, all the time. It’s very tiring. And when people come to accept the idea of death, it’s because they say to themselves, “Whew, it’s over! Enough effort!”

19. What have you forgotten?

A: If I knew, I wouldn’t have forgotten. But what I can tell you is that there is a mysterious thing . . . it’s that I know that I forgot, but what? I forgot it.

34. What is your advice to a young artist or writer?

A: I think of this often because I remember when I was very young, I had read of course Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet [1903–08]. It makes me laugh now. I think one can’t give advice. One must never give advice. It means nothing at all. You can’t give advice except to yourself, and even so it makes no sense. My mother was always giving advice. And it was charming. It was naive. It was confident. It was her duty to give advice. But why give advice? Because we never follow advice, never. I told her “You’re making yourself suffer, and since your advice is never followed, it only causes you astonishment and indignation.” But she didn’t follow my advice.

3. What is the role of titles?

A: Ah, that’s a complication, because when I write a book, it never has a title. For me, it’s torture, the fact that there must be a title. We’re not allowed to propose or present a text, an object, without one. I’ve always been fascinated by this title you see given to so many visual artworks, which is, Untitled. I think, That’s amazing! It’s called “Untitled”! But the problem is that as far as the publication of texts is concerned, they can’t be untitled. So I force myself to give titles, and I don’t like forcing myself, because it’s an artifice. To tell you the truth, for a very long time I asked for help: I asked Jacques Derrida, who was my reader, “What’s this called?” I asked him and he told me. Phew. What’s interesting is that he told me: “I would never do that, I would never accept receiving a title from someone else.” Now, because he’s not here, it’s as if I asked for them from a ghost. Because I have no titles myself.

38. Any miracles lately? (added by Precious Okoyomon)

A: There are no miracles. For example, yes, a miracle would be if Ukraine were saved. And there are miracles by other means, that are part of the world of love. There is the miracle of love. Love is a miracle. It’s absolutely unexpected. It’s absolutely incalculable. It resembles death, only it’s on the side of life.

Rollin’ High and Mighty Traps: Richard Prince

Dylan has been either in my life or close to it for most of my adult years.

—Richard Prince, “There Goes My Hero,” 2011

Elusive. Prolific. Singular. There are perhaps no better conceptual interlocutors than Bob Dylan and Richard Prince, undeniable luminaries in their respective fields of music and art. Both are artists in the truest sense of the word, having created multiple bodies of genre-defying work that have redefined the parameters of what art can be and even do. With forays into each other’s creative domains, Dylan and Prince share a renegade sensibility that flouts conventions and plays with expectations. Prince has maintained a long-standing interest in music, collaborating with bands such as Sonic Youth, using music paraphernalia such as vinyl records as material, and briefly playing in a group with Glenn Branca in the early 1980s, while Dylan has exhibited representational paintings and metal sculptures. Richard Hell articulated other contiguities between the pair in a 2018 article for the Gagosian Quarterly : “As an artist, Richard lies and

steals in a casual unconcerned way that’s also strategic and a statement about his doubts about himself, reality, and who owns what, not to mention history. This is all on the record. He’s like Bob Dylan in that way.”1

In the three-part Untitled (Dylan) (2014), Prince turns directly to Dylan for inspiration, monumentalizing an already iconic image: the famously blurred photograph of the musician that appears on the cover of his 1966 album Blonde on Blonde Under Prince’s hand, the picture undergoes a series of important changes: its composition is cropped, converted to grayscale, and enlarged to an impressive ten-by-ten-foot size while maintaining its square album-sleeve format. Prince inkjet-printed the image across three canvases to make a single tripartite work. While the canvases are identical in content and size, they differ notably in their varying degrees of resolution.

Untitled (Dylan) engages with the concept behind Prince’s signature technique of rephotography, which he initiated in 1977. Beginning with high-end furniture advertisements circulated in the

Richard Prince, Untitled (Dylan), 2014, inkjet on canvas, in 3 parts, each: 120 × 120 inches (304.8 × 304.8 cm) © Richard Prince. Photo: Fredrik Nilsen Studio

New York Times Magazine , Prince started using his camera to take his own photographs from these published pictures, strategically cropping and framing his compositions to remove any textual reference to the commercial domain from which the images were sourced. This process of rephotographing existing imagery revolutionized many of the established ideas around artistic authorship, appropriation, and originality, creating implications that still reverberate in art today.

Untitled (Dylan) expands the process of rephotography into new avenues of Prince’s practice using digital technologies. Here, he isolates Dylan’s portrait, excising the text-based albumcover details—the record-company logo and label “stereo” in the upper left—to create an entirely visual picture. Decontextualized from its commercial function of publicizing Dylan’s record, and presented as a sequence of images rendered at successively lower resolutions, the resulting picture has a captivating familiarity yet remains distanced from the viewer—a paradox that captures the seductive mechanism of celebrity.

The three repetitions of the musician’s image, coupled with Prince’s intensification of the blurred effect of the original cover, communicates the way a person’s public image can be ubiquitous but still inscrutable, as seen through the lens of fame. Certainly Prince’s use of a famous subject like Dylan recalls Andy Warhol’s photo-based silkscreened portraits of celebrities, for instance. Yet while Warhol’s painted portraits often speak to a preoccupation with mainstream celebrity and the cult of personality, Prince’s interests tend to focus on subcultural subjects or the reception of fame—fandom, collecting culture, and alternative circulations of media. This is exemplified by his Untitled (Publicity) pictures (1997–2013/2018), in which Prince frames eight-by-ten-inch celebrity headshots or publicity stills, often apocryphally signed to the artist himself. Notably, it was this particular series that inspired the first meeting between Prince and Dylan, which occurred on the musician’s tour bus in a New Jersey parking lot. According to Prince, the pair convened at the request of Dylan, who explained that he had

seen some of the Publicity works and “wanted to know what they were about.” 2 This initial meeting reportedly led to an ongoing dialogue between the pair, involving multiple studio visits over subsequent years. Despite the almost fantastic circumstances of their first encounter, the continued relationship makes sense. The mythology around Dylan’s revered but often mysterious persona speaks directly to Prince’s fascination with the reception of celebrity as it materializes in visual culture.

The original Blonde on Blonde photograph of Dylan, wearing a suede jacket and checkered scarf, was taken by the photographer and later film director Jerry Schatzberg during a photo shoot in downtown Manhattan in 1966. When Schatzberg presented Dylan with different options for the album cover, he accidentally included one shot in which the musician was out of focus, a result of the photographer’s trembling hand due to the brisk New York weather. Much against the photographer’s protests, Dylan immediately chose that image as his favorite and the rest is music history.

This era of Dylan’s career had a resounding impact on Prince, who has accumulated a substantial collection of Dylan memorabilia and has even made artworks based on these kinds of materials. As he recounted in 2011, “I loved Blonde on Blonde , and really loved the out-of-focus photo of Dylan on the cover with all his new hair. ‘Crimson flames tied through my ears / Rollin’ high and mighty traps.’” 3

The mystique around Dylan’s public image also appeals to Prince’s interest in the slippage between truth and fiction. The artist has described how the sense of agreement seen in his rephotographs of repeated advertising conventions or tropes creates a certain reality. 4 By reproducing an image of the legendary singer-songwriter in Untitled (Dylan) that disperses the viewer’s attention across three canvases, Prince plays into Dylan’s notorious evasiveness. (The musician’s refusal to attend his own award reception for the 2016 Nobel Prize in Literature comes to mind.) Meanwhile the alterations to the original image in terms of cropping, decoloring, and blurring also undermine the audience’s recollection of the album cover, with Prince’s

three-part presentation perhaps redefining, or at least destabilizing, how the picture of Dylan is remembered.

Prince first exhibited one of the three Untitled (Dylan) canvases in his solo exhibition It’s a Free Concert at the Kunsthaus Bregenz in 2014, a show centering on themes of music fandom and concert culture. Some of the works, such as large-format images of Jimi Hendrix, 1950s doo-wop groups, and raging concert audiences, explicitly communicated the focus on music; the idea was expressed more obliquely in the artist’s Band Paintings , works constructed from rubber bands, as well as a suite of pornographic photographs “censored” through the use of stickers from musical CD and DVD packaging. In a television interview on the occasion of the exhibition, Prince explained the reasoning for his choice of subject and his affection for Blonde on Blonde :

The Dylan photograph is simple. I like the album cover Blonde on Blonde , I grew up with it. I’ve looked at that album cover for maybe forty, fifty years of my life! I know it, and it was always

curious to me because it was out of focus. And I was always wondering . . . of all the images to portray himself, why did he pick an image that is out of focus? So what I simply did, I took the image and I made it more out of focus. I thought that’s cool . . . it’s a way to continue, or contribute to the image.5

Continuation and contribution—both are achieved in Untitled (Dylan), a work that is as much an homage to a music legend as it is a sly look at the power and plasticity of images in shaping, and being shaped by, cultural memory.

1. Richard Hell, “Richard Prince: High Times,” Gagosian Quarterly, Winter 2018, 48.

2. Richard Prince, “There Goes My Hero,” Bob Dylan: The Asia Series , exh. cat. (New York: Gagosian, 2011), 94.

3. Ibid. The quotation is from Dylan’s song “My Back Pages” (1964).

4. Prince has described his use of visual repetition as a form of evidence, for instance: “It’s almost as if you’re going to court and had to prove something: if you don’t believe one of them there’s four.” Prince, in an unpublished interview with Michael Newman, 1980, 4. Richard Prince archives, Rensselaerville, New York.

5. Prince, in Tim Lienhard, Richard Prince in Bregenz , interview on arte.journal , arte television, broadcast July 23, 2014. Transcript in the Richard Prince archives, Rensselaerville, New York.

ARCHIT

ALEXANDER CALDER AND ARCHITECTS

Karen Wong charts the journey of Alexander Calder’s Quatre lances (1964) from its intended home at the Fondation Maeght, Saint-Paul-de-Vence, to the Centennial Hall in Monaco, and now to its permanent home in a new single-artwork museum designed by Renzo Piano at the Nouveau Musée National de Monaco. Wong examines the sculpture’s interaction with architecture and environment as part of a larger story of the artist’s relationship with architects.

. . . FROM TIFLIS

Gavin Morrison grapples with the architect Berthold Lubetkin’s biography, inspiration, and legacy.

102 CASA RIA: DAVID CHIPPERFIELD

In 2017, architect David Chipperfield launched Fundación RIA in the territory of Galicia, in northwest Spain. The nonprofit think tank and agency has worked closely with local communities, government, industry, and academic institutions in pursuit of an interdisciplinary understanding of built and natural environments in Galicia. As Chipperfield discusses with his close friend the Galician artist Álvaro Negro, the region is rich in lessons both philosophical and architectural. The two spoke on the occasion of the opening of Casa RIA in Santiago de Compostela, Spain, a new headquarters for public programming, research residencies, and exhibitions—as well as a new cantina led by chef Iago Pazos.

106 OF MAGIC AND MODELS: WUTOPIA LAB

Vicky Richardson visits the Architecture Model Museum in Shanghai, designed by the magical-realist practice Wutopia Lab as a museum of architectural models doubling as a manifesto for a future world.

ALEXANDER CALDER & ARCHITECTS

When your legacy is defined by a single name—Duchamp, Picasso, Warhol—you have truly withstood the test of time. In the 1980s, popular artists received the “Hallmark” treatment, with their works reproduced as postcards, calendars, and tea towels. In this new century we’ve leaped from two dimensions to three, in a Disneyfication of art evident in such projects as Van Gogh: The Immersive Experience, a digital wallpaper environment where the artwork is made both anew and anodyne. While popularity is often treated skeptically, it is inseparable from relevance, and relevance is the thread that weaves history into the present. Except for Basquiat (Jean-Michel) and Kahlo (Frida), the mononymous club of famous dead artists is composed almost entirely of white men. Yet one stands apart: Calder, as in Alexander Calder, whose art practice was never overshadowed by personal drama. In a rapturous New York Times obituary from 1976, the British critic John Russell concludes, “We loved [Calder], and we shall go on doing it for ever and ever.” Calder and his inventive mobiles and stabiles—the former term coined by Marcel Duchamp and the latter by Jean Arp—continue to capture the public’s imagination, no doubt encouraged by the 388 international solo exhibitions (and counting) since Calder’s passing. While the art world and the Calder Foundation—established by his grandson, Alexander S. C. Rower, and the Calder family—celebrate his robust oeuvre, one group in particular has long loved Calder: architects.

Karen Wong charts the journey of Alexander Calder’s Quatre lances (1964) from its intended home at the Fondation Maeght, Saint-Paul-de-Vence, to the Centennial Hall in Monaco, and now to its permanent home in a new singleartwork museum designed by Renzo Piano at the Nouveau Musée National de Monaco. Wong examines the sculpture’s interaction with architecture and environment as part of a larger story of the artist’s relationship with architects.

Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM), an international firm whose heyday coincided with the US modernist movement in corporate spaces, collaborated with Calder on seven major projects between 1946 and 1974. In the early days, commissions were ambitious mobiles made of ordinary materials like sheet metal and wire. Each was more ambitious than the next, such as .125, boasting a span of fortyfive feet and commissioned for the 1957 opening of Idlewild Airport’s (now JFK) International Arrivals Building, designed by SOM. These large atriums presented perfect environments for Calder’s mobiles, allowing the movements of people and air to generate kinetic energy for these hanging sculptural works. In 1969, when Calder and his team installed La Grande vitesse on a prominent SOM-designed civic plaza in Grand Rapids, Michigan, this fire-engine-red stabile made headlines. (The title, most immediately translated as “great speed,” could equally mean “grand rapids.”) It was the first public artwork funded by Art in Public Places, an initiative of the National Endowment for the Arts. Measuring four stories high and weighing forty-two tons, this compressed monumental stabile was both derided and beloved. Today the work is locally known as “the Calder” and is the official cultural logo for Grand Rapids, known as America’s Furniture City. While the partnership between SOM and Calder was a real-time collaboration, since the artist’s death firms such as Shigeru Ban, Diller Scofidio + Renfro, and OMA have all placed sculptures of his in renderings for future projects. Admiration for Calder and the ability to Photoshop his bold, organic forms into architectural renderings make his sculptures easy accomplices. Collaging his stabiles as iconic symbols of monumental yet accessible art evokes a sense of place. His bold forms, sometimes veering to the anthropomorphic, continually harmonize with spaces defined by right angles.

Calder’s versatility with scale is exemplified by his thousands of delicate smaller works, often featured in exhibitions of their own. A cottage industry has emerged around these exquisite presentations, frequently involving collaborations between blue-chip galleries and the Calder

Alexander Calder with Quatre lances (1964) at Etablissements Biémont, Tours, France, 1967. Photo: Tony Vaccaro, courtesy Calder Foundation/Art Resource, New York

Alexander Calder, Quatre lances, 1964, Mareterra, Monaco. Photo: courtesy Nouveau Musée National de Monaco/François Fernandez, 2025

3. Alexander Calder reviewing the installation of .125 (1957) at Idlewild Airport (now John F. Kennedy International Airport), New York, 1957. Photo: courtesy Calder Foundation/Art Resource, New York

Exhibition model of Calder: Mostra retrospettiva, Palazzo a Vela, Turin, Italy, 1983. Architectural model by Renzo Piano © Fondazione Renzo Piano. Photo: courtesy Calder Foundation, New York/Art Resource, New York

Foundation, and renowned architects are often enlisted to design them. In 2015, the Dominique Lévy Gallery, New York, asked father-and-son duo Santiago and Gabriel Calatrava to create an environment for forty-eight tiny maquettes, mobiles, and stabiles. The architects deftly designed a white box of biomorphic platforms emulating a lily pond, with upward-sprouting structures culminating in round, mirrored tabletops that reflected the artworks’ undersides like a pristine lake. Calder’s studios in Roxbury, Connecticut, and in the village of Saché, France, are studies in controlled chaos. The Calatrava pair set up a contrast: ethereal and heavenly, their ivory-white display was a clarion call to ghostly angels to dance among the works. A couple of years later, Annabelle Selldorf took on a similar assignment from Marc Glimcher at Pace’s 57th Street location for the exhibition Calder: Constellations. The beloved art-world architect approached the design by creating a calm environment in which the show’s moderately sized works could speak to one another. When installing these complex works, Selldorf expertly varied the heights of plinths and platforms, enhancing sight lines and sculptural forms as she composed her own Calder-verse.

Calder’s museum retrospectives have also been distinguished by the contributions of world-famous architects.

It was Piano, an admirer of Calder’s work since childhood, who suggested placing the orphan sculpture at Mareterra, while Rower encouraged him to create an “outdoor museum” dedicated to the lone work. Sheltered by surrounding buildings in a prime inland location, the gallery opened in December 2024, its three-walled openair design seamlessly connecting the U-shaped enclosure to a main thoroughfare of pedestrians and visitors. Cast entirely in concrete, smooth walls and a perimeter boardwalk surround a shallow reflecting pool.

The 2013–14 exhibition Calder and Abstraction: From AvantGarde to Iconic, for example, at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (lacma), was designed by hometown favorite Frank Gehry. A kindred spirit of Calder’s in his urge toward unorthodoxy and experimentation, Gehry relished the challenge of creating a coherent presentation in the massive Resnick Pavilion, which was designed by the architect Renzo Piano and opened in 2010. The Gehry-designed exhibition space was distinguished by curved walls and intimate alcoves, the masterstroke lying in the elegant guardrails, which protected the loaned masterpieces and guided visitors through the installation. This acclaimed exhibition marked a full-circle moment for Calder’s legacy: in 1965, Calder had inaugurated lacma’s then-new William Pereira–designed complex on Wilshire Boulevard with a rare fountain commission, Three Quintains

Water and Piano are the common denominators of Calder’s Quatre lances (1964), a commission initially intended for a reflecting pool at the Fondation Maeght, Saint-Paul-de-Vence, a building designed by Josep Lluís Sert. For their museum of modern and contemporary art,

a private collection housed in a public gallery (a first for France), Aimé and Marguerite Maeght worked closely with several artists, including Calder. Calder’s standing mobile, however, was deemed too large for the designated location, where a Braque mosaic had been tiled into the pool’s bottom. To complicate matters further, Aimé was also using the basin to store his oysters. So Quatre lances was shelved, though another Calder, Contreforts, a mighty black-painted stabile installed in the foundation’s sculpture gardens, has welcomed visitors there for the past sixty years.

Two years later, Princess Grace of Monaco acquired Quatre lances on behalf of the principality and installed it on the esplanade of the city-state’s Hall du Centenaire. Harsh winds blowing in from the Mediterranean, though, proved inhospitable to the sculpture, and some of its components were damaged. The artwork’s inadequate installation had marred the piece, and in 2011, the Nouveau Musée National de Monaco and the Calder Foundation joined forces to restore Quatre lances and find it a permanent home. Finally, in 2018, longtime friends and colleagues Alexander S. C. Rower and Renzo Piano hatched a plan.

Piano is no stranger to Calder: in 1983, he undertook the challenge of transforming an arena in Turin, Italy, the Palazzo a Vela, into a colossal showcase of more than 450 Calder works. That presentation, Calder: Mostra retrospettiva, remains the largest Calder exhibition to date. More recently, Piano designed the 2019 show Calder Stories at the Centro Botín, a cultural compound in Santander, Spain, itself designed by Piano and Luis Vidal.

Since 2012, Piano’s firm has been part of an international design team developing Monaco’s new waterfront district, Mareterra. This mixed-use neighborhood combining a marina with retail and residential buildings sits near the plaza where Quatre lances was originally unveiled in 1966. It was Piano, an admirer of Calder’s work since childhood, who suggested placing the orphan sculpture at Mareterra, while Rower encouraged him to create an “outdoor museum” dedicated to the lone work. Sheltered by surrounding buildings in a prime inland location, the gallery opened in December 2024, its three-walled open-air design seamlessly connecting the U-shaped enclosure to a main thoroughfare of pedestrians and visitors. Cast entirely in concrete, smooth walls and a perimeter boardwalk surround a shallow reflecting pool. Nearby, planted pines cast painterly shadows, marking the passage of time. A concrete bench inset along the back wall provides a moment of respite, a place to contemplate the deceivingly simple work of stainless steel rods bolted to black steel plates. Five tall forms sway with the wind while four horizontal elements hover above the water. These panels’ undersides cast reflections on the water’s surface in white, yellow, red, and orange, an unexpected and dynamic splash of color. A sculpture in constant motion, Quatre lances has a sublime restlessness. The work’s unpredictable choreography changes with the seasons, and its emotive conversations with viewers connect the king of kinetics to land art, where shifts in weather and time create various optical effects. Calder’s sculptures are both rational in their embrace of balance and form and instinctual in their gutsy display for flair and tranquility. Ultimately his art gives us ways to seek poetry and song. Alexander Calder’s family, friends, and colleagues continue to “love him for ever and ever” by keeping his flame bright so we hear his voice clearly from one generation to the next.

…FROM TIFLIS

In the latter years of his life, the architect Berthold Lubetkin (1901–1990) started to write notes toward a possible memoir. Often a compilation of disjointed but lyrical anecdotes, the manuscript unsurprisingly never reached a publishable form, but Lubetkin did find a fitting title for this book that never was: Samizdat by Anarchitect. Within these recollections are several passages that describe the influence that his childhood in Tbilisi—called Tiflis at the time—had on his architectural thought. The writing of Samizdat took place in England and nearly eighty years after he would last have seen the Georgian capital. The distance was not only geographic but also the effect of war, revolution, and regime change. Lubetkin was an exile, and the only one who could write his history.

As the narrator of his own story he was unreliable, and intentionally so. These biographical doubts would be of mere anecdotal interest were it not for Lubetkin’s use of elements within his work that appear to reference his history. His commitment to moral ambiguity creates a more unsettling uncertainty. He claimed to have been born in Tiflis in 1901, but his British passport lists his birth as two years later and places it in Warsaw, Poland. This was a fiction, he claimed, created to avoid any suggestion that he had fought in the Red Army. The uncertainty of the most elemental biographical facts of Lubetkin’s life would lead his youngest daughter, Louise Kehoe, to publish—a few years after his death—a memoir, In This Dark House. It is an account of a tumultuous childhood due to her father’s belligerence, a character trait that she felt could be attributed to his past. The book documents Kehoe’s attempts to discover the truth, and the reasons for his distortions about his history. Even here, though, in a document purporting to dispel doubt and uncover the facts behind a difficult family history, there is a caveat. A statement prefaces the text: “This book represents the truth as I see it, but because of the sheer complexity of the story it has been necessary to introduce occasional elements of fiction.” It is an awkward concession for a book that seeks to be a corrective to the deceptive biography her father told, but one that is perhaps unavoidable and is also consistent with family patterns: Lubetkin recounted his own father’s proclamation, “I am not a fanatical worshipper of truth or of conventional morals; morality is a matter of individual conscience.” Lubetkin’s mentioning of his father’s relativistic beliefs is perhaps a conspicuous signal of his support for them.

Gavin Morrison grapples with the architect Berthold Lubetkin’s biography, inspiration, and legacy.

Berthold Lubetkin was, probably, born in Tiflis, Georgia, in 1901. The city straddles the Mtkvari River and is near the historical Silk Road, and this, combined with being closer to Baghdad than to Moscow, affords it a notable Persian influence. It was annexed by the Russian Empire in the 1800s. Following the Russian Revolution in 1917, a short-lived period of independence was ended in 1921, when the Red Army invaded. Lubetkin described his birthplace as “the back of beyond” and said that “the big question being debated at the time was whether we should welcome the rising tide of Western influence.” Lubetkin went west and in 1931 arrived in London, where he quickly established an architectural practice, Tecton, that responded to Britain’s housing boom and nascent welfare state. Lubetkin was the elder figurehead of a group otherwise composed of idealistic young architects who were committed to collaborative thinking and shared authorship.1 Though the practice only existed until 1938, Tecton was instrumental in the development of modernist architecture in Britain, with Lubetkin providing quotable ideological rhetoric such as “Nothing is too good for ordinary people.”

Lubetkin’s journey from Tiflis to London was a peripatetic one. His family left the city of his birth when he was a child and moved to the Russian city of Rostov-on-Don, close to

1. Sivill House, Columbia Road, Bethnal Green, London: detail of the main facade to Columbia Road, 2002, designed by Skinner Bailey & Lubetkin in 1962. Photo: Morley von Sternberg / RIBA Collections

2. Ilia Zdanevich, drawing of Byzantine church in Constantinople, c. 1928–33 © Fonds documentaire Iliazd, France. Photo: Stanislav Dorotchenkov

Sivill House, Columbia Road, Bethnal Green, London, 2009, designed by Skinner Bailey & Lubetkin in 1962. Photo: David Borland /

5. Steven Day, Two Girls, Cranbrook Estate, London, 2008, chromogenic print, 27 × 27 inches (68.6 × 68.6 cm), edition of 3 © Steven Day; building designed by Skinner Bailey & Lubetkin in 1955–66

RIBA Collections

Club Trapèze Volant, at the corner of the rue de Volontaires and rue de Vaugirard, Paris, 1928, designed by Berthold Lubetkin and Bob Rodionov in 1928. Photo: RIBA Collections

99 the eastern border of Ukraine, for a year. He would then go on to study at Svomas, Petrograd, in 1919 and at Vkhutemas, Moscow, from 1920 to 1922. An opportunity to accompany an exhibition of Russian art to Berlin allowed him to attend the city’s Höhere Fachschule für Textil und Bekleidungsindustrie, and from there he went to Vienna to study collections of carpets, including the Royal Collection at the Hofburg Imperial Palace. In 1923 he entered the architectural school at the Politechnika Warszawska in Warsaw, Poland, and after graduating in 1925 he moved to Paris and the following year enrolled in the École spéciale d’architecture. He would remain in Paris until moving to London.

It was in Paris that Lubetkin’s architectural thinking started to take material form. In 1927 he designed the interior of the Club Trapèze Volant, a circus-themed nightclub that utilized gymnastic apparatus and would become popular with Jean Cocteau’s Left Bank milieu. More substantially he designed an apartment building, with Jean Ginsberg, on the avenue de Versailles. The building was in the International Style, with obvious idiomatic borrowings from Le Corbusier.

In Paris Lubetkin was a member of an extensive émigré population that developed there during the interwar years. Many of these were artists, writers, and other creative individuals seeking an environment of freedom and safety. The group included Ilia Zdanevich, a writer, artist, designer, and publisher born, like Lubetkin, in Tiflis but a few years older. Although there is no record that they met, their biographies closely mirror each other. Zdanevich (who went by Iliazd, a contraction of his names) had studied in Saint Petersburg. There, in 1912, he gave Russia’s first lecture on Futurism, and he later met Filippo Tommaso Marinetti during the writer’s visit to Moscow in 1914. On his return to Tiflis in 1918 he established 41°, an avant-garde publishing initiative for which he

Lubetkin would design complex staircases as social and spatial condensers; pragmatic elements of architecture written in the language of Constructivist sculpture, they could resemble parts of a machine, and would create spaces for impromptu social interaction among the building’s inhabitants.

developed a distinctive Constructivist typographic style. For Zdanevich the page was a territory where letters and words became material and form. There is an obvious continuity between architecture and these experiments in typesetting. It is not surprising, then, that Zdanevich had a considerable interest in the ancient Georgian churches of Georgia, northern Turkey, and Armenia. He began an extensive study of these structures and created drawings depicting their ground plans and presenting the spatial relationships that govern their design; the drawings describe a hidden logic, a similar one that he used to determine the arrangements of his typography. In 1920 Zdanevich left Georgia for Constantinople, where he spent a year waiting for a French visa and making studies of Byzantine churches. In 1930 he would write a fictional autobiographical account of his time in Constantinople in the form of the novel, PhiloSophia; the text rewrites his history and invents a Bolshevik revolutionary centered on the city’s Grand Mosque Hagia Sophia. In 1921 Zdanevich moved to Paris, which gave him an expanded avant-garde community. It included the Dadaist Tristan Tzara, a Romanian exile; the two collaborated often, with Zdanevich designing a notable announcement for Tzara’s infamous 1923 event Soirée du

coeur à barbe (Soirée of the bearded heart).

Both Zdanevich and Lubetkin considered their early lives in Tiflis formative for their mature work through something like a metaphysical destiny. Here Lubetkin describes sitting with a young friend by an ornamental pool in Tiflis:

The sparkling pool was lined to the brim with a tangled undergrowth of submerged ornamentation, each tile asserting the endless threads of Islamic texts and Koranic quotations that knit into a coherent whole. . . . I do believe that this occasion was the beginning of a realization that the forces contained in images are but a translation of current beliefs and commitments. . . . All was solved for me. It remained only to grow up.

This can be compared to Zdanevich’s recollection of an instance from his own childhood:

At night, my mother put my hair into curls with strips of paper that were taken, page by page, from the gradually diminishing library of my grandfather. Pushkin, Griboyedov, Gogol all disappeared bit by bit. I spent the night with these books hanging around my head, and sure enough, little by little, I became a poet.

The material objects that these men encountered in childhood contained and transmitted a cultural force. Of course such post hoc explanations come easily, but the idea of objects possessing embedded meaning would recur in Lubetkin’s work.

Once in London, Lubetkin would initially continue to work in the International Style manner he had developed in Paris. Not long after his arrival in Britain, however, in his work with Tecton, he would begin to design housing projects in London (although the completion of many of these was delayed until after World War II). Lubetkin sought to mitigate the deadening social effects of the monolithic slabs in which the requirements for such high-occupancy buildings often resulted. His approach was to develop what he termed the “spatial vector,” a strategy to break up the imposing monotony. Environmental landscaping was a principal element, but so too was the design of the facades of the buildings. For this latter aspect Lubetkin referred back to his childhood in Tiflis, and the local traditions of carpet and kilim design. He understood that their design was not arbitrary but articulated an intricate relationship with the culture that gave rise to them. Lubetkin deployed this principle by creating facades that directly reference carpet designs through the rhythmic patterns of fenestration, walkways, and balconies. The approach is used in the Priory Green Estate in Islington, London, which he designed in the 1930s (although the first phase of construction was not completed until 1947), but he continued to use the device throughout his career. It is evident in the facade for Sivill House in Bethnal Green, London, a tower block on which he collaborated with former Tecton members Francis Skinner and Douglas Bailey. Completed in 1962, the facade used a stylized version of the design from the Caucus dragon carpet. Its curious lyricism speaks not merely of the design it appropriates but of Lubetkin’s specific history, yet this reference would be all but unknown to most of those who encounter the building. As can be seen from Lubetkin’s route from Tiflis to London, there is evidence in the cities he visited of his abiding inquisitiveness about textiles: he traveled to Vienna to study the carpets in the Royal Collection and attended the Höhere Fachschule für Textil und Bekleidungsindustrie in Berlin. Carpet production would also serve him as a metaphoric means to understand the practice of architecture: he would compare the weft and warp of weaving with the layering

of building elements that in concert creates strength. In a drawing for Cranbrook Estate, a project of 1955–66, also in Bethnal Green, the placement of the housing blocks is explained through analogy to a carpet. The dynamism of the site plan evolves from an understanding of the structure of carpet design.

In Cranbrook we also see a recurrent echo that can be traced back to Lubetkin’s studies in Petrograd and Moscow, where he was exposed to the Constructivist thinking of Alexander Rodchenko and Vladimir Tatlin. Lubetkin would design complex staircases as social and spatial condensers; pragmatic elements of architecture written in the language of Constructivist sculpture, they could resemble parts of a machine, and would create spaces for impromptu social interaction among the building’s inhabitants. At Cranbrook the staircase is not as complex as earlier examples in the social-housing developments of Bevin Court (1954) and the Dorset Estate (1951–57), but Cranbrook’s staircases do demonstrate an intention to create a spatial flow through shared space. The Constructivist qualities of Lubetkin’s approach, though, may be most evident in his design for the London Zoo (1934). Here he worked closely with the Danish engineer Ove Arup, another recent arrival in London, to realize the complex forms he envisaged. The buildings were less “machines for living” and more tools for viewing. The Penguin Pool in particular was a Constructivist music box populated by a diminutive Busby Berkeley chorus line, perpetually ascending and descending its intertwined ramps. There was no attempt to simulate the natural environment of the penguins, no fiction of icebergs cast in concrete. If the building alluded to anything, it was an abstraction of the machine age, wrought in a Euclidean absolutism of line, mass, and void.

Lubetkin’s use of biography, words, narrative, and truth becomes more revealing and more opaque.

In 1933, Lubetkin began the design of a housing block, Highpoint I, in Highgate, London. The building was commissioned by Sigmund Gestetner, owner of a family business producing an early form of office copying machine; Gestetner initially intended the building for the housing of his company’s workers. When Le Corbusier visited the project after its completion, he commended it as architecture “of the first rank.” (The debt the design owes to him is obvious.) This white monolith on a hill appears as rational as it is elegant. The building provided its occupants with the conveniences and utilities promised by modern living: well-ventilated homes, roof terrace, laundry chutes, communal café, and so on. Following its success, a second, smaller development was planned on an adjacent site. Highpoint II, as it would be called, completed in 1938, was generally in keeping with its neighbor, but a theoretical shift can be detected between the two buildings. Lubetkin’s commitment to the tenets of Le Corbusier’s version of modernism were waning, to be replaced by a distinctive approach that evolved from the idiosyncrasies of personality and history.

This is explicit in the presence of two caryatids that uphold the canopy at the entrance to Highpoint II. Their presence was seen as a direct affront to the evangelical modernists and an almost baroque inclusion, performing a function, yet one that could have been undertaken with a far more prosaic form. A bemused but accommodating curator of antiquities at the British Museum supplied Lubetkin with molds taken from casts of the Erechtheion caryatids. Lubetkin’s provocation operated in two directions: not only were the modernists aghast but so too were the traditionalists, who

saw the inclusion of the caryatids as so out of context as to be read as a joke at their expense. In its reference to a historical and architectural lineage, the gesture could be seen as a postmodernist precursor, but one disrupted and set apart. Meanwhile, however, a more personal narrative also underlies their inclusion: while Lubetkin was studying in Warsaw, his gaze would often fall upon a balcony that had a pair of smiling caryatids. He recalled these with great affection. We can read Lubetkin’s caryatids in London as an analogue to those he left behind, as not merely generic historical objects but objects from a personal history.

In 1947, after the war, Lubetkin and his wife, Margaret Church, visited Poland and made a point of visiting the street where he used to live. He recalls that it was mostly destroyed apart from one gable wall, but adjoined to that wall was a section of the balcony and there the caryatids still stood, still smiling. In his Samizdat by Anarchitect he describes the scene:

In this lunar landscape the only vertical fixture was part of the elevation of the very house in which I lived when I was studying at the Architectural Faculty. There was the familiar entrance above the workshop, and on the very top the same balcony where I used to study geometry, under a large cornice supported by two caryatids. How well I remember their timeless smiles, that serene confidence in permanence and continuity. They were still dreaming dreams of eternity when the demolition brigades started to batter at the remainder of the ruin.

Do the caryatids at Highpoint II represent for Lubetkin those notions of “permanence and continuity”? Were they totems standing as emblems of cultural persistence, and of humanity’s need to be attentive to the past while creating anew? Lubetkin’s use of biography, words, narrative, and truth becomes more revealing and more opaque. It leaves the narrative between his buildings and his biography somewhat uncertain. Reflecting long after the halcyon days of their collaborations, Arup recalled that Lubetkin “often told me himself, that he is not interested in truth as such; for him any statement, spoken or written, is just propaganda to further an aim which is considered to be of overriding importance for mankind. This is of course the normal communist attitude, which I know only too well having clashed with it on numerous occasions.” This criticism suggests that Lubetkin was ambivalent about truth, but that that ambivalence let him avail himself of a certain pragmatism.

The possibility resonates with Kehoe’s conclusions from In This Dark House. She grew up with a man she did not know. His history and past were shrouded in uncertainty, but perhaps his obfuscation through fiction was a pragmatic means for survival. He came from a Jewish family; in their later life his parents ran a jewelry store in Warsaw until the Nazis arrived. His leaning toward biographical ambiguity may be traceable to the erasure of his personal history during the war, and his escape from a past to which he couldn’t return. Lubetkin was an exile. It is a paradox that the architecture of modernism, with which he is closely aligned, often uses a rhetoric that appeals to notions of truth and honesty: truth to materials, to social program, and to functional intent. It was a form of experiment where words were built into buildings. Berthold Lubetkin went further: history and biography, fact and fiction, are also the material of architecture.

1. The original members of Tecton were Anthony Chitty, Lindsay Drake, Michael Dugdale, Val Harding, Berthold Lubetkin, Godfrey Samuel, and Francis Skinner. Denys Lasdun joined in 1937.

facade, 1938,

7. Highpoint II, North Hill, Highgate, London: the porte cochere and

The Penguin Pool at London Zoo, Regent’s Park, 1954, designed by Berthold Lubetkin in 1934. Photo: Topical Press Agency / Hulton Archive / Getty Images

6. Flats in Holford Square, Finsbury, London: the central spiral staircase of Bevin Court, 1954, designed by Skinner Bailey & Lubetkin in 1954. Photo: John McCann / RIBA Collections

entrance

designed by Lubetkin & Tecton in 1938.

Photo: John Maltby / RIBA Collections

CASA RIA: DAVID CHIPPERFIELD

In 2017, the architect David Chipperfield launched the nonprofit think tank and agency Fundación RIA in the autonomous community of Galicia, in northwest Spain. The organization has worked closely with local communities, government, industry, and academic institutions in pursuit of an interdisciplinary understanding of built and natural environments in Galicia. As Chipperfield discusses with his close friend the Galician artist Álvaro Negro, the region is rich in lessons both philosophical and architectural. The two spoke on the occasion of the 2024 opening of Casa RIA, the Fundación’s new headquarters for public programming, research residencies, and exhibitions—as well as a new cantina run by chef Iago Pazos—in Santiago de Compostela.

ÁLVARO NEGRO: David, could you tell us about how your life experience in Galicia has influenced your architecture and, by extension, your decision to create a foundation that conceives its projects with a clear multidisciplinary vocation?

DAVID CHIPPERFIELD: As an architect, you’re always designing physical things. You’re designing houses or libraries or museums. You’re dealing with the inanimate, the fixed, the substantial. But of course these things don’t make any sense without occupation. They must be built around something, otherwise they’re just empty vessels. As an architect you find yourself celebrating not only the static and the physical but also the relationship between the physical and the fluid, the software, the people. A room is for people, after all. And what rewards you most in architecture is the dynamic between those two things: that the physical object has a relationship with or can be related to by the variables. Simply put, the way people come in and enjoy themselves (or not) in the spaces you’ve designed is what concerns me the most. In that sense, I’ve always felt that architecture is more of a background, or a stage, and hopefully it’s a high-quality one that quietly insinuates its qualities on you. You should enjoy simply being there, the way you do in nature. But the awareness of the architecture should come after that feeling more than before. I’ve always felt the danger of architecture is that it loses this ambition. If you’re not careful, you become more interested in the object than in the purpose or, eventually, the humanity. The mantra of modernism was “form follows function,” but what is function when it comes to people and their daily lives? Is there a strict single function for a bathroom, for example? It’s not just a place for washing, it’s also a place to be and to enjoy the idea of water. Our work here in Galicia is informed by this attitude. Fundación RIA is really a space to think through the specificities of this place, of the experience of people’s lives, and to engage with architecture in a less rigid and more ecological manner.

ÁN: As you were speaking, I started to think about when I tried to take this chair: we don’t simply sit, we make a shape that we need in order to be seated, as we are now. But a child can approach a chair in an incredible array of ways. It’s like another thing, it’s a toy. That kind of imagination, of playing with an object, I feel it within certain buildings. And maybe the architect feels this in one way, but the community, the people, use it in their own way.

DC: There’s an interesting difference, because I think as an artist, you’re at liberty to make a provocation. You have that license with an audience. You put something on the wall and we’re expected to look at it, and therefore when we look at it, we expect to find something. You’re invested with the chance to say something, and by saying something you can make us think or challenge our expectations. It’s a provocative position, even if it’s affirmative of certain things.

In architecture there are certain moments when provocation is interesting: at the beginning of the twentieth century, and following the First World War, architecture was part of the provocation in asking how society changes. The early buildings of the modern movement made us think about how we built, how we lived. Society wanted or needed that provocation and an idea of change, of progress. But in general terms, architecture is not a very comfortable medium for provocation, or for commenting or making a joke or asking a question, because the purpose of architecture is affirmative. It confirms your feelings of comfort, of security, of protection. You don’t want to go into a building and say, “Well, it’s really fascinating because it made me feel so uncomfortable.” Whereas with a painting you might say, “I have to say it’s really interesting because it disturbs me in some way,” you know? Architecture is not meant to disturb you. We have a much more conciliatory

relationship with society, which is to quietly elevate and persuade and contribute. We’re therefore much less independent of the relationship to the individual, to the audience. We need the community, we need permission, we need a client, we need a budget, we need a timetable, we need contractors. Before we begin any creative aspiration, we have to fulfill all of the technical ones. So then the question is, if we fulfill the technical requirements, what are the creative aspirations that might be available or relevant? Having the cantina with Casa RIA, for instance, is not provocative in any way, but there is definitely scope there to consider more than just the physical specifications.

ÁN: In Corrubedo, Galicia, where your family have had a home for over twenty years, five years ago you reopened a village bar, Bar do Porto. This is not just a place for leisure; it is conceived as a democratic space where people from all walks of life share experiences and celebrate them as rituals that value the everyday as transcendental. In this way, residents build and maintain a sense of belonging to the community.

DC: That’s an essential component of the thinking around Fundación RIA and Casa RIA, because as architects we’re designing the hardware and, in a way, the software too; we’re directly involved in the program and activities that occupy the building and how people use it. You might say that we’re creating the play and the theater at the same moment. Part of the reason is that we want to reconfirm the cantina, or the bar, in its social importance.

ÁN: The first thing that you see, entering into the kitchen in Casa RIA, is there isn’t a limit between the inside and the outside. It’s like the produce that ends up on my plate came directly through the window. That tells a lot about your passion for food, about a kitchen, about the space in a personal way. It also connects to the way food is thought about in Galicia: here we value the quality and source of the product more than anything else. That is, what comes from the food comes from an activity.

DC: Absolutely, and I think these are questions about how we see the future and how we deal with our past. From an autobiographical point of view, I completed my studies as an architect in the late 1970s, when the dream of the modern movement was collapsing. Nonetheless we were taught about the work of great modernist heroes, and I still can’t be free of them—Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, Alvar Aalto, many more. We were—and are—captivated by their ideological and missionary attitude to design. But by the 1970s and ’80s, the dream of modernism and technology, and the idea of progress, had really started to crumble. Around us we were seeing the results of bad planning decisions and the impact on the quality of our built environment and quality of life, particularly in social housing.

ÁN: It was like the first crisis of the idea of progress.

DC: It was the first crisis of progress, and now we’re going through another and more profound one. It was a very interesting time to be a student at that moment, when everybody started to rethink the recent past for what seemed like the first time; we started to look at architects of the nineteenth century instead of architects of the twentieth century, and reevaluated the concept of progress. Within my own context and the people around me, we were very influenced by architects from Europe, architects like Álvaro Siza, Rafael Moneo, Portuguese and Spanish architects who were looking for a more convincing relationship between modern ideas and traditional restraints of historical and physical context because the architecture of modernism had become international and independent of place. My generation tried to refind this idea of place, in our projects and as a profession.

Having spent my early professional years in Japan, I had a very heightened awareness of the idea of place, especially being an outsider. For architects and designers, it is incredibly inspiring and humbling to work in Japan, and in a culture where there is an impetus to celebrate daily rituals and the seasons, to invest things with meaning or importance. There is a profound connection to the place, the past, and the present moment. I’ve found a similar environment in Galicia. When we first came here as a family thirty years ago, there was something very refreshing about it. Perhaps this was a result of our own projections, especially coming from London, where everything can feel invented, artificial, speculative. But for five weeks a year, here in Galicia we immersed ourselves in everything that’s not artificial, everything that’s real, that connects you to your surroundings, to the people and nature around you, and that locates you. Admittedly we were without the disadvantages that you might feel if you lived here the whole year; I fully recognize that we had an extremely privileged relationship during those weeks, but it was deeply formative. It gave me a new idea of what quality of life should feel like, and a new idea of “progress.” I owe so much to Galicia.

ÁN: You have many close friends who are artists, like Thomas Struth and Tracey Emin. Every individual has a different idea or a different approach, of course, but do you see something common between your activities and theirs?

DC: Not so much. I mean, obviously we swim in the same water and we get excited about common things. We’re all visual people and we look for ideas in similar places. But I think my fortune of having artists as friends helped me confirm the notion that the architect is not an artist. There are too many architects who think they are artists, but I’ve never been a frustrated artist because I don’t think I’m that creative. Maybe by having artist friends I could just relax. I suppose if you had friends who were priests, you could just relax about being too religious [laughs]. Your soul is protected by them.

Another lucky thing about knowing artists is you can trust their opinions, which are usually free of agenda or a priori principles. When I’m in Galicia and I talk to you, I know the things you say have cultural authority and independence. When I first started working in Germany, knowing artists like Thomas Struth, Thomas Demand, and Wim Wenders gave me an amazing reassurance and support. I accept—and always assumed—a certain level of ignorance and naivete about places outside my own country. I’ve learned that the first rule of being somewhere that’s not yours is to never confuse your ignorance with some sort of superficial understanding.

ÁN: Then again, when you’re so close to something, because it’s your country or it’s your family, it’s more difficult sometimes to take a distance and analyze things properly. A balance is needed for any clarity.

DC: Certainly. My privilege has been to enjoy the meaningfulness of places that aren’t mine, and maybe to exaggerate that meaningfulness because I don’t know the bad bits of it. At a conference here, someone from the region said something like, “Come on, David, you’re just exaggerating. This place isn’t so wonderful as you keep telling us it is. We’re not as good as you keep telling people. Our food isn’t so good. It’s an exaggeration.” And I say “Of course,” I recognize that sometimes I may have exaggerated things. But if you don’t make exaggerations, elevate things, celebrate things, then so much of life can be too easily dismissed. It’s a responsibility for all of us, it’s what artists do, and that’s an aspect of architecture that I love, the exaggeration. Perhaps I might think too much about the details of a door handle—it’s just a door handle—but if we dismiss all these small things, what’s left? To make life meaningful you have to exaggerate a little.

Casa RIA, seen from a back garden that connects to Belvís, the largest park in Santiago de Compostela, Spain. Opened in July 2024, Casa RIA provides a new headquarters and dynamic space to expand conversations and multidisciplinary research on sustainable development in Galicia and beyond. Photo: © Adrián Capelo for Fundación RIA

Installation view, A territorial approach, the first exhibition at Casa RIA, which showed the work that the foundation has carried out in Galicia over the previous seven years. Photo: © La Diapo

A Cantina, managed by the local chef Iago Pazos, is the gastronomic space that supports the public program of the building. Photo: © Adrián Capelo for Fundación RIA

OF MAGIC AND MODELS: WUTOPIA LAB

He’s asleep at the wheel. The driver of my DiDi (Uber), which is speeding along Shanghai’s North–South Elevated Road, is leaning at forty-five degrees with his eyes shut. Instantly dropping my English manners, I shout out loud to wake him up, and I’m relieved when he pulls over and deposits me beside a ten-lane expressway beneath the Elevated Road’s intersection with the Inner Ring Road. My arrival couldn’t be more appropriate for a visit to the museum that the architect Yu Ting calls the Last Redoubt, a name inspired by a location in William Hope Hodgson’s disturbing 1912 novel The Night Land. In the story, the sun has gone out and the last few millions of the Earth’s population are gathered in a giant metal pyramid: the Last Redoubt. Okay, this might sound a little melodramatic for a space actually and more prosaically called the Architecture Model Museum, but my cinematic experience puts me appropriately on edge to discover the “world within a world” conceived by Yu, founder of the Shanghai practice Wutopia Lab. Yu is a fan of science fiction and magical realism. He came up with the name of his practice in 2013. After nearly losing his wife to cancer and spending a year in London taking a short course in narrative design at Central Saint Martins, Yu decided to break from “regular architecture” and committed himself to using every opportunity to make something new rather than conform to expectations. The made-up word “Wutopia” is a combination of “Wu,” the name of a dialect spoken in Shanghai, and “utopia,” after Thomas More’s 1516 fiction, a word literally meaning “no place.”

It was not my idea of utopia, but beside the expressway I did seem to have found myself in a “no place,” or at least, to use the French anthropologist Marc Augé’s term, a “non-place” on the edge of Shanghai, surrounded by roads and anonymous commercial office blocks. This was certainly challenging my preconceptions of what a new museum in Shanghai might look like. China’s boom in museum building, sparked by the government’s 2002 declaration to build a thousand museums by 2015, has produced a plethora of distinctive, expressive structures featuring mirrored eggs, swooping wings, and digital facades, all intended to symbolize China’s dynamic urban growth, modernization, and cultural infrastructure. According to the country’s National Cultural Heritage Administration, by 2023 China had built 6,833 museums, with annual visits exceeding 1.2 billion.

Perhaps I had entered the wrong address into WeChat: none of this museum hubris seemed visible as I approached my destination, after walking through a business park for twenty minutes. Finally I arrived at an unremarkable office block, the headquarters of Fengyuzhu, a design company specializing in the technology for immersive digital displays of the type that fills many of the new museums. Fengyuzhu was founded by Li Hui, an entrepreneur and art and architectural-model collector who studied architecture at Tongji University. Li began his career as an architectural model maker before getting into software. His business really took off when he made the digital displays for many of the pavilions at Shanghai’s Expo 2010.

Vicky Richardson visits the Architecture Model Museum in Shanghai, designed by the magical-realist practice Wutopia Lab as a museum of architectural models doubling as a manifesto for a future world.

Li’s architectural-model collection, which makes up China’s first museum of these works, aims to gather architectural visions of the future, built and unbuilt. The entrepreneur decided to devote a floor of the Fengyuzhu headquarters to a museum after visiting the Archi-Depot museum in Tokyo, an open-storage collection set up in 2016. Archi-Depot was made in response to the shortage and cost of storage space in Tokyo. In its imaginative formula, architects pay to rent a stack of shelves from a company that specializes in environmentally controlled storage. Archi-Depot manages the space and handles visits from the public, who access information about the projects via QR codes. The “undesigned” appearance of Archi-Depot reflects its pragmatic approach: visitors walk between rows of sixteen-foot-high industrial shelving, and the models are displayed “as they are,” without the voice of a curator.

The Architecture Model Museum is very different: in Yu, Li found a kindred spirit who was prepared to have fun with the design and setting of his collection. Whereas the Archi-Depot treats its

architectural models like animal-head hunting trophies that seem to glorify the individual architects, Yu created a fantasy world inspired by eclectic works of literature and movies. At the time of the commission he happened to be reading Italo Calvino’s 1972 novel Invisible Cities, which describes fifty-five cities with female names. The book creates a game in which readers look for linking patterns between the cities and overall themes. They can read the book in different directions, with multiple conclusions. For the Architecture Model Museum, Yu similarly made an exploratory game, dividing the space into a “maze” using 5,653 white-painted steel poles, each 32mm in diameter. These echo the pattern of strings in Calvino’s city of Ersilia, filtering the light and allowing glimpses through the subdivided space. The Architecture Model Museum is very much an architectural manifesto for Wutopia Lab: “The discipline of architecture needs to think about the future destiny of humankind,” says Yu. “Openness, temporality, diversity, chance, accident or temporary amnesia, instant inspiration, short-lived beauty and slight fragility are also worthy of attention for the profession of architecture.”

Fengyuzhu and Wutopia Lab have taken the opportunity to create an imaginary world within a world, an idea that is particularly powerful and unexpected for visitors given the anonymity of the museum’s exterior surround. At five meters (sixteen feet) deep, the floors of this office building are unusually tall; into this space Yu has inserted walkways, stairs, bridges, and small rooms to house the collection of around 350 models. (Li’s collection continues to expand; he is planning another museum in Guangzhou, opening this summer.) Yu describes the setting as a “mega-model of the future city,” where the projects are arranged without reference to context or scale, as if forming a miniature urban landscape.

The visitor experience is highly orchestrated: emerging from an elevator into a dark lobby, the Night Land, you enter a central exhibition space, Stargate, that has a ceiling of distorted mirrors. From there the visitor can explore three zones: Tijuana (from the neo-noir Japanese anime TV series Cowboy Bebop [1998]), Ironia (from the City of Iron in the sci-fi movie Alita: Battle Angel [2019]), and Pod Bay (from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey [1968]). A circular space in the southwest corner is the Thunderdome, from Mad Max 3 (1985), although the room is entirely white and bears no resemblance to the movie sets. It currently displays Antony Gormley’s Stream (2018) from the Rooter series, a figure with pixelated outstretched arms in mild steel. At each of the other three corners of the museum are rooms with windows out to the city. Yu describes these as “sacred spaces”; one is painted in red, one in blue, one in yellow, and they respectively represent Olympus (from the Appleseed manga and films), Asgard (home of Thor), and Arrakis (from the Dune sci-fi novel and films).

The eccentricity of the design, its eclectic references, and the all-pervasive white light of the space are in strong contrast to the analog simplicity of the models in the collection. The focus is on recent Chinese architecture by leading architects, including Wang Shu and Lu Wenyu (Amateur Architecture), Hua Li (TAO Architects), and Li Xiaodong. A particularly spectacular object is a bamboo model of a building with an “infinite” curved roof, designed by Archi-Union in Daoming Town near Chengdu. The model was exhibited in the Chinese Pavilion at the 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale exhibition Building a Future Countryside. There are several models of pavilions from Expo 2010, including one of the China Pavilion, now the China Art Museum in Pudong. The collection includes models and artworks by international artists and architects, such as Japan’s Atelier Bow-Wow and a relief drawing from 2022 by the late Indian architect B. V. Doshi. There are also models by students, and oddities such as a solid-ash Ordrupgaard Bench by the British-Iraqi architect Zaha Hadid, one of four copies manufactured for the United

Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen in 2009. This particular one was subsequently signed by all the conference participants. The museum’s latest acquisitions are two large models of the Imperial Kiln Museum in Jingdezhen and the Majiayao Ruins Museum in Gansu Province, both projects of the Beijing-based Studio Zhu Pei.

The Architecture Model Museum was an ideal commission for Yu, an architect whose practice goes against the grain of contemporary Chinese architecture—including many of the projects illustrated in the museum. “I’m not a regular architect,” says Yu. “Daily life is boring and pressured, whereas architecture and design are wonderful tools with which we can create miracles.” Yu cites as a constant source of inspiration a quote from the playwright Romain Rolland: “There is only one heroism in the world—to see the world and to love it.” He rages against the current trend to “hide behind the shell of history, context, and regionalism.” He is perhaps referring to the Chinese government’s current diktat that architects reflect Chinese values, culture, and aesthetics, an agenda linked to the Rural Revitalization program of 2017. This has seen a shift in emphasis away from urban development and what Chinese president Xi Jinping called “weird architecture” in a 2014 speech calling for a return to Chinese heritage. According to the architecture critic Austin Williams, in current architectural practice in China the “Chinese national, patriotic spirit seems to have won out,” and “China is making a clear statement about its status, in its influential, architectural expression.”

Wutopia has yet to build a major stand-alone building, but has found its niche designing imaginative interiors. As well as the Architecture Model Museum, it has designed a series of bookstores, including the Sinan Books Poetry Store in a former Russian Orthodox church in Shanghai, dating from 1932 (completed in 2019), and Ceramic Pages, a bookstore and café devoted to pottery making, which is adjacent to the new UCCA Clay Museum by Kengo Kuma in Yixing, Jiangsu province (October 2024).

The covid years marked a turning point in Chinese architectural practice that helped to define Wutopia’s alternative path. In line with economic activity, many Chinese architects in this period reoriented their work to the national economy and internal tourism. But Yu’s response was to go the other way: short of work, he decided to convert the two-bedroom apartment his studio occupied in Shanghai’s Jing’an District into a fantasy world dedicated to the art of escape. Dividing the standard-plan apartment into two opposing sides, he created a zone dedicated to the “Ideal Life” and a zone reflecting his lockdown experience as a “prisoner, captive and prey.” The sequence of spaces uses color, texture, and literary references and is the very definition of what the Chinese premier might condemn as “weird architecture.” The pièce de résistance is the bathroom, which doubles as a poetry library. At first glance everything seems fairly normal, but a white curtain rising to the left of the toilet reveals a shower room that looks like a black cave. A pink rope hangs ominously from the ceiling, offering a means of escape.

For Yu, breaking the stereotype of an apartment was an attempt to prove that “architecture can awaken us from our numbness.” It will be interesting to see how far his approach will take him in an era that favors heritage and renovation over science fiction fantasy. Wutopia will shortly complete a new 200seat theater in Suzhou’s Taohuawu District. Taking inspiration from the Ming dynasty calligrapher and painter Tang Yin (also known as Tang Bohu), it transforms a former Xinguang silk factory, using blue-green landscape paintings to symbolize freedom and embedding geometric interpretations of traditional landscapes into the building’s exterior. I sense this is not Yu’s ideal project; it is “about finding the bigness in the smallness,” he says. It will be fascinating to see if he continues to tread the precarious path between commercial success and creative expression.

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The Architecture Model Museum is located on one floor of the Shanghai headquarters of Fengyuzhu, a company specializing in immersive digital displays. The five-meter-high space is subdivided by transparent walls made up of steel pipes. Visitors enter into an expansive gallery named Stargate, where the museum hosts temporary exhibitions. A mirrored ceiling makes the space appears to be twice its height. Photo: CreatAR Images

The collection of more than 350 models is eclectic, although mostly focused on work by leading contemporary Chinese practices, including Amateur Architecture and Studio Zhu Pei. The handmade wooden models stand out from the all-white setting of the museum, sitting on floating white shelves supported by a forest of white steel pipes. The museum is treated as a “world within a world,” which the visitor explores via walkways, staircases, and bridges, allowing views of the models from a range of angles. Photo: CreatAR Images

At three corners of the rectangular floor plan, the architect Yu Ting has created small rooms that he describes as “sacred spaces,” each painted a different primary color. These rooms are the only places from which visitors can look out to the city. A window seat in the red room, named Olympus after the Appleseed manga series, provides a place for contemplation.

Photo: © Liu Guowei

Visitors to the Architecture Model Museum are asked to wear shoe covers to protect the pristine, white, highly polished floor. Reflections, filtered light, and shadows make this an intentionally confusing space to explore, an effect Utopia Lab intended to heighten the sense of discovery. There are models of some of China’s most significant recent buildings, including a bamboo building with an “infinite” roof by Archi-Union that was displayed in the Chinese Pavilion at the 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale.

Photo: CreatAR Images

On April 3, an exhibition of new paintings by Julie Curtiss opened at Gagosian, Paris. Ahead of the show’s debut, the artist met with author Lauren Elkin to discuss the work’s relationship to the Florida suburbs, the power of juxtaposition, and what it means to leave a painting open for the viewer.

JULIE CURTISS SUBURBAN LAWNS

LAUREN ELKIN Do you think of the work in this upcoming show in Paris as a departure for you, or as a natural development of your work over the last few years?

JULIE CURTISS Well, the paintings in this show revolve around a specific point in my life. I made these works just after giving birth. We were spending most of our time in Florida then; we have a small house there, in Tampa Bay, and we figured we’d be more comfortable there. We would have my husband’s mother around to help out during the few first months. Not only having a child but also spending more time in a suburban environment—it was a huge life change.

There are references from this time in the works, which are almost snapshots, and more autobiographical than earlier paintings. I was walking around my neighborhood during this important life event and taking photos of things that struck me. So it’s a collection of those photographs that evolved in my head and became compositions and narratives. The paintings are a bit like novels.

LE That’s interesting. In what way are they novelistic?

JC The way they’re built out. If you look at Last Stop [2025], for instance, I began with the setting and the mood—those very gloomy, shadowy palm trees. Very tropical but also something dark about them. And then I added the character, waiting at the bus stop in this in-between state. That’s a characteristic of many of the figures, waiting between states, neither here nor there. They’re in a mode of thoughtfulness or dreaming.

LE I see that in Fish Camp [2024]. The lone woman at the bar.

JC That was inspired by two different things. First, the Fish Camp, which is a restaurant in Saint Petersburg, not far from where we live. There are beautiful fish trophies floating above your head while you’re eating. It’s so surreal and bizarre, but also such a typical diner—the red cups, the wood paneling. I knew I wanted to paint these things

and eventually I thought about one of my favorite paintings at the Metropolitan Museum [of Art, New York], Vermeer’s Maid Asleep [c. 1656–57]. Half of the painting is shadow, and you see the maid on the left dozing off.

LE How about your painting of the two women with their strollers?

JC That was the first painting I made after I gave birth. Stroller moms. To be honest, I just don’t love the American suburban landscape, even if my area is actually quite gorgeous, with beautiful oak trees. The manicured lawns, the vast space between people, waving from cars to your neighbors. Amidst all of this are lots of young mothers—like me—and all these young children everywhere. It’s sunny, everyone is really fit, it feels so integrated—and I always say I’ve been grafted onto this scene, this New York transplant. I had really bad postpartum depression, on top of this more general feeling, and the bouncing-back moms, in their gym gear, were a subject of fascination, so seemingly different from my reality. I didn’t relate to it at all.

LE In the suburbs everyone’s so atomized, they’re in their own houses, they’re in their own cars. They’re only outside for a walk, for exercise. Your women with the strollers are going to just hop back into shape from having a baby and it’s going to be all spandex, very fake, like in your painting—their bodies are molded into these weird bulbous forms. And it’s like their entire life is an extension of their manicured lawns. Everything is just manicured, manicured, manicured, and you don’t leave your bubble.

JC The Floridian suburb is distinctly fascinating because the state is one of the wildest places in America in terms of flora, fauna, natural occurrences, but it’s full of suburbs where people are constantly trying to control the environment. It’s a constant battle. Our neighbors across the street removed all of their beautiful lawn. They completely peeled it off, installed concrete

everywhere in front of their house, and then put down AstroTurf. That’s the new trend!

LE Wow. That’s such a perfect encapsulation of that suburban mentality: we’re going to control our environment as much as we can, even the grass will be fake. How did you come to be in America to begin with, and do you find it a nourishing place to live and work, or do you miss Europe?

JC Oh no. I find it way more nourishing than working in Paris. I’m from Paris, from Montreuil, the suburbs of Paris, and I studied at the Art Institute of Chicago for a semester. I somehow got into an exchange program and it was such a revelation for me. I found the subculture so alive. The contemporary art environment is better for me in America because there’s a more intense push for action than in Europe. It never worked very well for me to think too much ahead of what I was making. Europe in general and France in particular—we’re too cerebral; but in America you do whatever the moment asks. You make first, and then you think about it. And that was a much better process for me. The visual language was so new and refreshing and bold and nonhierarchical, no taboos, no dos and don’ts—it was quite liberating for me.

I also discovered the work of the Chicago Imagists at this time, and then in 2010 I moved to New York and started to work for Kaws. He’s an avid collector and I had access to a lot of really interesting subcultural art. All of this gave me the confidence to do what I actually enjoyed. For a long time I’d been flirting with illustration, with graphic novels, but I’d been afraid to bring that into my art.

LE You’ve spoken in the past about the distinction between illustration and the figurative work that you do. You said something like, In illustration you have to give people all the information they need to see what you’re drawing, but in your work you suggest and step back, letting viewers fill it in or understand it as they will.

Previous spread, left: Julie Curtiss in her studio, New York, 2024. Photo: Dan MacMahon

Previous spread, right: Julie Curtiss, Delivery, 2025, oil and acrylic on canvas, 48 × 60 inches (121.9 × 152.4 cm). Photo: Maris Hutchinson

Left:

Julie Curtiss, In the Flow, 2025, oil and acrylic on canvas, 55 × 80 inches (139.7 × 203.2 cm). Photo: Maris Hutchinson

Opposite: Julie Curtiss, Fish Camp, 2024, oil and acrylic on canvas, 48 × 60 inches (121.9 × 152.4 cm). Photo: Maris Hutchinson

JC Yeah, even though I have this attraction to illustration, what I do is very different. I don’t need to explain what I’m doing, I don’t illustrate an idea, I don’t work toward literal representation; I give a lot of details, a lot of information for the eye to see, lots of figurative elements, but at the same time I keep the meaning of my works very open. It’s important to allow for inner contradictions and strange juxtapositions.

LE Could we talk a bit more about juxtaposition in your work, specifically in terms of the kind of productive ambiguity it creates? People throw the term “surrealist” around a lot, but there’s something in that history that’s perhaps useful in approaching your work. Your painting In the Flow [2025], for instance, of the woman on the exercise bike behind the fish tank, is an amazing expression of that surrealist idea of Lautréamont’s about the “chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on an operating table.” These disparate elements come together and create a marvelous shock. Who would ever think to paint a woman on an exercise bike as viewed through a tank of fish except for you?

JC Thank you [laughter ]! Well, the work is often about a shift or shifts of perspective. I was just listening to the audiobook of your recent book Art Monsters [2023]; I feel like it’s an exposé about my work. You have this whole theory around the slash in writing.

LE Yes, a device for suturing together these different ideas without explaining the links between them.

JC Exactly—something can be one thing and its opposite, and somehow it still works. Art is really the perfect place where this can happen and somehow still make sense. Often what prompts a painting is an inner conflict between two things suddenly forced into dialogue. When they meet in the same space, there’s a shift of perspective, an ambiguity with the gaze. Where is the action taking place? In that specific painting there’s the woman on a bicycle, and bicycles are supposed to go somewhere, but she’s going nowhere. It’s stationary, she’s pedaling just for the act of it. And yet she’s somewhere else—she’s wearing a VR set. Is she visualizing another space? She’s here physically but she isn’t here mentally. And then she’s placed behind this fish tank, which is displacing her one more time. We were already talking about the rift between human and nature in the suburbs, and the neutralized space that humans have created for themselves in the chaos of nature; the aquarium is another attempt at control, a miniature natural environment that’s completely artificial.

LE And there’s an amazing visual resonance between how shiny the fish are and how shiny her Lycra outfit is. She’s like an artificial fish.

Julie Curtiss, Téléphone

Rose, 2025, oil and acrylic on canvas, 40 × 34 inches (101.6 × 86.4 cm). Photo: Maris Hutchinson

JC Yeah, exactly. I want her to look as beautiful and tropical as the little fish.

LE Your subjects are also often faceless. As I write in Art Monsters , there’s a major feminist history of faceless portraits by female painters. In several portraits Vanessa Bell made of her sister, Virginia Woolf, in 1912, for instance, she doesn’t give her a delineated face. I was thinking about that as the answer to the problem of identity, the problem of the female artist representing herself on the canvas and escaping the male gaze, as well as the more general problem of knowing another person. How could Vanessa Bell ever do her sister’s face justice on a canvas? She can’t. So she just has to leave it blank.

JC Exactly. It’s not one single answer. The fragmented self, the puzzle of the female body, the Medusa turning others into stone with her gaze, it’s all part of that decision making. But on a very basic level, for me, there’s something very satisfying and magnetic about a face in a portrait. That’s where your eyes want to go first. There’s probably some form of primal psychology in that, making sure you can read the other person’s mood and behavior. In a sort of passive-aggressive reaction to that impulse, I need to erase the face, eject it from the frame, which forces the viewer to look at the rest of the image and complete the image in a more total way. Additionally, I’m interested in voyeurism: the fact that you can look as much as you want at the painting without it looking back at you is appealing.

LE This is a growing approach in contemporary literature as well. It’s become more common not to name your main character in a novel. Elif Batuman wrote an essay a number of years ago in which she talks about a Chekhov short story, “The Lady with the Dog,” and she’s like, It takes a writer of great power not to name the dog. The dog is just a dog, it’s not Buffy or Fluffy or Fido. Batuman wrote approvingly about writers who have the restraint to keep from pinning down a person with a name. I think of that when I look at the women with no faces in your paintings; it would be a disservice to stoop to the level of giving them faces.

JC Right. I’m not painting anybody in particular—they’re templates anybody, archetypically, can inhabit and project on.

LE I know that this work isn’t in the exhibition, but I encountered a painting you did of a woman with a breast pump on the Internet somewhere, and I loved it so much. There’s a fascinating surge right now among women our age who are thinking about motherhood and artistic or literary creation in a way that hasn’t been done before—what it actually feels like, from the inside. And I wonder how you think about painting now that you’re a mother, to return to that subject. How has that shaped your practice? Some artists I’ve spoken to don’t want to talk about it. It’s like, “I’m just an artist. I don’t want to talk about motherhood. I leave that at the studio door.” But you’re painting a woman with her breast pump, which is a very specific experience—

JC When I was pregnant, people would ask, Do you think it’s going to change your work? I was like, I have no idea. Maybe not. My practice is intuitive, and while it isn’t intentionally or clearly autobiographical, of course my life slips in.

LE Of course—you’re always drawing from your own experience of what it is to be a human being.

JC And then you extrapolate and you develop an empathetic approach to your characters. I create all these characters who are sides of my own self, more or less developed, more or less alien. I have a lot of animals in my work, and even with the creatures

that are the most alien to us—a horseshoe crab or a lobster, more prehistoric or less familiar animals— even with those creatures you can feel a sense of empathy.

LE You’re constantly widening the frame of what art can approach, and I’d wager that becoming a mother can only push that expansiveness further. Watching your child can be making art; you’re still working, even if you’re mothering.

JC But it’s interesting that you bring up the breast pump painting. Living in this culture, you have all these images of motherhood in your head— iconography of Mary, the child and the breast, the ideal image of motherhood. But that wasn’t my or many people’s experiences of motherhood. My painting is this lonely Mary pumping her breast in the middle of the night. It was inspired by Georges de La Tour’s painting of a nocturnal Mary Magdalene bathed in the very warm hue of candlelight, but now it’s modern times and it’s the blue glow of the machine and it’s cool, hazy, and slightly sad. I guess you could say I was turning my grief into something positive. A big theme in my work is modernity and the associated sense of disconnect. That’s why there are so many animals—searching for that lost connection with the primal self, or with something more instinctual. My characters sometimes seem lost in the urban landscape. But there’s humor in the face of all this, there are question marks.

Julie Curtiss, Last Stop, 2025, oil and acrylic on canvas, 102 × 84 inches (259.1 × 213.4 cm). Photo: Maris Hutchinson

Artwork © Julie Curtiss

Fiona Duncan interviews Susannah Cahalan, the author of Acid Queen: The Psychedelic Life and Counterculture Rebellion of Rosemary Woodruff Leary.

“My best lines all come from Rosemary,” the infamous LSD advocate Timothy Leary said of Rosemary Woodruff Leary, his ex-wife and partner, and the subject of a new biography by Susannah Cahalan. Once dubbed the “most dangerous man in America,” Leary, a former Harvard psychologist turned posterboy for acid, was associated with at least as many mantras as he had wives, his most famous slogan being “Turn on, tune in, drop out.” But it was Leary’s fourth wife— born Rose Marie Woodruff in 1935—who lived that catchphrase out, turning on to psychedelics and tantra as a two-time divorcée before she’d even met Leary, then tuning in to the politics of her day, collaborating with the Weather Underground and the Black Panthers on a jailbreak and finally becoming a fugitive and living underground for decades rather than rat on her radical peers. Leary chose to do just that: to stay out of prison and in the public eye, he collaborated with the FBI and probably the CIA, freeing himself up to dance at Studio 54 and market a self-help video game for the Apple II computer while the ex who dressed him, wrote for him, got him out of prison, and lent him authenticity in an era of sincerity was forgotten by history. Cahalan’s biography, The Acid Queen: The Psychedelic Life and Counterculture Rebellion of Rosemary Woodruff Leary, shows us what we’ve been missing. It’s an intimate recounting of the life of a woman beautiful enough to be street-cast as a model but disobedient enough to wiggle her way out of that opportunity, a woman who shared the ticket with Leary in his 1970 campaign for governor of California, knowing they’d lose to Republican incumbent Ronald Reagan, and a woman who read Wittgenstein for fun. Like many

intelligent people, Rosemary had mixed feelings about fame and publicity. Her absence from history tells us more about the world than her ex’s presence ever could.

FIONA DUNCAN What’s your party line for the book? You know when you’re at a social gathering and you’re asked “What’s it about?”

SUSANNAH CAHALAN The elevator pitch? I would say it’s about a lost woman, a seeker, and the history of the counterculture—American history, really. It’s also about someone who was not traditionally seen as a main character. If you think about who the camera frames, Rosemary was often off to the side. With this project I’m able to fix the camera directly on her.

FD Do you have a favorite image of Rosemary?

SC So many. There’s one from 1969, of Rosemary and Leary during their run for governor of California. A friend of mine had it framed for me. People forget that they ran as a unit [against Ronald Reagan]. There’s another one I love of Rosemary with the lawyer Michael Standard, whose wife, Bunny, gave me a bunch of letters. They’re an interesting couple. That was the problem with this book—

FD A lot had to be cut?

SC I had to condense. I wrote a whole chapter on Rosemary’s brother Gary’s tour in the Vietnam War that I had to cut. I pulled way back on Rosemary’s psychedelic experiences. My editor reined those in, like, “All right, we don’t need to have five pages on a trip when she went to lower Manhattan and flew like a seagull . . . ”

FD It’s a tight edit. It’s good to leave people wanting more.

SC I had to condense one of my favorite characters, Oden Fong. He was adjacent to the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, the group of surfing drug dealers called the “Hippie Mafia” in Laguna Beach. His parents were very famous actors. Oden always felt like an outsider in Hollywood and when he dropped out and into the psychedelic scene, he was still an outsider as the only Asian man in this crew of white men. He told me about this lollipop that had about a thousand hits of Orange Sunshine. One lick and you’d be fucked up. He took a huge bite out of it and had as close to an OD as you can with acid in Joshua Tree. He claims that he died and came back and Jesus was there to help him. Now he’s a pastor.

FD What was your research journey like?

SC The first place I went was the New York Public Library, which has the Rosemary Woodruff Leary papers. It was covid and the library was only open to researchers. That was a strange time, but it was amazing to have the New York Public Library almost all to myself. They’ve about twenty-three Bankers Boxes there of paper and audio archives. I got to hear Rosemary talk, just enveloped in her world.

FD What does her voice sound like?

SC She almost has a transcontinental accent. Very graceful, soft-spoken, careful, and methodical. Pleasing, warm. She was very aware of her role, especially in her thirties when she was with Leary. It’s clear from her language that she was thinking about everything that was coming out of her mouth. I always think, if she was a muse, she’s created herself as a muse.

FD Did you conduct many interviews?

SC I connected with Rosemary’s brother, Gary,

who gave me his full support. Then I interviewed John Schewel, Rosemary’s lover, who was able to fill in huge gaps in the narrative. I talked with him for hundreds of hours.

FD John was the younger man who revered Rosemary, right?

SC Exactly, very attractive guy. He looks like Bob Dylan but tall, like a football-playing Bob Dylan. Finding people from Rosemary’s pre-Leary life was harder, so it was exciting when I found David Amram, a jazz musician and composer who knew her pretty well. I met her lawyer, Noel Tepper. He’s in his nineties now. We were able to go to Millbrook, an estate in upstate New York where Leary hosted a kind of acid commune, together. He took me around Poughkeepsie, where she was in jail. Oden took me around Laguna. I met a lot of people and traveled a lot, covering her Santa Cruz era, her Cape Cod era.

FD Rosemary’s life was so cinematic. The Millbrook era—that’s like a Sofia Coppola movie.

SC Oh my gosh, 100 percent. Millbrook is actually on the market right now for $65 million. The Hitchcock family still owns it. I got to interview Peggy Hitchcock before she died. She was the one who connected Leary with Millbrook, or the Hitchcock estate. Her brothers owned it. Peggy was Leary’s girlfriend before Rosemary. She’s an oil heiress who was super into psychedelics and the jazz scene.

FD One of the most cinematic parts of Rosemary’s and Leary’s story is their jailbreak and escape. As fugitives they were everywhere. I kept asking myself, how did they afford it?

SC In the first part of their life, when Leary was still an ex-Harvard scientist, they were funded by Peggy and other rich people, as well as making

money on the college-lecture-tour circuit. They also hosted weekend retreats. Later their lives were funded in part by Brotherhood drug money. But it wasn’t like they had tons of money. They lived hand to mouth. Sometimes they were very poor. But then they would have this Porsche—

FD Two Porsches. On the run, both Rosemary and Leary end up in their own yellow Porsche.

SC The one Rosemary was in John got from his mom. His parents were wealthy. You know, like a lot of the Weather Underground people were very wealthy people.

FD You make a note of that in your book.

SC Rosemary had a wonderful line like “They could afford to live that close to the bone.” Which is a great—

FD She didn’t come from an affluent background.

SC No. And neither did Leary.

FD Something they had in common, besides having the same rising and moon signs. Do you know Ann Rower’s book If You’re a Girl [1991]? She babysat Leary’s kids in the early 1960s. Ann calls him “King Leary” and “Teary Lim,” really funny. He doesn’t come across well from a twenty-firstcentury perspective. Without name-calling, you do a great job of showing Leary’s hypocrisies and failings while also entering into Rosemary’s desire for him. I understood and believed her desire.

SC I’m not interested in beating Leary up, even though there was a lot to beat him up about. Reading his own biography, it’s hard to come away with a positive feeling about him. I almost had to unlearn what I knew about how he treated his children and wives to understand why Rosemary would still love him. I really tried to understand.

FD I could feel her desire. There’s something about magic men, confidence men, tricksters?

There’s that magnetism. But the relentless tricksters I’ve known have ended up really lonely.

SC Yes, and I think in the end Leary was extremely lonely, even though he was surrounded by people. With this need to always shift, there’s no solid ground.

FD Did you look at other models for your book?

SC Janis Joplin has a wonderful biography that was helpful to me [ Janis: Her Life and Music , by Holly George-Warren, 2019]. I looked at memoirs, Eve Babitz’s Eve’s Hollywood [1974] especially. Have you read T. C. Boyle’s Outside Looking In [2019]? It’s his fictional take on Leary at Harvard. There was [Françoise Gilot’s] Life with Picasso [1964] and [Jennifer Clement’s] Widow Basquiat [2000]. The Silent Woman [1994], Janet Malcolm’s book about Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes. Joyce Johnson’s Minor Characters [1983] was helpful with the Beat side and the concept of being outside the frame. But I couldn’t find many serious books about, let’s call them “hippie women,” or women from the counterculture. It was exciting to identify something that was missing.

FD It has been missing. I went through a hippie, druggy phase. Alan Watts, Terence McKenna, Dennis Hopper, Ram Dass, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs. Men. In your book, you mention that Rosemary tried to convince Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda to change their ending to Easy Rider [1969]. How did she want it to end?

SC She didn’t want them to die, which shows her idealism. She still thought the counterculture could lead somewhere positive, not to gunfire.

FD She was sincere.

SC She wasn’t a trickster or a contrarian. She was really about community and freedom of expression, freedom of movement, freedom to take in

substances and to experiment with the self. She had such a kind way of dealing with the world.

FD After finishing your book, I thought, Oh, Rosemary actually fulfilled the mantra that Leary made so famous: “Turn on, tune in, drop out.” She was the real dropout. After all the sex and drugs, she leaves Leary and goes underground, becoming a fugitive. She refused to rat him or others out and so had to disappear. Whereas Leary went on to collaborate with the feds, saving his own ass so he could stay out of prison and in the public eye.

SC There’s something really interesting there about ego death: Rosemary took it seriously. But she did still want to be known—she wrote for posterity, she kept an archive—so that’s not complete ego death either. What does ego death look like? It’s going to mean something different for some Silicon Valley guy versus a single mother.

FD The ego gets a bad rap. It’s not bad, it’s just your social self. You might be able to kill one ego by doing psychedelics but a new one will be born. There’s no way out.

SC I think the most helpful quote from Rosemary is that she believes “in everything and nothing and it leaves me in a very comfortable place.” In the end she was no longer dogmatic. This flexibility of thought, believing in everything and nothing, is pretty amazing. It’s not a political-activist way of viewing the world but it’s an artistic way of viewing the world, maybe. What do you think?

FD I believe something similar. It’s also just a way to maintain sanity. What’s the line from The Crack-Up [1936]? [F. Scott] Fitzgerald? About believing in two opposite things at the same time? 1

SC Cognitive dissonance, which is what I’m exploring in my next book.

FD You have to live with these ambiguities. It’s survival.

SC Yeah! Survival. I think Rosemary was very fluid when she was young. Then she calcified for a period of time, while underground, only to become fluid again.

FD I mean, she incurred so many traumas. That’ll harden you. Then there was the paranoia of that era . . . cointelpro. We know Leary was an FBI informant but there are also conspiracies that he was CIA, like Harry Mathews maybe and Charles Manson maybe and Gloria Steinem. How did you deal with paranoia and conspiracy while writing this book?

SC I read [Tom O’Neill’s] Chaos [: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties , 2019]. It was amazing to read. There was stuff going on for sure—all the so-called leftist organizations had informants and people working undercover. Everyone studying psychedelics received money from the CIA through various shell companies and research organizations. I have the FBI files on Leary; they’re redacted all over the place. At a certain point, all I could do was hew to the facts that I had and hew to her narrative and perspective.

FD She didn’t know everything, why should you? The book is true to her. Could you talk about your intimacy with Rosemary? How close did you get?

SC She came to me in dreams twice. I wanted more, honestly. I have her mirror, which her lover John Schewel gave to me. I worked with her I Ching and with the Crowley deck, the same tarot she used. I did her yoga and breath work practice. I tracked down one of Rosemary’s astrologers and interviewed him. She didn’t make a move without looking at the astrology or her moon book. I compared our charts, Rosemary’s and mine. I tried to

Previous spread:

Rosemary Woodruff Leary, c. 1975, Tayrona Park, Colombia. Photo: John Schewel, used with permission

Opposite: Timothy Leary and Rosemary Woodruff Leary, Millbrook, New York, 1967.

Alvis Upitis/Getty Images

This page: Ken Kesey and Rosemary Woodruff Leary, San Francisco, 1970. Photo: Robert Altman/Michael Ochs Archive/Getty Images

get into her mind. I’m always hesitant to talk about this because it sounds . . . I did all that I could on the Western side, the interviews, the realistic stuff, but I also did as much as I could on the esoteric side. There were mysteries I was trying to figure out.

FD I felt her, I cried. Given, I was on an airplane. But still, books never make me cry.

SC At what point did you cry? I’m just curious.

FD In the end. It was this feeling of resolution or justice for her.

SC Thank you. I cried writing it, which was weird for me as well. I’ve only cried one other time while writing—that was about another Rosemary, actually, Rosemary Kennedy, in my second book [The Great Pretender: The Undercover Mission That Changed Our Understanding of Madness , 2019]. I also cried when writing about [Timothy Leary’s daughter] Susan Leary. Susan gets to me.

FD Could a documentary be made about Rosemary? Is there enough footage?

SC You could definitely track down enough footage of her. You’d have to address the gaps. The gaps in her narrative are when Leary was not in her life. It was like she didn’t think documenting her life was important anymore. Those were the hardest parts for me. I relied on others to fill in the gaps. Even so, she remained mysterious, somewhat outside my grasp.

FD Those are big chunks of time. Interesting—so maybe Leary was her muse, actually.

SC Oooh, I like that. She definitely put her brightness in him. She was comfortable with him shining and getting refracted glory from that. But obviously she wanted more.

FD Rosemary had a way with words. “My body is a hammock for my soul today”: Lana [Del Rey] should steal that lyric. Leary, a famous sloganeer

himself, admitted that “My best lines all come from Rosemary.” But when she tried to write her autobiography, it didn’t work. She couldn’t get it published. She was edited and reedited. Were you able to see the layers of edits in her archive, what other people thought it should be?

SC Everyone had their different perspectives. Initially you have John Schewel, who actually just wanted Rosemary to write. He became the hearth that she was for Leary. He got her a typewriter. They were doing the cut-up method. He wasn’t editing, more like promoting and pushing her to write. He told me that he was disappointed because she would edit her own story to save other people, so it was never fully authentic. I have her diaries, it was interesting to compare. Her diaries were much harsher and angrier—more wounded. Then you have the agents. I didn’t see their edits as much as I did the feedback from editors at publishing houses, which was very negative. Later you have David Phillips, a close friend who housed her in Cape Cod, who I think was valid in his critiques. He kept pushing her to make it the Rosemary story, the Woodruff story, not the Leary story. Sometimes you don’t feel her in the text, she becomes a detached observer. You want her to be more embodied, because she was so embodied as a person, very sensual. Later on, when Leary became her editor, he pushed her to be less negative in her recollections, which was obviously self-serving. I noticed people whose names weren’t signed editing out the essence of her on paper, which could be over the top, ornate, and flowery. I love that part of her. But they cut it out, anesthetized her, made it flat.

1. “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.”

Photo:

Carlos Valladares ON mike Leigh BY

ilm directors, like your favorite schoolteachers, cultivate. They do not hector, or, tyrannizing for the sake of tyranny, thrash their actors’ open palms with a wooden rule. Instead, they listen to a roving class (the cast and crew); they create a new reality, in collaboration with the class, using the raw materials of physical experience; and, having built the sturdiest playground, they let the students arrive at the (temporary) answers to all their burning soul questions. The best directors and teachers cultivate the desire to know, feel, and act in others. And this idea is enchantingly realized in the British director Mike Leigh’s 2008 feature Happy-Go-Lucky Here, the cheery, wheeze-laughed schoolteacher Poppy (Sally Hawkins), the quintessential Leigh avatar, squawks around a classroom with twenty giddy children, flapping their arms-turned-wings, all crowned with papier-mâché bird beaks, all coming alive to each other’s elastic bodies-in-play. This to Poppy is the purpose of school: to access the inner child, so as not only to know how to act in life but also to prepare oneself for its hard truths. Best to go to Leigh’s latest film to know those Hard Truths (2024). In this visit to two striving middle-class Black families in post- covid Britain, two starkly different sisters clash. Michele Austin is Chantelle, a lower-middle-class hairdresser with two joy-filled daughters (Sophia Brown and Ani Nelson) whose talents are underappreciated in majority-white bourgeois office spaces. This doesn’t bog the family down in misery, nor does the absence of a classic father figure (Chantelle has raised her daughters by herself) suggest a doomed family. They get along well. But a hostile, even smothering resentment, both on the surface and unspoken, is the only mood allowed to reign in the sad family of Chantelle’s fairly solidly middle-class sister (Marianne Jean-Baptiste), who bears the high-ironic name of Pansy. She does have a husband, Curtley (David Webber), who spends his days silent, mending leaks in the pipes of expensive London flats. Both avoid their adult son, Moses (Tuwaine Barrett), who eats in his bed, plays video games, and avoids relationships with the world. Pansy berates grocery clerks, dentists, and sofa saleswomen with the fury of an avenging nihilist saint: “Cheerful, grinning people: can’t

stand ’em.” Yet her sainthood is predicated upon her rejecting all acolytes.

The fates of Chantelle and Pansy, so easy to segregate and compartmentalize as siblings who don’t quite get along like they used to, converge one mid-March afternoon. The families celebrate Mother’s Day together, and Moses, for the first time in his life, gifts mother Pansy a bunch of flowers. Jean-Baptiste’s extraordinary reaction is haunting and should be studied for ages: she titters, then laughs, then hysterically guffaws, then wheezes, then cries, then openly weeps, all in the same unbroken tsunami of feeling. The awful truth is clear: this current iteration of civilization has disenchanted us so much from the squirming muck of love that we are confused when love asserts itself, especially in its limp but genuine form as a grocery-store bouquet. Pansy’s laughing/crying face, as distinctive as Francis Bacon’s or Edvard Munch’s screams, could be the face of the struggle in all Leigh’s films: How do I love? Where do I put my love? What happens when this love is rejected, unheard, shouted into a modern void defined by class struggle, Thatcherite neoliberalism, drifting friendships, angry siblings, and a fluctuating weight?

Poppy and Pansy are not necessarily dialectical negations of each other, but they do present a sliver of English life and its possible routes. These two people exist in society, and sooner or later they must confront each other’s realities. It’s the only way out of this mess.

Born in 1943 in the Broughton area of Salford, Lancashire, Leigh is the son of a Jewish doctor. As he notes, he matured as “a middle-class kid right in the middle of a working-class area,” 1 and “from the earliest, I grew up with a consciousness of the existence of class. I think that is an important aspect of what it is I naturally keep saying and looking at.”2 One event stands out in his cinematic imaginary: the funeral of his grandfather when Leigh was twelve. “There was thick snow, the place was crammed with Jews, some guys were struggling downstairs with the coffin.”3 The funeral was the first time he could remember consciously thinking, “This would make a great film,” perhaps not unlike the funeral procession that concludes Yasujiro Ozu’s End of Summer (1961).

Leigh claims that it was with “utter astonishment” that he received a scholarship to study at London’s prestigious Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (rada), which he described as “an extremely sterile experience.”4 He was more taken with the theatrical scene beyond rada : Joan Littlewood’s experiments with popular theater in East London, as well as the linguistic and existential innovations of Harold Pinter (the young Leigh directed a production of The Caretaker [1960]) and Samuel Beckett (the young Leigh devoured his novels). These writers shifted the very idea of space, silence, and action in theater. Leigh’s discovery of “art-house” cinema—the non-Englishlanguage work of Jean Renoir, Yasujiro Ozu, Satyajit Ray, François Truffaut, and many others— also expanded his ideas of how he could see the England around him with palpable immediacy, through artistic methods radically different from those that surrounded him and were encouraged as the dominant, only way to “do” art.

Leigh’s epiphany came during a life-drawing class in the mid-1960s at London’s Camberwell School of Arts and Crafts, when he realized

that cinema and theater could be so much more than what they were. Because the cast and crew of a film relied so heavily on the prefab screenplays generated by studio systems, their work was not based on fresh, raw, lived reality in the way an artist draws from a nude body. 5 Since then, Leigh has never started a film or play with a full script. Rather, as Paul Clements writes in The Improvised Play: The Work of Mike Leigh , a revealing 1983 study of Leigh’s theater and BBC-TV films, “the actors invent characters, the characters are put together in improvised situations and out of the material thus created comes, after two and a half months or so, a finished piece of drama.” 6

First the actors are asked to make a list of people they know. The list cannot include family members, and the people the actors choose must be near their own age and gender identity. Over a period of days, even weeks, Leigh and each actor discuss the people on the list thoroughly, with the actor describing each person they’ve chosen with idiosyncratic, specific detail, in a rambling and relaxed atmosphere. After a while, a person

is chosen for the actor to “imitate” and base their performance on for the first few weeks. Through individual behavioral work, talking out the character’s biography, and individual improvisational techniques, a fully-formed character—not at all the original imitated person, let alone the actor— emerges.7 From there, Leigh (as “deviser”/writer) brings the group together, placing characters in situational relationships with each other, teasing out the plot while being careful not to reveal to the actor any parts of the narrative that don’t concern the actor’s character, so that the actor only knows what their character knows. Over time, a network of relationships develops, ultimately forming the basis of the work’s narrative. Heading into shooting, Leigh writes only a bare continuity script with no dialogue and only the vaguest of stage directions. The film is “written” through improvised rehearsals on set; the actors, though, are so intimately aware of their characters that it’s as if they’ve written the scenes already, since they will only arrive on the set if they possess full knowledge—not of the situation, but of how their character would react in it. The film is thus a continuously

Previous spread: Mike Leigh. Photo: Myrna Suárez

Opposite: Still from Happy-Go-Lucky (2008), directed by Mike Leigh. Photo: © Miramax, courtesy Everett Collection

Above: Still from Secrets & Lies (1996), directed by Mike Leigh. Photo: Bridgeman Images

Following spread, top: Still from Hard Truths (2024), directed by Mike Leigh. Photo: courtesy Bleecker Street

Following spread, bottom: Still from Hard Truths (2024), directed by Mike Leigh.

Photo: © Thin Man Films Ltd, courtesy Simon Mein

spontaneous, regenerative surprise to its director, its cast, its crew, and its audience.

Leigh’s method comes out of a particularly 1960s theatrical idea called “devising.” But, as he wrote in a 2012 foreword to a helpful manual on devising drama games, “devising” has been an element of classic theater from Sophocles to Shakespeare:

Far from being an anomaly invented in the Swinging Sixties, so-called “devised theatre” is as old as society itself. Millennia before the birth of the formal literary “script,” we can be sure that folk got on their feet and made things up. . . . A play in performance is an organic, visceral, three-dimensional thing. It isn’t, by definition, the reading out of a text. So it is entirely logical to create live theatre directly. The currency, the medium, is people: physical action in time and space—not merely words on a page. 8

I can’t here piece together all the various elements that go into the Leigh method; that would require months of reading texts by, on, and with Leigh, as

well as compiling his wisdom from TV interviews, old pieces of print journalism, and Q&As with him on YouTube. 9 But it is instructive to hear from the actors themselves on the Leigh process. On working on Hard Truths , Jean-Baptiste has said, “What I realize working with Mike is that, God , I really trust him to take care of me. To make sure I’m not going too far. It was wonderful.” 10 This is the experience of most actors working with Leigh. For Austin, the director upsets stereotypical expectations of actors, particularly in the portrayal of Black families: “We are so used to seeing films with Black families [where] there’s trauma, there’s miscarriages of justice—all that triggering stuff that we see. And this film, basically, is just about families experiencing stuff. It’s so rare, sadly, for us to be seen like that.” 11 Webber adds, “We brought a cultural thing to the film, like we knew what was in our cupboards, we brought our own products. But it wasn’t about that. Which was the beauty. We didn’t feel like we were ‘representing,’ we were just being.” 12 Lesley Manville, who has worked with Leigh eight times in film, once on the stage, and once in radio, explains best why actors love

working with him: “It makes you feel intelligent, gifted, talented, empowered. It’s the most fulfilling work you could ever hope to do as an actor.” 13 Brenda Blethyn, who won the Best Actress award at Cannes for her powerhouse performance as Cynthia Purley, the bereft and heartbreakingly sweet single mother in Secrets & Lies (1996), knows the challenge of Leigh’s method—and, simultaneously, the joy—all too well:

It’s very difficult work. As an actor, you create an entire person. It’s so much more rewarding at the end of it. Working with Mike Leigh, he gives you a greater arena to be more daring, to delve deeper into the character. And you’ve also got the time to do it, because it’s done chronologically. You find a starting point with Mike in the early stages of working, and then you create an entire character from infancy to childhood to the present time. . . . It’s so liberating, because the actor is only responsible for one person: the person that they’re creating. You don’t have to be interesting, or funny, or entertaining. You just have to be truthful to that one person. 14

When trying to answer the thorny question we pose of cinema in 2025, “Where do we go from here?,” we can be sure that the Leigh method demonstrates one concrete step in a tangible, fresh-yet-ancient direction. Cinema is a collaborative art form. We forget this. It makes no sense to assume that a screenplay, fresh written and sprung Athena-style from one’s head in order to impose set characters on actors, is the only way of making films. Nor does it make sense to rely solely on the hierarchy of producer at the top, director beneath, actors in front of the cameras, and crew way far behind. The idea of genius, singular and allencompassing, is tiresome and self-centered. To reach for the epic is to stitch together varying, contradicting voices, all telling the same story. A film comes alive through a combination of plan, contingency, diverted possibilities, and accident. Leigh and company know this well.

Leigh’s films are generous wells from which we can endlessly draw, weeping convulsively and laughing hysterically in the same breath. On rewatching them, we can see more clearly how he and his actors manage their terrifying feats

through a perfect synchronization of improvisation, performance, score, and angle. Technique, though, ultimately becomes irrelevant. You cannot quantify either the overflow or the absence of love in a family, the lens through which we first crudely understand politics and the world around us. We must begin, first, to understand the world from which we came, how we are conditioned to prefer this lifestyle over that, which family members we try to model ourselves upon, which we must feel the gratuitous need to destroy, and why our struggle to transcend the role we are given must always be continuous, crazed, incomplete.

There are calmer, more canonical, less splashy films, to be sure. You have your Yasujiro Ozu, your Robert Bresson, your Andrei Tarkovsky, your Ingmar Bergman, your Jean-Luc Godard. They all carry the weight of distance, the visual and sonic markers of a Style. Leigh’s style is determined entirely by people in their instability. He is not afraid of run-on feelings and declarations pitched at a loud scale, and he understands how lighter but no less painful understandings of one’s tragicomic society rest on such instability. JeanBaptiste, Austin, Barrett, Webber, Brown, Nelson— all the actors/characters in Hard Truths become avatars for my own family, just as I see my mother in Blethyn’s volcanic, otherworldly performance in Secrets & Lies . Here, my own crude subjectivity mixes with a world of adoptions, furniture, and wedding photographs.

In this way Leigh ruthlessly understands the conditions that form someone “like” me, though he has not known me. He does not need to. I myself don’t know what I will feel next, I don’t know what the next outburst will be, despite suspecting how the story of my life will play out. And this, surely, is the mark of—if not that hackneyed word “genius”— then surely the sensation of commitment , a fidelity to the reality of an unruly situation. Like Ozu, Leigh has always been within me. This realization, in part, has led to my weeping, sobbing, crying when watching his work. And, of course, the laughter. Since levity, too, is part of the grand keyboard, which others will try desperately to monopolize in the name of static gravity. Elizabeth Bishop once wondered what it was to be “grim without groaning.” Watching Leigh’s films, we come to know the terrible price of a smile.

1. Mike Leigh, quoted in Paul Clements, The Improvised Play: The Work of Mike Leigh (London: Methuen, 1983), 7. 2. Ibid., 7. 3. Leigh, in Mike Leigh on Mike Leigh , ed. Amy Raphael, 2008 (reprint ed. London: Faber and Faber, 2020), 1. 4. Leigh, quoted in Clements, The Improvised Play, 7. 5. Leigh’s epiphany is worth quoting in full. “A year or so after I’d left rada and done a bit of acting, I enrolled in the foundation course at Camberwell Art School. One day I was in the life-drawing class. . . . Twenty or so of us sat quietly drawing the model—a real naked woman sitting on a chair. Bright sunlight beamed through the generous Victorian windows. There was total concentration; you could have heard a pin drop. I looked around and—ping!—it all came to me in a clairvoyant flash. This was what it was all about. This was what we had never experienced as drama students. Everybody was totally absorbed in making an organic discovery of something real, something meaningful to them. We were each investigating a unique personal experience. We were looking at the world and we were being creative. And I thought, ‘Why can’t rehearsals be like this? Why should they be unfocused, undisciplined affairs where people read newspapers in the corner of the room and take no notice of the work? This is a group of individuals each doing his or her own thing, yet this is more of an organic ensemble than many a rehearsal, because here each student is centred and secure, and not made insecure by other people’s insecurities. Why should actors only practise interpretive service skills? Can’t they be artists in their own right? And why, for that matter, should directing be an interpretive job? And why should writing and directing be forced to be separate skills? And couldn’t writing and rehearsing be one and the same process, involving the actor in a truly creative way?’ And a million thoughts. . . . It just suddenly all became clear at that moment.” Leigh, in Mike Leigh on Mike Leigh , 17.

6. Clements, The Improvised Play, 5.

7. Leigh has famously never divulged these techniques exactly, declaring them “trade secrets.”

8. Leigh, foreword, in Jessica Swale, Drama Games for Devising (London: Nick Hern Books, 2012), ix.

9. The three best: Clements, The Improvised Play ; Mike Leigh on Mike Leigh , Raphael’s book-length series of interviews with Leigh; and Michael Coveney, The World according to Mike Leigh (London: HarperCollins, 1995), written as Leigh embarked on his film Secrets & Lies (1996).

10. Marianne Jean-Baptiste, in “Mike Leigh, Marianne Jean-Baptiste & Tuwaine Barrett on Hard Truths | NYFF62,” Film at Lincoln Center YouTube channel, October 10 2024. Available online at https://youtu.be/ v1XwSNX2cTM?si=8kZE0YkVPr4xles4 (accessed February 26, 2025).

11. Michele Austin, in “The Cast of Hard Truths Discuss Lessons They Learned from Director Mike Leigh | Variety Studio at TIFF 2024,” Dailymotion, published by Variety, n.d. Available online at www.dailymotion.com/video/ x959zxa (accessed February 26, 2025).

12. David Webber, in ibid.

13. Lesley Manville, in Mike Leigh on Mike Leigh , xviii. 14. Brenda Blethyn, in Charlie Rose, “Mike Leigh and Cast Interview on Secrets and Lies (1996),” YouTube, n.d. Available online at https://youtu.be/L7IR6y8FHHo?si=3p_ H4pPLdGsUqVFG (accessed February 26, 2025).

DANCING ACROSS THE LIP OF THE ABYSS

THE ART OF BENNETT MILLER

Text by Andrew Winer

Beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror which we are barely able to endure, and it amazes us so, because it serenely disdains to destroy us.

—Rainer Maria Rilke, “Duino Elegies,” 1923

Every person knows something of the hunger— born, perhaps, in that part of them that understands they will one day have to die—to touch and even possess beauty. For poets and artists, that hunger can drive a person to do something strange and wonderful and potentially dangerous: to take what they had deliberately shielded from others’ eyes, the inner life, and reveal it for public consumption. This forces the artist to operate in the trap of the world, and often to address the circumstances in the air and, occasionally, the coercers who fill that air with their hectoring noises. But it doesn’t mean the artist must please them. Beauty is required only to please judges unknown. But does it, as Rilke implies, have the potential to destroy us?

That question haunted me throughout the four intensive days I spent with the artist and filmmaker Bennett Miller this past winter in New York City, as we examined and discussed a breathtaking array of moody, tragic, and alive pigment prints from which he was selecting work for his upcoming exhibition in Paris. The body of a whale in a speeding boxcar; a girl with flaming hair; a child being assaulted by a frightened mascot; a cigarette (or doll’s legs?) dangling from the lips of a woman whose hair is smoking; a boy falling from a cliff—these were images I felt I had been waiting for, or trying to avoid, all my life. Ghostly, ashen, even ancestral, the figures in them appeared to occupy a world of their own, or to shadow ours like things flashing up at the edge of our dreams, remembered briefly on waking and then ebbing away, particle by particle, into nothingness. Philip Larkin might have been describing one of these figures when he wrote: “And so it stays just on the edge of vision, / A small unfocused blur, a standing chill.” Beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror

But how to account for this disquietude—the “standing chill” in Miller’s images? After all, their sheer diversity of mesmerizing faces, figures, and situations—which time and again triggered intense feelings of empathy in me—was breathtaking, even inspired. It was work that seemed to have been created in states of enthrallment. Perhaps it had to do with the fact that the artist’s peculiar depictions are paradoxically locked inside one of our most comforting and recognizable visual vernaculars: the old, sepia-toned, black and white photograph. Friedrich Nietzsche tells us that we make judgments about something before we’ve really looked at it: “It is more comfortable for our eye to react to a particular object by reproducing an image it has often produced before, than by seizing on what is new and different in an impression.”

nineteenth-century photography, others of the early-to-mid-twentieth—both styles lulled me into thinking I was looking at some moment captured long ago and now lost to history. But there is a friction to their familiarity that belies something entirely unusual. And the truth, which became more noticeable the longer I stayed with these images, is that they possess merely a drifting fidelity to photography.

In her volume of essays On Photography (1977), Susan Sontag asserts that “photographs really are experience captured, and the camera is the ideal arm of consciousness in its acquisitive mood.”

Yet her very choice of words—“captured” and “acquisitive”—makes plain whose consciousness we’re talking about here: the photographer’s.

more of a camera-clicker, someone who has to wait to see what was captured.

All of this certainly applies to the kinds of old photographs that Miller’s images resemble , but it is highly antithetical, I came to understand, to his aims and means. For one, when we see such a photo, we tend to accept its basic truthfulness, and then, maybe because it is poignant to us, we might speculate about the people and circumstances captured in it. Yet, for the reasons Nietzsche identifies and because we simply cannot know, it is very easy for us to get it all wrong. We bring our values and interpretations to something that puts forth no values and interpretations itself, and thus we are susceptible to deceiving ourselves. With what Miller is doing, we can’t be so

Some of Miller’s pieces have the appearance of

Meaning that what’s captured by a photo is primarily the photographer’s experience; any argument that it captures another person’s point of view runs up against the constraints of a limited third-person perspective that is hard-baked into a medium whose function is to record what’s out there . Elsewhere in the same collection, Sontag tells us that photography is noninterpretive: it promotes acceptance of what it records rather than understanding , an acceptance that doesn’t depend on an image-maker. Instead, it maps the real by capturing the reflection of light waves off objects. This is a case, then, less of consciousness than of perception, and an impoverished version of perception at that: Sontag’s image-maker is really

deceived, because his images, exposing their own plasticity, are reliably honest about their interpretive nature and about their larger project of seeking human understanding. They employ illusion but have a good conscience on their side. They are, as Nietzsche says, “art, in which precisely the lie is sanctified.”

The second way in which Miller’s art differs from regular photography has to do with point of view. As in the films he has made (I’m thinking especially of Capote [2005], Moneyball [2011], and Foxcatcher [2014]), there is a consciousness in his images that places the viewer in a pointedly observational position that is hard to pin down. Each image seems to suggest a story of sorts, yet

Bennett Miller, Untitled , 2024, pigment print of AI-generated image, 56 × 56 inches (142.2 × 142.2 cm), edition of 3 + 2 AP

any larger meaning I tried putting together felt as though it were emerging from this other, more mysterious, observational point of view. It was as if I were in the mind of this ghostly consciousness as I absorbed what was before me. That might have contributed to the feeling I had, looking at Miller’s prints, of watching what they portrayed become unfamiliar right before my eyes. Even light itself behaved strangely, somehow suffusing everything, so that even solid things such as figures and objects looked suspended in a medium, part of a fraternity of light.

With the exception, that is, of the faces. In Miller’s images, faces look impenetrable, as though his figures were wearing masks. Lost, imploring, frightened or frightening, they are the

powerless to affect me: Why are we ourselves and not other selves? Why are we here, sharing this time with all the others who are here? Why not another time, with other others? Why at all, when there easily could have been no “at all”?

What was happening to me? It suddenly seemed that Rilke had to be right. There, before my eyes, was beauty—exquisite, serene, and cold to all eternity. To behold it was to be pierced by the truth: I am . And could easily not be. Or have ever been Beauty, then, threatened to have an almost Trojan horse–like effect on those who were seduced by it, coolly delivering that dangerous thing: time. As time made us, so it took us. In between, it worked quietly, moving us further and further from where we started, stranding some

kind of faces that might long ago have shuddered out at us from the great background padding of strangers to which everyone is exposed in childhood, when, half-conscious, unshielded, and so often seemingly alone, despite (or because of) interference from adults or other children, we are still sensitive to the psychological masks people wear. Again and again during my time with Miller, I found myself revisiting these faces he had created, often staring at them in amazement, for they had returned me to that early awareness of otherness, the first, disconcerting recognition that every stranger is carrying an inner life. I was repeatedly and viscerally seized by questions that, so fundamental as to be academic, had normally been

of us, burying others under the weight of history. Beauty stuck around. Like death, or a god, it visited every living thing, staying for a brief moment before moving on. Maybe that was the moment Miller had captured in these images. Though the figures in them didn’t seem trapped by time—if anything they looked as if they had come from somewhere beyond it, beyond our grasp. And, as it turned out, they had.

Each of these figures, like the images in which they found themselves, was made possible by a newly emergent channel of access : artificial intelligence. For the first time in history, humans could work with something resembling the totality of their recorded imagery. Previously, all of it was

dispersed among paintings, drawings, etchings, books, magazines, printed photographs—things to be found in archives or in people’s photo albums, bookshelves, shoeboxes, and garages. With the advent of the Internet, a great deal of existing imagery began to be uploaded, yet traditional search engines limited our interaction with it to mere retrieval, finding images on webpages whose keywords matched those in our queries. We certainly had more access to images than before, but they remained discrete, essentially siloed things— they couldn’t be made to interact with each other so, functionally, we were still closer to keeping them in those shoeboxes and photo albums than we were to what, one day, we would be able to do with them. That day arrived with the invention of a highly operational artificial intelligence that, in turn, was hooked up to new image-generating software. Suddenly we could do the unprecedented: engage with all the images humans had ever made— as a whole . And all of them as a whole had been waiting to talk, for a very long time, as Miller discovered. For him, making them talk was like dialing through radio signals using the earliest receivers and pulling voices from the ether— long-forgotten voices gleaned from new frequencies.

It was thrilling to speak with Miller about all this over the course of our four days together, during which he also screened for me sections of A Better World , an as yet unreleased documentary he spent several years making about what is surely the biggest technological (and perhaps cultural) revolution most of us will witness in our lifetimes. That such changes now get normalized so quickly can make it difficult for many of us to wake up to the implications of artificial intelligence for human life. But the experience of interviewing those who are driving the forward march in its development, along with a number of artists, philosophers, and intellectuals who constitute its finest critics, gave Miller an intimate front-row seat to the internal and external conversations that some of our best minds are having about the consequences of suddenly being able, with the help of artificial intelligence, to have another kind of conversation—with the whole human repository. Beyond the tangible possibility that AI will put many people out of work, much of what people are arguing about pivots on a concern that was already voiced nearly a century ago by Martin Heidegger: that the effect of science and technology on our way of thinking threatens the living, ongoing dialogue with Being that we ought to be having, particularly as we engage with history and what is happening in the world. Even in his own time, the German philosopher understood that we were reducing history to mere data, a dusty collection of facts, robbing it of its power to provoke deep questioning, and thus throwing us into a state of taking existence for granted. Miller, in his work, makes it poignantly clear that artificial intelligence can set us up to engage with history

Bennett Miller, Untitled , 2024, pigment print of AI-generated image, 56 × 56 inches (142.2 × 142.2 cm), edition of 3 + 2 AP

in precisely the way Heidegger felt we should. The way Miller uses it suggests a beautiful new possibility, something vital and sublime—and alive with risk. We have created a tool that can divine things. We have made software answer to human awe. That is a kind of beauty in itself. And a new kind of danger. Who are we? What are we? What is this —our life, and life in general? Is this everything ? The danger lies not in asking the big questions; it lies in having the new power to elicit replies. Can we stand them? Can we look at the answers, or, more important, can we face the oracle and not succumb to it? Will it help us or hurt us? How should we proceed now that what we have amassed unknowingly over centuries has suddenly opened its eyes—and asked, What can I do for you ? Rilke, immediately preceding what I quote him as saying about the dangers of beauty at the beginning of this essay, also wrote: “Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angelic / orders? And even if one of them pressed me / suddenly to his heart: I’d be consumed / in his more potent being.”

These were the questions I asked myself a month later in Paris, where, having Miller’s rapturous exhibition to myself for an hour, I became convinced that this work would one day be looked back upon as one of the decisive expressions of that moment when the sum of everything we had until now recorded gave rise to something that could, in the right hands, see us more clearly than we had ever seen ourselves.

But how, then, could we claim—or reclaim—as our own whatever it was that artificial intelligence revealed about us?

Referring to what we can learn from artists, Nietzsche urges us to become the poets of our own lives— not in grand, performative gestures, but in the smallest, most ordinary moments. It isn’t a metaphor. It is a challenge: to treat existence itself as a material we are responsible for shaping, to face the raw facts of life and give them form. Nietzsche, who had a profound influence on Heidegger’s ideas about Being, is talking about the radical responsibility of creation, of shaping one’s life with the force and freedom of an artist despite the chaos and absurdity of existence. Only as I stood alone in that gallery with Miller’s images did I fully grasp what this means for our present moment. AI doesn’t just offer us new tools—it gives us, all of us, a new possibility: to form meaning from the vast, untamed totality of human experience that is suddenly available to us. To be, in an entirely new way, the poets of our lives.

one with the will, a constant vision. You can train your partner, create routines with which you can coax it to do something interesting in ways you cannot predict. Still, it can be stubbornly simpleminded sometimes, while at other times seem to have all the beautiful reasoning and unreasoning, all the predictability and unpredictability, of another person. Always it has access to the whole history of dance routines; depending on what you ask of it, it can generate countless new variations on any combination of them, never growing tired. This is where Miller had to be careful, he confessed—one could easily fall prey to the software’s ability to do anything . As with any serious artistic use of artificial intelligence, a subtle restraint must prevail: to control it too much is to refuse its

now, humans have never known. It is an enticing, dangerous game. Playing with beauty always is. Playing with beauty while playing with a largely untested partner puts us in completely new territory. Nietzsche, who also greatly influenced Rilke, has a term that is applicable here: “Dancing across the lip of the abyss.”

This kind of dancing cannot be rehearsed. As I say, it can hardly be described. So much of it still comes down to a matter of feeling, of intuition. “Two things cannot be reduced to any rationalizing,” writes Simone Weil. “Time and beauty. One must begin from them.” So, at least part of the secret is knowing where to begin; another part, which is also part of Miller’s negotiation with the medium, is knowing when to stop. He seems to

Using artificial intelligence in this way involves making it serve us rather than us being its servant. That can be tricky. With this new medium you are to some degree working less with a tool than with a partner. And where there is a partner, there is a dance. Neither you nor your partner can know all the steps in advance; it is substantially a dance into the unknown. Not that you lack control. You are the choreographer in this dance—the

potential; to let it run wild is to refuse the artist’s. In Miller’s work, in other words, I was looking at nothing less than a new form of authorship, one that had emerged through a deliberate, responsive, deep engagement with a completely new medium. And it seemed to me that the very definition of what an artist is, and what an artist does, would have to be reconsidered, because neither the world nor the art world had seen this sort of authorship before.

What exactly is it, though? I’m brought up short by that question, as I feel we all should be. Much of what the answer is will have to remain for the future to decide. What can be said is that we are involved in a collaboration of a kind that, until

understand that something good has happened when the sense that can be made between elements in a composition is somewhat short-circuited. As I moved from image to image in the Paris exhibition, it seemed to me that he had broken off the AI-assisted process at the point of each image’s most extreme nakedness, when the figure in it looked most displaced, a babe fresh from some other world, unaccustomed, like an angel just released to us, to being marked by measures of time. His images found each figure at a moment when its personality had vanished. For a personality avoided solitude like this . A personality needed others: it was a piece of armor, or a weapon; it hid the needy, chaotic, hurting,

Bennett Miller, Untitled , 2022–23, pigment print of AI-generated image, 6 ¼ × 6 ¼ inches (15.7 × 15.7 cm), edition of 9 + 2 AP

loving, hating inner life. But this was great silicon tracts of the unknown, sending us their dreams. Spirits escaping the synthetic. Faces and figures—emigrants from the land of AI—virtually (pun intended) flying straight out of the crepuscular cave of Big Data World. No personalities allowed. Only souls. Raw souls. It was as though the medium had permitted Miller to be present on the first day of these people’s lives. He had achieved, in each printed work on paper, a morphing amalgam of images fished up from the great human burial ground of recorded moments, of captured things in time, and thrown into an unknown time. What I was looking at in each was a secret, elusive, daring second life of something that was having its first life. Secret, because no

speak of itself but tells of others. Miller’s work, though, is neither a recovery of the unheralded nor a staging of its disappearance; each of his images is the product not of a mere retrieval but rather of a blending and a bleeding of many millions of things into many millions more. A great Whitmanesque mixing. A playing of the keyboard of all that has ever been recorded, to awaken not the past but the thousand persons who live inside us. Artificial intelligence has granted Miller a profound discovery: if we contain multitudes, the multitudes also contain us . We, in all our variousness, in all our humanity, can be found in new faces and figures born of an imagistic merging of the anonymous masses, in the conjuring up of the never-existed from the never-known.

one had ever seen it before; elusive, because it was both there and not there; daring, because it seemed to undermine AI’s mass quality, its at-scaleness, with the potency of its particularity. And with its smallness—its dispersion of miniscule dots, filled with existence, directed at the larger social deficiencies of the medium. These things were singing on top of the stockpile, backed by a symphony of trillions.

One of my heroes, the writer Elias Canetti, once noted in his journal that “the least person has a claim to being found again and listened to.” And Jasper Johns once defined a work of art as an object that tells of the loss, destruction, and disappearance of things—an object that doesn’t

And with this, a new contradiction is introduced into art: a certain commitment to the anonymous as a means of achieving an individual vision. Yet contradiction, another form of truth (some say it is the only form of truth), has always served as a friend to art. Weil, perhaps the twentieth century’s greatest advocate of contradiction, also writes that “a work of art has an author and yet, when it is perfect, it has something which is essentially anonymous about it.”

To return roughly to where I started, all this talk of authorship and anonymity calls for a few final words on the distinction between Miller’s art and what, on the surface, it resembles: photography. A photograph “remembers” a moment, locking it in,

rendering life static by virtue of what it eliminates: the constant onslaught of phenomena and the endlessly chaotic wash of sensation and thought. Miller opens up an aperture and invites all this in. Though different in kind, the photographs that share the strongest affinity with what he is doing are probably Cindy Sherman’s. Both artists are interested in discordant narrative possibilities and potent emotional states (Sherman’s photographs come as close to representing consciousness as any I have seen). Like Miller, Sherman understands that fictional subjects—the never-existed— work better to achieve such possibilities and states than do actual or historical ones. And like Miller, she operates with a formal mastery requiring hundreds of small decisions. Both have a penchant for the baroque (though Miller’s is more restrained). And both attempt to catch a solitary dramatic perspective as a means of tapping into the collective unconsciousness.

That—expressing the problem for everyone via a single consciousness—is the golden trick in all art, in any form. It’s the catalyst that makes nearly all good work ferment, but perhaps Miller’s more than most, since the AI-powered image generator he uses dips into the communal human well, thus mixing two bases of life that have never been reconciled and whose antagonistic relationship may be responsible for our cultural amnesia: individuality and the collective. Some argue that modernity’s favoring of the individual killed our collective unconscious or world soul (if you will), cutting us off from what ties us to distant generations and permits us to communicate with them. Others have suggested that the collective organization of human life— so-called “mass man”—precludes us from any acceptable understanding of individual human existence. Miller’s work cuts a connective channel between these two seemingly polarized pools of self-understanding. To say it again, he avails himself of precisely the paradox on offer from AI-powered image-generating software: the ability to create a distinct vision by drawing from the anonymous vat of human visual activity, a vision comprised of the accumulated outputs of individuals, including their photographs, going as far back as such records exist.

In the end, though, what Miller is doing with AI is something very different from photography, and, yes, much closer to poetry. Like a poem, an image by Miller is a charge of condensed energy—energy from the nucleus of all human knowledge. His work is permeated by a singular pressurization of argument that is at once exact and exacting. It validates itself by the irreducibility of its form. Poetry comprehends reality as a question and Miller’s images are no different. He is picking fruit from a wild tree in the darkness, testifying to what’s seeable and to what’s not. Afraid neither of his work’s sonorities nor of its disharmonies, he is seeking fire and clarity, arriving, when he prevails, at the limit of the imageable.

Bennett Miller, Untitled , 2024, pigment print of AI-generated image, 33 ¾ × 33 ¾ inches (85.7 × 85.7 cm), edition of 3 + 2 AP

A Foreign Language

A FOREIGN LANGUAGE BY CATHERINE LACEY

by Catherine Lacey

Part 2

But Tomasa woke up early and found Ismail splayed wildly beside her—hips torqued, arms thrown wide, palms upward. It had always been like this; he fell asleep each night flat on his back, orderly and contained, but entered the next day looking like a toy that had been tossed aside. What happened to him in the night?

In the living room, Nile was tucked on his side on the couch, facing away from the windows. Tomasa stepped softly past him—it felt indecent to look—and after closing the bathroom door she stared at herself in the mirror, barely understanding where or who she was. She’d spent the night treading water between waking and sleeping and her eyes did not hide this fact.

A sense of disquiet crept over her, a sense that she was being watched by some malevolent force, but it was only the cat, Molasses, who was narrowing his eyes at her from the tiled floor. Tomasa turned on the tap to begin her morning ablutions and the cat rushed away, offended, as usual, by the faucet.

It had been a strange night. No, again, not strange. That word kept coming up, but it wasn’t the right word.

In the last few months Tomasa had often been uncertain of which language she was thinking in, an inner unsteadiness that sometimes bled outward. Her thoughts shifted constantly between the words of her everyday life and those of her childhood and subconscious, a vertigo she hoped would be temporary. She had left her native country years ago now, and it was still unclear to her whether it was possible to leave that language behind, too, or whether she would want to dissolve it away, even if she could. But ever since she and Ismail had come across Nile in the park that day with the sunset, she’d felt an even greater insufficiency: all words now seemed to be unable to do what they should do—to be clear, to convey the right thing. She wasn’t sure how to tell Ismail about the late summer she met Nile, about the many nights she slept over in his apartment, while she also failed to form the words to ask Ismail that one simple question—How do you know him?

Yet Tomasa was most frustrated by her inability to simply describe this new sensation between the three of them. There was a slight effervescence to it, but what did that mean? It was a positive feeling, a pleasurable one, though it was also a little exasperating, even tiring at times, and then it would bloom into something easy and bright again. The hours she and Ismail and Nile had spent talking to each other, she felt she had another, hidden body inside her body that was trying to outrun something while also remaining perfectly still. And yet putting it that way implied something imprecisely dramatic.

Tomasa had been washing her face as she was thinking all this over, trying to get under the rock of it, but her thoughts had stalled in fatigue and she came back

to herself to find she was just standing there, pressing a towel into her forehead.

In the kitchen, she tried to silently carry out the rites of the espresso pot, hoping not to wake Ismail or Nile, but also half-hoping they’d join her and unlonely the morning.

For the last week she’d been dreaming constantly of her hometown, dreams that were all spoken in her first language, and with those familiar words and places came people she hadn’t seen in years—the man she’d left, her brother, the ghosts of her parents, former neighbors, classmates from childhood. They told Tomasa everything they’d been doing in the time since she’d vanished, everything she’d missed. They told her who had been murdered, who had gone mad, whose house had burned down, and which girls had matured into profound beauty and married respectably and despite all that good fortune had still given birth to stillborns. The man she’d formerly promised herself to had immediately married someone else, he told her, because it made no difference if it was her or anyone. He had reached this conclusion, he explained, as if his whole life had been an experiment to prove the replaceability of people and the lie of love. He had burned all his poems, he told her plainly.

The other townspeople in her dreams casually asked Tomasa if she was still alive, and her brother wanted to know if she’d return to this place once she was finally dead some day.

The sun was higher now, the kitchen brighter. Tomasa had finished one cup of coffee. How long might Ismail and Nile keep sleeping? Tomasa’s mother had only ever told her one thing about marriage, but Tomasa had been barely eleven at the time, and her mother was dying of cancer and often did not make much sense. And yet her voice had been so clear when she said, Good men sleep the deep and untroubled sleep of good men while a good woman will never truly know rest.

In those last months her mother had regularly announced she was casting vicious spells on certain neighbors she’d never cared for, and one of the only things she could ingest was a bitter tea that aided in her discussions with the spirits. The night she finally died she departed without an apparent struggle or sweat or moaning. She’d seemed pleased, even triumphant, to be released from this place.

But Tomasa typically slept just fine, and sometimes she wondered if that meant she wasn’t a good woman. She didn’t take last night’s sleeplessness as evidence of some sudden goodness but rather as a side effect of an extra body in their apartment overnight. They’d never hosted a guest, and they never brought any part of a party back to their place—half-drunk, half-injured—and now the morning light seemed to have an almost guilty slant. But guilty of what? No.

Guilty wasn’t the right word either.

She imagined settling into the armchair in the living room and watching Nile sleep his good-man sleep, but she wouldn’t do that, and anyway how did she know what kind of man he was? She hardly knew him, or whatever knowledge she held must have been outdated by now. Still—she didn’t let herself watch him sleep. She stayed in the kitchen, leaning against the counter, mentally re-tracing the events of the previous night.

The sensation of a whole side of Nile’s body pressed into hers as they helped him home had been startling, and the pressure of her hip bone against his as they made their way up the stairs had been almost entirely too much. She remembered much of Nile’s physicality from the August they’d first met—the tilted way he walked, the long scar on his shoulder, the sudden hand gestures he made when he told a story—but it seemed now that her years with Ismail had erased the memory of what Nile’s body had felt like against her own. By the time they’d reached their apartment door, she sensed her cheeks had flushed a hot red, so she’d rushed to the kitchen to put the kettle on, hoping the color would abate in the meantime.

But she was still blushing when she came back to the living room with the tea. Ismail raised his eyebrows. Is it that obvious? she thought in his direction, but he had already returned his attention to Nile, the two of them talking, animated, about someone they knew in common, and as they laughed, Tomasa felt her face finally cooling down. So it was fine. It was nothing. Nothing’s happening. It was just that they all three had so much to talk about, so much to catch up on, and this indescribable nervousness was simply the sensation of lost time being regained. That was all.

They’d stayed up for another two hours or so after delivering Nile to their sofa. It was already past midnight and both Ismail and Tomasa repeatedly made half-moves toward getting ready for bed, then not following through. Nile had assured them that he didn’t think anything in his leg was actually broken, that it was just a bad muscle strain from landing on it strangely, but when, at one point, he tried to readjust himself and winced, Tomasa and Ismail practically ran to his side, just as they had in the street, she to his shoulders and he to his knees.

When Ismail was a child, his father had taken him on a survival trip into the woods where he taught his son how to make a fire and how to forage and, unexpectedly, how to recognize and set a fractured bone after their dog had stepped on some loose stones, fell into a ravine, and needed to be carried out. This knowledge came back to Ismail as he touched Nile’s leg, tenderly searching for something out of place or swollen. Does this feel ok? And this? Tomasa put a hand on their patient’s shoulder as Ismail moved his hands up Nile’s leg, one hand on each side,

first the ankle, then each side of his shin, then there was a delicate discovery of Nile’s knee, the edges, the tendons, the soft underside, and when Ismail pressed a thumb lightly into Nile’s thigh to find the femur, Nile’s breath tensed and vibrated slightly in his throat as he inhaled. But it wasn’t in pain, not at all. Tomasa noticed what seemed to be tears in Nile’s eyes, though he was also faintly smiling.

Does it hurt here?

No, Nile said, softly, as if breaking some kind of spell.

At that, Ismail pronounced the injury a sprain and lowered himself to the floor beside the couch, leaning against the armchair but staying close, as if Nile were a fire and the night was cold.

For the first time since they’d returned to the apartment, a few moments passed without anyone filling the air with words or a story or laughter, and for a moment Nile wondered whether he might have manufactured his bike accident in order to remain near the two of them. The couple must have told each other what had happened between Nile and each of them, years ago—hadn’t they? And that’s why it felt like this? And that’s why he was here in their apartment?

Tomasa had backed away from Nile at the same moment Ismail had, but she’d also felt a strong impulse to touch his hair—longer and wilder than she remembered it. Instead she took a seat on the small red ottoman, pushing it away a little so she could better see both of them, her husband and this man she long ago assumed she would never see again.

Ismail then told the story of the camping trip with his father, how he’d learned how to set his dog’s injured leg and find fresh water and forage. All three were relieved to have this story on which to affix their focus rather than on the sudden uncertainty in the room. Following Ismail, Tomasa recounted how her mother had taught her how to grow and use various herbs for everything from muscle cramps to opening the third eye. She knew this knowledge was something she’d keep forever, that anything you learn early enough tends to remain, hardened, no matter how helpful or useless, in your life.

You lose everything else, don’t you? she asked no one and no one replied. And don’t you have that tincture for pain, Ismail asked, and Oh yes, how could I forget, Tomasa said, and suddenly she was holding a dropper over Nile’s open mouth, watching the dark jewels of it land on his tongue. Instinctually, Nile reached up as if to help guide her hand, but only the tips of two fingers had grazed the side of her palm and a current passed between the two of them that Ismail also felt as he watched.

They kept talking after that, telling stories of home, those faraway and long-abandoned places. Tomasa knew so many of Ismail’s anecdotes, but she also

noticed how he always told them slightly differently—new details came up or old ones fell away. And as he spoke now there was a new vibrancy in his face; it was almost as if his eyes had changed color. Or was it just that they never stayed up so late? It was nearly two in the morning and the conversation kept finding new turns, and they all felt both at ease and uneasy as their bodies subconsciously and constantly calculated the volume of air between this body and that body, the negative space, the distance between them.

At two, Tomasa had been the one to wave the white flag of exhaustion, and soon they began retreating toward sleep. Once he’d shut the bedroom door, Ismail had wondered if he and Tomasa might finally confess how they each knew Nile, if he might finally hear himself detailing their encounter to his wife—or was that too large a confession so late at night? They hadn’t done so. They’d kissed each other goodnight and held each other a while before rolling apart to pass the night untouched. Soon everyone had fallen asleep except for Tomasa, who stared at the ceiling for a while, slept shallowly, and woke thrice before getting up to face the day.

The way the morning light was hitting that pale blue bowl on the kitchen countertop—creating such luster in the ceramic’s glaze—it made Tomasa wish (yet again) that she had learned to paint. She studied the edge of the bowl as if she knew how to render it in oils, or as if she were examining a painting that she’d already made. Was it fine enough? Was it real enough?

The bowl had been an engagement gift from the locally famous potter in her hometown. The potter was much older than Tomasa, but close in age to her neverwas husband; the two had grown up in neighboring houses and had come to see each other as brothers. Tomasa knew it hadn’t really been fair of her to take the bowl for herself when she ended that relationship by leaving town—and so abruptly, and without telling anyone—but it was the choice that she had made and it was too late to unmake it. Now, when she used the bowl or even just looked at it, she never regretted smuggling it away from him, though she wasn’t entirely without shame. It was just that she’d had so few possessions back then, and the bowl had seemed like a crucial talisman that she would need to arrive wherever it was that she was going. The bowl seemed to promise her an eventual home, a real home, in this new country. She had packed it carefully for her long journey, and looked after it the whole way through—wrapping and rewrapping it in a wool sweater, holding it on her lap during a rickety bus journey on a mountainous road—and now it had finally arrived here, with her, somewhere she both lived and felt alive.

But just a month prior, Tomasa had received a letter from Luci—the only friend from back home she trusted with her new address—and Luci had written

to say that the famous potter had fallen on hard times. His wife had been bedridden for a year now, their young child had died of a fever, and recently the potter had developed mysterious pains in his hands that often prevented him from carrying out his work. There were fewer and fewer pots, fewer bowls, and with every passing day this light blue bowl—oval shaped and perfectly irregular—seemed like evidence of Tomasa’s culpability in his fate, as if by taking this beautiful object that didn’t entirely belong to her, she was secretly the one to blame for his suffering.

Tomasa had always been, from a very young age, fluent in every kind of guilt, a willing sponge for the guilt of others, a magnet that pulled ambient guilt from any group and transformed it into her debt to settle. This is the problem she will live with, to lesser and greater degrees, all her life, right up until her final weeks alive, when, finally, in her last decrepit days of breathing, the self-inflicted burden of being the world’s guilt-eater will depart from Tomasa, leaving her with the freedom to die a clean death. But she doesn’t know this now. She cherishes the sky-blue bowl. She even cherishes the blame it points in her direction.

Then Ismail appeared at the threshold of the kitchen, interrupting her dwelling, rubbing at one eye and stretching the other arm. He went to her and held her and after they’d traded yawns they began to whisper, as if conspiring, about how the other slept or didn’t sleep, and about the images in their dreams—a train Ismail was unable to catch, a vineyard where Tomasa was working. Neither of them yet knew that Nile had just woken as well. He had turned onto his back and opened his eyes slowly, waking up in an unknown room, faintly confused but somehow delighted in his confusion, and as he sat up and looked to his left, he saw his hosts down the hall in the kitchen, embracing in the morning light.

The clearest memory Nile had kept of Ismail was from the weekend they’d met, some six years ago in the forest. Nile had been watching Ismail break down his campsite on their last morning together, collapsing the tent frame while Nile had sipped from his tin cup of coffee, feeling at once unburdened and serious, as if he knew he must have been approaching a difficult era, personally, but did not yet know what difficulties it would entail. Of Tomasa, whom he’d known a little longer but less profoundly, he remembered the moment they met more than anything that came after; her then-naive grip on this language had endeared her to him as she asked for directions in the street. All their mistranslations and misapprehensions had created a light, comical dynamic between the two, one that had carried them into a few weeks’ courtship. Like a well-made but nevertheless burnable paper airplane, this way of being together could not survive for long.

Over coffee Nile and Ismail and Tomasa decided it was only right to go out for breakfast, a reward for having stayed up late, praising Dionysus with all that wine. It was a cooler morning than this winter had yet brought; the chill enlivened them as much as the café’s warmth.

After they’d found a table in the corner and settled into it, Ismail spotted the previous night’s scandal in the opposite corner, by the windows, pawing at each other. The analyst wore a bright-yellow scarf around her neck and shoulders while the redhead, whose hair was disheveled and eyes raccooned with mascara, kept laying her head on the older woman’s shoulder and raising one corner of the scarf to her mouth, chewing on it like a puppy or a feral child.

Don’t all look at once, Ismail cautioned, but over there, by the windows—

So Nile quickly sent his eyes leftward, then Tomasa had to turn almost all the way around, ostensibly to readjust the peacoat she’d flung over her chair. Right away they noticed how the previous night’s illicit glisten had drained away from the adulterous couple, yet something solid did seem to remain. The analyst and the redhead held some of that worn triumph that a decades-enduring couple sometimes has. But how? It was obvious the affair couldn’t have been going for so long. And, what—was the girl even twenty-four, twenty-five?

As subtle as they’d tried to be, the analyst had noticed being noticed, and while holding eye contact with Ismail she raised her coffee cup, toasting the apparent tryst. Because that’s what it looked like, they all realized now. The three of them had been locked in conversation for hours at Rin’s house, had left at the same time, and now here they were, bleary at the café the morning after. It wasn’t untrue, it just wasn’t true in the way it would be naturally assumed. Or was it? Tomasa turned back to smile at the analyst, feeling analyzed, and almost a little too seen.

Having been spotted, that now familiar agitation grew between the three of them, a nervous energy they tried to dispel, yet again, by telling stories of home, old stories, origin stories, backstories. Nile considered but chose not to tell the couple about the afternoon when he and his best friend, at fourteen, had stolen two horses from the neighbor’s barn, and while Nile had been trotting his horse gingerly across the field, his friend’s mare had suddenly bucked and the boy had gone flying in a huge arc, the boy’s laughter sounding wild and clear until he landed on his head and was dead on impact.

But Nile did not tell this story, only thought of it briefly before recounting the time he went missing as a toddler but was found hours later in the sheep’s pen, napping amid the lambs. Ismail followed this with his favorite piece of selfmythology—the afternoon he’d wandered free from his mother at the market

and made the logical choice to take apples from the vendors’ massive piles and hand them out to the beggars who sat on the ground. The vendors had watched him, frozen, unable to intervene, and once his mother found little Ismail again all she could do was pay for the pilfered fruit and carry him home, without a punishment, without a word.

Tomasa felt she didn’t have any stories like theirs, no charming evidence of her innocence. So few of her tales from childhood ended happily, or at least she couldn’t think of any of them now. What came to mind instead, for some reason, was what happened a week before she left her homeland, a detail she often omitted when people asked why she’d left everything she knew for a country she’d never even visited.

Tomasa had, she thought, loved the man she was engaged to marry—despite his inconstant rage, despite his having thrown her into a wall. Didn’t you have to love someone so intelligent who wrote so many love poems about you? Yet it was also true that Tomasa felt then, at twenty-two, that there was something about her impending nuptials that she did not understand, so she went to see the witch who lived in the hut on the edge of town. The witch knew immediately why Tomasa had come.

He’s sleeping with another woman, someone you know.

The witch’s psychic powers were not at play; in small towns, the betrayed is often the last to know of the betrayal, yet Tomasa only reacted with a blink.

But you do not care, do you?

I care, Tomasa said.

You do not care because you are in love with someone else.

Tomasa did not say anything to this. Perhaps she heard an owl’s call or perhaps she just imagined it.

It’s your friend.

Symptoms of being told a fact you have almost successfully denied include silence, nausea, and blushing.

And the reason you’re in love with her, the witch continued, is because she can—in a glance or by ignoring you or with a single word—cause you pain. This is what you must unlearn. You must teach yourself to stop meeting pain, or the threat of pain, with love.

Dominica. Beautiful Dominica with all her knife tricks and strange ways of dragging the backs of her hands across Tomasa’s body. Dominica, freakishly fairhaired and dark-eyed, who described her life as a perpetual game against God.

For this, you must leave this place and travel very far.

RACHEL WHITEREAD: CASTING HISTORY

From her Judenplatz Holocaust Memorial in Vienna (2000) to her casting of George Orwell’s World War II office at the BBC (2003), the sculptor Rachel Whiteread has long engaged with the emotional and historical complexities of addressing deeply troubling moments in human history through art. This month, Whiteread will debut a new work for the inaugural exhibition at the Goodwood Art Foundation in Sussex, England.

ALISON MCDONALD Your work often meditates on the unseen or forgotten. I wonder about your thoughts on the way history gets written.

RACHEL WHITEREAD One of the most striking things about history is how it repeats itself—time and time again, seemingly with little remorse. Especially with everything we are experiencing at this moment. It makes one aware of how artists and museums have a responsibility for recording history and keeping it alive so that eventually, hopefully, we can learn not to repeat past mistakes. The job of an artist is to try to work as a cipher, to bring clarity in a creative way.

AM Over twenty years ago you designed the Judenplatz Holocaust Memorial in Vienna. This was a complicated project for many reasons, but the finished work is remarkable in its ability to distill such a massive and emotionally charged part of history. For generations into the future this sculpture will pay tribute to countless lost lives. The work is incredibly powerful, yet meditates in a place of quiet.

RW Well, reflection is an incredibly important part of grieving and also of understanding. You can’t understand something through instantaneous response. It takes time to pick over what’s happened and learn from it.

AM Can you elaborate on how you approached the proposal?

RW It was completely daunting. My research was wide and varied. If I hadn’t lived in Berlin for eighteen months, I would never have attempted to make a proposal. In Berlin, I could feel the traces of trauma and of knowing that Germany had spent an enormous amount of time, resources, and intellect attempting to better understand what had happened and why it had happened. In Vienna that trauma is still very present.

AM The structure resembles both a library (a source of knowledge and empowerment) and a bunker (a means of protecting oneself). The books that line its walls are all the same size; the leaves of the books face outward and the spines face inward.

There are engravings in the ground around the sculpture that record all the camps where Jewish people were murdered. And the sculpture sits on the site of a historic Jewish temple and across the plaza from a very different kind of statue, of the eighteenth-century writer Gotthold Ephraim Lessing. Would you take us through some of these details and the decisions you made along the way?

RW It was a challenge. I wanted the memorial and the sculpture of Lessing—a sympathetic German poet, philosopher, dramatist, and voice for peace— to be in conversation, culminating in a disruptive presence within a very quiet historical square. It was part of the proposal to include the information on lives lost. I have them on the ground, but they could have been presented as just a small plaque, or any other way. As for the structure, I wanted it to look like a bunker. That was something I was very clear about. A lot of the research I’d done was looking at historical bunkers. I wanted it to be quite brutal, but also sensitive. So the idea emerged to incorporate books, to cast it as a library. The books could be anything—I cast their spines inward so there’s no information clarifying specifics about them. They can be read as lists of names, Jewish history, world history, poetry, whatever the viewer wants them to be. What I like to do with my work is leave things so there’s an opening for interpretation.

AM And the doors you can’t open—

RW There are two holes where the doorknobs were. They’re small circular apertures—the only things you can see from the ground that are slightly open, almost like eyes.

AM How do you see that piece now, so many years after you created it?

RW Well, I’m extremely proud of it. And I’m always very touched by how moved people are by it. When I made the work I cast extra books because I thought the work would get vandalized. In fact it’s been incredibly well respected. And the other thing people don’t typically know about the work,

Opposite: Rachel Whiteread’s Judenplatz Holocaust Memorial (2000) in Vienna. Photo: Stephen Burrows/Alamy Stock Photo

This page:

Rachel Whiteread, Untitled (Room 101), 2003, mixed media, 118 × 197 × 253 inches (300 × 500 × 643 cm). Photo: Mike Bruce

Memorials tend to be very serious, while outdoor sculpture can often be very playful. But they can both be plopped in places where they’re completely inappropriate, and for me, the placing of memorials and sculptures is very important. It’s something that I do. It’s part of my language. It’s how I think.

— Rachel Whiteread

because it’s rarely photographed from the top, is that at the center of the roof there’s a big ceiling rose with a hole. When it rains the water pours through it, and for me that’s always felt like tears running through the sculpture.

AM The site was originally a medieval synagogue, right?

RW Yes. When it first opened, I worked with the architects, who designed a structure of packed mud under the sculpture that included medieval remnants of the former synagogue. There were two rooms, which now are a Jewish study center, that had a lot of information and drawings of mine. That original exhibition has come down. Still, that was a whole other layer to the work.

AM As an artist who has made many different temporary and permanent public sculptures, and who has talked about your interest in studying people’s interactions with memorials (making rubbings to record loved ones’ names, bringing flowers, leaving candles or stones, etc.), I wonder if you have thoughts about the distinctions that might exist between public sculptures and memorials?

RW It’s a difficult issue. Memorials tend to be very serious, while outdoor sculpture can often be very playful. But they can both be plopped in places where they’re completely inappropriate, and for me, the placing of memorials and sculptures is very important. It’s something that I do. It’s part of my language. It’s how I think. I’ve always been interested in urban planning and architecture and things like that—in why things get put where they are and what decisions informed the choice. And often it’s just a bunch of red tape—that might be one difference. Lots and lots of people are making a decision and as an artist you need to have the confidence to stand firm. And that’s something I can do, but it’s exhausting. Yet these works can be very worthwhile.

AM You cast Room 101 of the BBC’s London headquarters, Broadcasting House, where George Orwell worked during World War II—a room that’s been discussed as possibly inspiring the dystopian novel 1984 [1949]. Can you talk a bit about

that project, and about the traces of history you felt in the space that resonated for you?

RW Well, I was approached with the idea of casting Orwell’s office, which was really enticing. It was a complicated work to make because it was up ten flights of stairs, with lots of corridors, and no lifts were working. The building was under construction and we had a limited amount of time there. When we first came across the room it was full of massive industrial aluminum boxes and pipes and electrical wires and whatever, which we ripped out very roughly. Consequently the room looked like it had been under fire, like it had been in a war zone. So we cast that. Orwell was a fantastic writer and this work recalled the time he spent at the BBC. It later informed how I make the Shy Sculptures [2018– ], which are almost antimonuments.

AM One of your Shy Sculptures is a cast of a Nissen hut, a simple prefabricated building that was economical and portable, produced in response to supply-chain shortages of building materials during World War I. Human creativity in response to the limitations of materials in short supply during the war is a fascinating topic in World War II as well, and in fact Nissen huts grew in popularity during World War II.

RW I was asked to make a piece in Dalby Forest in Yorkshire, so I visited a number of sites. I responded to the history of this particular hut—I thought, I could use that, but it was very disheveled and dilapidated. And that was actually the first piece that I reinvented: I used it as a basis and then copied the plans of a Nissen hut. It was about invention as much as casting the actual object that was there. And it’s enormous. While it was the location that really attracted me to do it, the idea of making something within this forest, I was also intrigued by how Nissen huts are set up. They’re still used now, actually: they’re like permanent tents—there was brickwork, there was woodwork, there was corrugated iron. I bought all of the supplies, put them together, and then I cast it. There’s something special about the way these buildings exist in kit form and are transportable, being made

This page: Rachel Whiteread, Nissen Hut , 2018, concrete, 9 feet 10 1 8 inches × 17 feet ¾ inches × 36 feet 6 inches (3 × 5.2 × 11.1 m), installation view, Dalby Forest, Yorkshire, England. Photo: Ben Thomas, Forest Commission

Opposite:

Rachel Whiteread, US Embassy (Flat pack house), 2013–15, concrete, installed at the US Embassy, London. Photo: Mike Bruce

on a drawing board and then clipped together to become a home, hospital, storage shed, or ammunition store. They were adaptable buildings.

AM For the US Embassy in London you created a sculpture of a flat-pack house—a home delivered in a box. This type of portable housing furnished living quarters for military personnel through both world wars, as well as during England’s colonial expansions, the gold rush in the United States, and so on. How does this sculpture bring forward ideas of “home,” or “a home away from home,” or a “longing for home”?

RW Well, the location of that work is very different. People are often going to embassies to get visas and such, and those moments are often accompanied by feelings of fear or anxiety, that things might not go the way they’re hoping. There’s a strong sense of authority. You also have to understand that the embassy was being constructed as I was making the sculpture, so it was hard to envisage what was going on. But I just kept thinking about the people, and the fact that there was this thing about inside and outside going on, and the feeling you get when you’re between two places. Borders are set up to divide us, to divide people, and if you have any sense of humanity, you don’t want that division to be there. You want it to be open, but obviously it can’t be, there are borders—that’s how we’ve constructed the world.

AM In earlier conversations you’ve recounted how large areas in Britain were devastated by bombing raids during World War II.

RW I am part of the generation where my parents were very young, perhaps about seven, when all of this was happening. My father was in London until he was sent out as an evacuee and had a terrible time in the countryside. And my mother was in Liverpool, which was also very badly bombed, she was staying in shelters and would play on the bomb sites. Lots of my friends’ parents had very similar experiences. And having parents who were very much a part of that without doubt becomes part of your psyche, because it’s stories that they tell you. My grandfather on my father’s side was a conscientious objector, and on my mother’s side he went to war. So we had experiences on both sides. One grandfather was very political and went to prison—to stand up like that within a family of working-class people was a very, very tough thing to do, even though that whole family just didn’t agree with violence. It scarred him all his life, and it probably scarred my father as well. My mother had very different experiences, where her father, who had gone to war, had terrible nightmares. These things become part of your own history and experience. I’m a sponge for emotion and other people’s trauma, and that affects me.

From deep in the wild world of Marchesa Luisa Casati, Walton Ford continues to reflect on the bon vivant subject of his recent exhibition Tutto. Depicting the exotic animals that she kept, Ford portrays her years in Venice shortly before World War I.

TUTTO

Previous spread, left: Walton Ford, La levata del sole, 2025, watercolor, gouache, and ink on paper, 115 × 60 inches (292.1 × 152.4 cm) © Walton Ford.

Photo: Tom Powel

Previous spread, right: The Marchesa Luisa Casati with one of her pet cheetahs, c. 1912, Venice. Photo: unknown photographer, courtesy Ryersson & Yaccarino/The Casati Archives © The Casati Archives

This page, left to right: Walton Ford, Tutto fu ambito e tutto fu tentato, 2025, watercolor, gouache, and ink on paper, 60 × 89 ½ inches (152.4 × 227.3 cm) © Walton Ford. Photo: Tom Powel

Walton Ford, Desiderio infinito, 2025, watercolor, gouache, and ink on paper, 94 × 60 ¼ inches (238.8 × 153 cm) © Walton Ford. Photo: Tom Powel

Walton Ford, Forse che sì forse che no, 2024, watercolor, gouache, and ink on paper, 84 × 60 inches (213.4 × 152.4 cm) © Walton Ford. Photo: Tom Powel

A cheetah is not something to own. A cheetah should be like the surging wind before a monsoon, ripping hot dust into the air and stripping dead leaves from the trees. The Marchesa Luisa Casati was like a cheetah in this way—it was a bad idea for anyone to try to possess her. Yet the marchesa kept cheetahs as pets, in the artificial confines of Venice, no less. Perhaps she was aware of the paradox; we can’t know. She rarely said or wrote anything about herself. She was a visual artist. Her medium was her body, costumed for spectacle, and she wore the cheetahs like garments—like her pearls or her nudity, her makeup, furs, masks, headdresses, and lovers.

Neither the marchesa nor her cheetahs were domesticated. Domestic animals chose domestication long ago, evolving past mere tameness into creatures born with the inclination to move toward docility, compromise, and partnership. These submissive qualities are entirely absent from all big cats, just as they were absent from Casati.

Secondhand accounts of Casati’s life in Venice are rich in visual poetry. There are reports of her wearing only a fur coat while walking her cheetahs in the Piazza San Marco. Others remember sighting her gliding in her gondola with the big cats beside her. There are numerous descriptions of Casati in front of her palazzo, lit by torchlight, costumed by Léon Bakst, silently greeting guests at one of her outrageous masquerades, her two fearsome cheetahs eyeing all comers.

This is the kind of surreal imagery that I thrive on. I feel like my relationship with the Marchesa Luisa Casati and her cheetahs has just begun.

FASHION AND ART PART 22: YOON AHN

Yoon Ahn and her partner Verbal established their jewelry and design line Ambush in 2008. Since then, they have collaborated with renowned musicians, artists, and other luminaries on projects for the brand. In 2018, Ahn was appointed the jewelry director at Dior Men, and she recently collaborated with Nike and tennis star Naomi Osaka on a full apparel collection. Here, the Quarterly ’s Derek C. Blasberg speaks with Ahn about her peripatetic childhood, pivotal moments in her design education, and the evolution of the Ambush universe.

DEREK C. BLASBERG: Were you an arty kid?

What are your earliest art memories?

YOON AHN: We moved around a lot because my dad was in the military, so museums and galleries were less a big part of my childhood than things like magazines and going online.

DB: Where were you born?

YA: Korea. Every few years, we moved. I lived in Hawaii when I was a kid, then we went to California, then back to Korea, back and forth again, and finally we settled in the suburbs of Seattle. That’s where I settled down and got used to a place. I spent a lot of time at the public library. I wasn’t interested in art books yet; I was more drawn to fashion, so I dove into the old i-D magazines and The Face . From there I learned more about the art world but it was always through the lens of pop culture, fashion designers, musicians and music videos and stuff. For me it was never “Let me study art.” It was always going down the rabbit holes of different things.

DB: Fashion was your gateway drug.

YA: Yeah. You’re young and you look at these beautiful people, not just fashion models but all the interesting characters you see populating these worlds. Also, living in the suburbs of Seattle, which was quite gray and full of all the stereotypes, like flannel shirts, I’d look at the opposite end of the world and think, “Omigod there’s a beautiful place out there with these kinds of people and one day I hope I can make it out there.” It gave me a mental escape to yearn toward something in the future.

DB: How long did you stay in Seattle?

YA: Middle school and high school in Seattle, and then I went to Boston University, where I studied graphic design. This is when I started to get into the art world a little more, because the graphic design program wasn’t entirely based on what you can do on a computer. My teachers were classically trained and they insisted that we do it in the way they were taught in the ’60s and ’70s: we’d have to source, cut, paste, all the things that were established in fine art courses, including oil painting and sculpture. And then the curriculum opened into a full graphic design program from junior year. DB: I wonder if graphic design programs still emphasize non-tech-based process?

YA: I’m not sure, but I’m so grateful we had to do everything by hand. Our professor studied under Paul Rand, one of the most iconic graphic designers ever. He did logos for Apple, IBM, FedEx, all these incredible brands. He was

brought up in the era of the modernist graphic designers and he believed that you need to have the eye, and be able to figure out what makes sense, before you put your hand on this frame. He’d tell us to think about typography in terms of the words, colors, and shapes that will cut them together and visually convey what the message is about. Literally, two years was a lot of cutting and pasting by hand. At that time I couldn’t really understand why he was doing that; we were kids and kept asking, “Can we just get a computer?” But looking back I really appreciate it because it helped me to think about the process and the steps. I was able to train my eyes to have precision right away, which helped me when I got into jewelry and clothes later on. If I looked at something, I could tell if it wasn’t symmetrical, something was off, you know—those things come with practice. I’m sure everything’s changed and we’re in a different place now. Everyone is talking about AI, which doesn’t even require humans. But I believe you do still need the creative eye to be able to use these tools to produce something creative.

DB: What did you do after Boston University?

YA: I worked in Boston for a few years, doing very uptight, corporate graphic design jobs. It was entry level, of course, so I was assisting other designers, and we did a lot of schools, hospitals, and a lot of corporate things. I jumped from college, where I didn’t even get to really develop software skills, into a corporate setting, where I had to learn software, which was very technical. So it was technical and conservative and stiff, which I didn’t love, but I can now appreciate all those experiences and the exposure to different forms of graphic design. Those definitely came in handy when I started my own brand. Looking back, it makes sense, but yeah, at the time I was bored

DB: You were incubating in your boredom.

DB: When you were in a suburban high school in Seattle, did you dream of becoming a jeweler or fashion designer?

YA: No way! Fashion was something I was obsessed with looking at but I didn’t think I was going to be part of the industry. It was just more like, “Oh, I admire these people. They’re so inspiring.” I was drawn to characters, I think. I was more into music and music personalities. When I moved to Japan to be a freelance graphic designer, I got a closer look at other worlds. Specifically, I spent a lot of time clubbing, which was a mix of fashion and art and other industries. When I say clubbing, I don’t mean New York kinds of clubs.

DB: It’s a good distinction. You’re not talking about finance bros and bottle service.

YA: Exactly. In Tokyo the clubbing scene is more like London, where there’s a music movement and you become part of the local scene.

DB: What convinced you to move from Boston to Tokyo?

YA: My partner, who started Ambush with me, said, “Why don’t you try Tokyo, because I think you might enjoy a different challenge.” He said there were more opportunities there, and we should just go out, try it, and if we don’t like it, we can always go back to the States and move to New York. That was almost twenty

DB: Famous last words.

Previous spread: Yoon Ahn, 2024. Photo: Hioshi Manaka

This spread, left to right: NOMAD Anchor Chain Manaka, POW! ® Chain, and NOMAD Grill Ring; photos: Toshiaki Shiga

YA: Exactly.

DB: Your big break were some of the jewelry pieces. I remember the pow and were sold at Colette. How did those happen?

YA: That’s where clubbing and meeting people through the music scene played a role. Obviously I’m crunch ing up years of experience, but the thing I loved about clubbing at that time was that everything I’d read about in The Face and peacocking part of it, I could see with a new gen eration coming into this Tokyo scene. That was taking place in fashion and music and all that stuff. But there was a time when everybody used to go out every single day, which is kind of weird because if you’re familiar with Asian culture, there’s quite a hierarchy, even in fash ion, where there’s older-generation people and younger. I loved this moment when everyone was mix-matching and in the same place, we all hung out, had fun, exchanged ideas. That’s how I met all the OGs and the generation above me from the fashion scene. They gave me a chance to collaborate, introduced me to new music peo ple, exchanged ideas. It wasn’t like now, when all the kids are kind of sitting there thinking, “I want to start a brand.” It wasn’t. It was literally just talking about things, and then you’d go back home and it would be like, Let me make this, let me make that, for fun. Then it all kind of brewed together. I’m sure New York had that kind of scene too, no?

DB: When I first moved to New York in the early 2000s, there was an element of that. But now I think, sadly, New York has become so expensive and so corporatized, you actually don’t get as much mixing among financial classes, the way you’re talking about, as you used to. Which is a problem. I think if New York wants to remain a creative hub they need to think about how to handle disparity of wealth.

Kanye used to come out to Tokyo a lot, he picked up Ambush and he’d wear it. Sarah [Andelman] from Colette was the first one to actually put an order in from outside Japan. It probably wasn’t even a brand yet! It was like, “Okay, I guess we got an order, can you make a few more,” to the people who were making those chains and rings for us. We were packing it and sending it from our own apartments! We didn’t even have an office at the time. Eventually we had to sit and think, “Is this something we’re taking seriously?” It’s as if we’d sung a song for fun and it had gotten featured on a famous singer’s album. You ask, “Do I stay as a one-hit wonder or do I have to pursue things and see how far it can go?” I thought, Life’s short, right? Let’s

Officially we launched around 2012, not knowing how the fashion system worked, never having worked in the fashion industry. I didn’t know the system. We just launched it and then we’d show whatever and buyers would be like, “You know, there’s things called ‘seasons’ and ‘buying.’ We can’t put out the budget just because you emailed us.” I was like, “Oh, okay.” That’s when we started to get in shape as a brand—“Oh, we’re going to do two collections, we’ll do spring/summer, fall/winter.” Everything was quite DIY.

YA: Of course we do! We’re much more structured. I have a lot of employees to feed, so we need structure. It helps me be creative within a certain framework.

DB: Is your creative process different now?

YA: I’m less familiar with New York because I’ve never lived there, but I think it’s beyond the financial things. People have to be hungry for newness. You can’t really pinpoint what that is, but people come together when they’re collectively seeking something new, and that’s when a new culture is born. I worry that, right now, new things are being born but because we’re exposed to so much stuff at the speed of light, it all just gets recycled so quickly. There’s no time to actually sit and marinate and have conversations about these things, no time to go and think things through. The way we come together is different now. Twenty years ago, even fifteen or ten years ago, even in the Tokyo scene, it was different. We spoke more, we had conversations. The other important thing to mention is that we were doing it just for fun, we weren’t trying to monetize everything.

DB: Have you read Patti Smith’s Just Kids [2010]?

YA: Yes, great book.

DB: I reread it this year and it made me so nostalgic for a moment in New York when it felt like so many people were focused on creativity, when young artists were paying their rent with paintings. It seems sort of quaint nowadays.

YA: I think that helped creativity.

DB: What were some of the big first moments you had with Ambush?

YA: We’d make things for fun, and they’d get picked up naturally, because we happened to be in the right place with the right people at the right time.

YA: At that time it was less about products and more about establishing who you wanted to be in the scene. Back then, we were much more focused on how we even get our foot in the door in the industry. One thing I noticed while we were doing things in Tokyo was, Japanese buyers and the Japanese scene were looking for very safe things. When you’re young and you’re starting as a brand, sometimes you have more avant-garde ideas. It wasn’t the right time to kind of pull myself back to meet their small demands. So I was like, “Okay, whether I make it or not, let me see if I can go to Paris,” because that’s where the top-of-the-top people were. If I can survive there, I think I can kind of see where I can go with this. We went in 2017, did our first exhibition, and we showed a little bit of clothing with it. At the time we wanted our own clothes for our look book, we didn’t want to use someone else’s brand. So we made a few things and from there we took things step by step and kind of grew from it.

DB: What is Ambush universe?

YA: I started a content page, Ambush universe, on our website, linking to social media, to make it a window to our world for our customers and outsiders. I was somewhat frustrated with the media trying to box us into certain types or categories as a brand. Just because we dwell in the space of new-generation streetwear doesn’t mean we all like similar things, or came up looking at similar things. I created this to be in control of curation. There are categories like “Art & Design Theory,” “Field Study,” “Living World,” “Playlist,” “Ambush® Artifact,” and “In Focus.” They cover everything: people, places, sounds, visions, and anything that inspires us. Some are more direct extensions of our world, like our Spotify playlist, which gets shared in all our workshops (brick-and-mortar stores) to create a sonic mood to link to the product ambiance of our space. Some directly link to our archive pieces to reintroduce them and remind people what we’ve been doing if they just joined us on the ride. Another fun part is that we work with many up-and-coming photographers, illustrators, and writers worldwide to collaborate on the content.

DB: I saw artists like John Chamberlain, Constantin Brâncuși, and James Turrell, who’s one of my absolute favorites, on the site.

YA: They’ve influenced us in many ways in some of our pieces from past collections. We’d love to work with them or their estates one day if the opportunity arises.

DB: What kind of art are you drawn to?

YA: I don’t have a specific medium, but anyone with a very clear vision and easier-to-digest execution. I love how some artists see the world, and I learn a lot by digging into their thought processes, what made them become who they are, and how they are producing these fantastic arts to express themselves. Your peripheral vision widens as you study how many different ways you can look at the world and connect dots and

the best way to see other humans with empathy. I’ve done collections more directly related to artists, like the photographer Karlheinz Weinberger in our Halbstarke collection, the Alejandro Jodorowsky–inspired Holy Mountain collection, and the NOMAD collection inspired by Katsuhiro Otomo’s Akira. Most obviously, our genesis piece, the “ pow!” ring and necklace, was inspired by Roy Lichtenstein and Pop art.

DB: Are there any artists you’d love to work with?

YA: I’d love to work with one of my favorite directors one day, who include Luca Guadagnino, Denis Villeneuve, Wong Kar-wai, and David Fincher. It would be a dream to be part of a movie by working on costumes that define the characters. The fashion catwalk or presentation is a tiny version, where the setting, sound, characters, and collection story all come together, for a few minutes anyway, so I’d love to experience making a more long-lasting version.

DB: What was it like being in Paris?

YA: I always felt like I was an outsider because I didn’t come from a fashion school, I didn’t come up under a certain designer or get trained a certain way. So I had to work on being open to doing things differently from the way they’d been done in the past. We were so open to receiving a different way of doing things. Nowadays the word “collaboration” is such a big part of everyone’s marketing exercise, but that’s always been in the DNA of what we’ve done and how we came up. Someone from Amazon would be like, “Do you want to do something?” And I’d be like, “Yeah, actually I do have an idea. I’m from Seattle!” I’d just come up with fun ideas and we’d put together a fashion show, but also there’s different things going on where I’m serving food in an Amazon Prime box to people in their seats right away. I’d just come up with fun ideas to see what I could do beyond jewelry and fashion. It’s hard to explain because if you’re not from fashion I think people will be like, “How’s that going to go with clothes?” But it makes sense to me.

you produce as a creative person but also about what type of business you’ve built to support your creativity. That requires creativity.

DB: Ten years or so ago, there was a retrospective of Comme des Garçons at the Met[ropolitan Museum of Art, New York], and it was incredible to see her work positioned in one of the most important art museums in the country. Do you collect any art?

YA: Actually I’m purging a lot of stuff right now. There’s just so much going on every day from morning to night that when I come home I love sitting in silence and nothingness. I don’t want any furniture or anything. It’s quite extreme.

DB: You’ve turned into a minimalist.

DB: Do any art movements or artists working today inspire what you do?

YA: I’ll be honest, I don’t check out that much art because you’ve only got twenty-four hours in a day and my head is in a zillion different spaces right now. But I went to Korea Frieze, I went to Hong Kong Art Basel. I go around and look at things and some of the names I recognize. But I can’t pinpoint something like, This person’s really interesting to what I’m doing with the label.

DB: Do you think fashion can ever be art? Do you think art can ever be fashion?

YA: It depends on what type of designer you want to be. There are so many fashion designers who do very creative things but also made a very sustainable business. I’m from Japan, so we can talk about Comme des Garçons. [The designer Rei Kawakubo] can do those amazing pieces on a catwalk, which are art, but she

YA: I want to get rid of everything! It’s interesting to say—or it’s ironic to say, as someone who makes things—that I don’t have as much attachment to things as I used to. I think that kind of freed me a lot, actually, to be creative in a new way from before.

DB: Karl Lagerfeld was like that. There was a point in his life where he’d collected as much eighteenth-century gilded furniture as he possibly could, and was well-known in every auction house, and then one day he woke up and decided, “I’m actually over this and I don’t want any of it.”

And that’s when he sort of went space-age futuristic.

YA: I’m kind of the same. Now my head’s more in that space, and I look forward to the future more than the past, more than to collecting, holding on to things. I guess there’s an art to that too, right? Consuming those things to study and really understand what it was about is a beautiful journey, to be able to collect it and actually make that be part of you. But I don’t see the point of collecting something for the vanity of it. I’d rather not have that and have a very open headspace that I can fill with the things I’m naturally drawn to. And I’d rather just kind of dwell in that space. It sounds abstract but maybe it’s that I’m a little bit older and wiser. But that’s what I mean about things—just that things don’t interest me as much.

DB: Spoken like an artist!

YA: Looking for connection, not just things.

DB: Have you ever thought about going back to your roots and trying out being a fine artist?

YA: Well, I’d just call myself a mixed-medium artist. One day I could do sculpture. I could try painting, film, whatever. I guess in that way I feel like I relate a lot to how Pop art came out in the ’60s— there were things that were happening in society, in the zeitgeist moment, but also there’s a message behind it.

DB: That era had a lot of experimentation, artists doing films, sculptors doing live

YA: On the surface, people looked at it as something light. But it wasn’t. It was quite philosophical what Andy Warhol and those guys were doing. I’d love to bring that era back again.

This page, left to right: NOMAD Crest Leather Bracelets, NOMAD Smiley Whistle; photos: Toshiaki Shiga

Opposite: AMBUSH® Spring-Summer 2016 look book. Photo: Amy Gwatkin

Swiss Institute, New York, is staging an exhibition that places the paintings of Louise Bonnet and the sculptures and videos of Elizabeth King in dialogue. Ahead of the exhibition’s opening this May, Stefanie Hessler—the show’s curator and the Institute’s director—met with the two artists to discuss animacy, gesture, and the liminal space between life and lifelikeness.

LOUISE BONNET AND ELIZABETH KING

STEFANIE HESSLER The title of the exhibition is De Anima , and through pairings of both of your works we’ve been exploring the increasingly blurry boundaries of life and nonlife in relation to art, technology, and gender. The presentation will examine notions of life and lifelikeness at a moment of heightened pressure on ontological, epistemological, and ethical questions concerning animacy, the quality of being alive. Elizabeth, your sculptures and animations in search of the perfect, most lifelike forms and movements, as well as your research into automata, make us think of today’s automatic chatbots that pass as all too human but that lack life or life force. And Louise, your paintings show bodies suspended between tooabundant-with and emptied-of life, falling off couches or performing a gesture until it becomes second nature. The exhibition is a result of this ongoing conversation among you two and myself. Louise, is there a certain aspect of these discussions that you’d like to revive here?

LOUISE BONNET I think about the Jaquet-Droz automata [automata built by a Swiss watchmaking family in the eighteenth century] all the time. Elizabeth, you told us the story of two of those automatons: one is playing an instrument, so everyone’s supposed to look at that one, but then there’s another one that’s seemingly “off,” since it isn’t its turn to perform, but it’s actually active in very subtle ways

that you don’t really notice, shifting a little bit, like it’s waiting. There’s something about that dynamic that’s been a recurring interest.

ELIZABETH KING Yes! The harpsichord player waits while the draftsman and writer perform. Encountering them, you realize she’s been moving too, almost imperceptibly. I certainly didn’t know this before I went to see these Enlightenment automata in [the Musée d’art et d’histoire de] Neuchâtel. I knew I was going to see a demonstration; I didn’t know that one of them was going to be waiting, actively waiting, before she herself performed. The shock of discovering this, but then the amazement at how she’d been animated to do these very minimal, almost unconscious movements, reinforced some of the things I’ve tried to have my sculptures do in stop-motion film. I have no idea how Pierre and Henri-Louis Jaquet-Droz, and their colleague Jean-Frédéric Leschot, cut those automata’s cams. They would have had to be very, very slow curves. I’d love to look inside the figures to see the shapes that generate such exquisitely minimal, liminal sorts of motions.

SH And of course you’ve been working toward finding the perfect, lifelike joint or body part and sculpting that, and then also thinking about the perfect movement that feels as lifelike as possible in the animations.

EK Yes. And not just any gestures, but certain kinds of gestures that are more ambiguous. They might be gestures that signal the relationship of body to mind, as opposed to our age-old habit of separating those and putting the mind first. The whole robotics world is still discussing artificial life in terms of that old dichotomy. I’ve always felt that they can’t be pried apart. The kinds of motions that I want to capture are crafted around that. I loved your word “animacy,” Steffi. I actually looked it up—it’s a word that I didn’t know, from linguistics. In the case of a ladder falling on a man, the ladder appears animate. There can be an interesting switch in agency between the object and the subject of a verb.

SH And I think that also relates, Louise, to your work. The figures in your paintings feel both too alive and also like they’re being constrained—by tights, by clothing, by architecture, furniture, and so on.

LB As I’ve been working on the paintings for the show I’ve been thinking a lot about “tells”— the things your body does against your will, the small, usually overlooked or unconscious movements we make. I’m making new paintings that are oriented around pants or jackets: a body putting pants on, a body putting a jacket on, but the jacket or the pants aren’t there. So you see the figures doing something, and you might not know exactly what they’re doing, but I think it makes your own body react, because it knows that gesture. I found this old army manual that includes photos showing how various uniforms are correctly supposed to be worn, like “This is for parachuting,” or whatever. I thought those pictures were great because they show soldiers or army personnel modeling the uniforms, and positioning their bodies in the movement that would be required along with whatever they are wearing. For the parachuting outfit, for example, the person is just standing a bit awkwardly on a very colorfully lit set, with their arms up, and it removes the crucial thing it’s all for, which is plummeting to earth—possibly to your death, in this case. I took cues from that. I’m putting my figures in a sort of theater—it’s as if AI or aliens made a handbook to show other aliens what it is to

put pants on, but they didn’t understand that the pants are actually the point. So there’s no pants, but there’s everything else.

EK That’s fantastic.

LB I’ve also been reading a lot of books about spies and spy craft, tells and misdirections, specifically using the body. During World War II, for example, when the British were parachuting spies into occupied France, these people had seconds to hide the parachute and then just walk away, as if they’d always lived there, so they had to be completely ready to look and seem French. They were given garlic chocolate to chew so they’d smell right, and had to know and remember things like, for example, never to put their hands in their pockets because French people never put their hands in their pockets. You’d get caught if you did stuff like that. I’m interested in movements that are mostly unconscious, or so rote that they become unconscious, and what they communicate.

SH The garlic chocolate is essentially doing the same thing as the movement in your work, Liz, and how you photograph your sculptures. I know you’re very specific about how they’re shown. I think, for example, of the ear in one of your sculptures, and how there are the lines on the skin behind the ear, which are so delicate and really make the work feel alive, even though we know it’s not. So there’s something about the simulation, the coming as close as possible and pushing toward that boundary, be it through the sculptural form, the gesture, or what you ingest.

EK Well, anything made of wood, let’s say, or of clay, or of paint, has physical and visual properties that insist on themselves, regardless of what they depict. I wonder if I can make an image that elicits responses that are reflexive and innate in us, despite the fact that we can see with our eyes that these are things made of clay. I was struck by a word that Ben Lerner used when he was writing [in the New York Review of Books ] about Ed Atkins’s work: he used the word “obligation.” If we think something is alive, it draws from us a sense of obligation—a feeling we don’t have in front of a photograph, or anything we feel isn’t sentient. It’s not unlike when you’re looking at someone who

Previous spread, left: Elizabeth King, Pupil, 1987–90, porcelain, glass eyes, carved wood (Swiss pear), and brass, one-half life size, all joints movable, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC © Elizabeth King. Photo: Katherine Wetzel

page:

Bonnet. Photo: Ed Mumford

This

Elizabeth King, Bartlett’s Left Hand , 2017, carved and turned English boxwood, one-half life size, all joints movable © Elizabeth King. Photo: Lynton Gardiner

you think is asleep, and then you realize their eye is just a slit open and they’re watching you. Your cover is blown! Now it’s a two-way street.

SH I’m rereading Iris Marion Young’s essay “Throwing Like a Girl” [1980]. She was examining the ways girls move differently before puberty, when girls’ and boys’ bodies aren’t really that different. And she asserted that the difference in movement is due not to biological reasons but to conditioning. The women are more inhibited in their movement; the supposed fact that girls can’t throw very well is not because of any physiological reasons but because of the way we’ve been trained to think of our own bodies and agency in space. Could we talk about your work in terms of gender and conditioning?

EK Louise, you paint both the male and the female figure, yes?

LB I really don’t totally think of them as fully either one, but I think that, since they’re me, really, in the end—in the way that in dreams it’s always you—they’re more female-looking because that’s what I know; I’m working from the inside out.

EK It’s interesting, in the history of automata and androids and cyborgs, they’re mostly female. Most of the literature involves a woman being made by a man. Here I am doing it too, god knows, though I’m a woman making a woman. Maybe it’s just what you say, Louise: you just work from the inside out. It goes with all the other kinds of things you can’t really control, like the size of the work you make, how big or small it is. And then everything that comes with how you make something, the gestures you yourself make, what you do with your body. In my younger years I wasn’t really aware of the extent to which I was working from the inside out. I didn’t want people to know these were self-portraits. As Adrian Piper said about her work, “Just because it’s a self-portrait doesn’t mean it’s about me.”

LB That’s good, yes.

EK But at the same time, the sculptures’ heads are hollow, and I’m literally working inside the head, making the nostrils go all the way through— so I’m bound to still be in there somewhere when the work is finished.

LB Do you think you’re making a space for you to be in?

EK Maybe. People ask me if I played with dolls when I was a kid, and no, I hated dolls. I was into making forts. I spent hours dreaming about them, constructing them mentally, building them out of cardboard, woodpiles, snow, leaves. And they were always intimate, one- or two-person forts. In art school I made sculptures that borrowed forms from architecture and were intimate to the single body. I made a sculpture where you closed a miniature theater around your head. But then the head itself became a kind of architecture to me, a container with windows and apertures and contents, with an inside and an outside. We’re always trying to figure out what it is we are, and what makes us alive. When someone dies, you see that they’re no longer there. Presence and absence come into play in all these ways while I’m working.

SH It also reminds me, Louise, that you once said the reason you don’t really paint faces is that you don’t want your figures to be looking at you.

LB It’s true. I think the notion of obligation from earlier is interesting here, because I make sure I don’t have that with the figures I’m painting. I don’t want them to know I’m there.

EK No wonder you’re reading spy novels.

LB Yes, that’s true. When I was a kid—but I think all kids do this—I really, really loved spying. I’d go

into my neighbor’s house and hide.

EK You wanted to know what was going on in there.

LB It’s true. I always liked to be there but no one knew I was there.

EK I love that you don’t want to be seen by your work. This is how alive it becomes for you. You were spying when you were a kid, and me, I was hiding. Both of us were involved with places where inside and outside mattered.

The body is a piece of architecture with parts, each part doing its different thing. My mother suffered from polio and was paralyzed when I was three. So I don’t remember her walking—my memory is always that she moved with the help of machinery. And it’s the same sort of machinery we see robots made out of. With a robot you start with nothing, with stuff, and you make something that you hope might come to life. But with a person you start with a live body and round up the same machinery, joints, mechanical braces and things, to try to keep that person moving. Where the human ends and the machine begins in the AI world is a constantly changing boundary.

LB I read about the British SOE [Special Operations Executive] faking a plane accident and parachuting a corpse, a dead guy, as a plant, to carry false information into Nazi territory. He had to seem real, and as if he were a high-ranking person in the British army, so they had to make him an identity card with his photo on it. It became a big problem because it was impossible to take a picture of him where he looked remotely alive—they had to find somebody who looked like him to photograph, because they couldn’t take a picture where he didn’t look like he was absolutely dead.

SH That’s interesting as well, that there’s this inner knowledge or sense of what’s living and what isn’t.

EK And we can’t pinpoint it. What’s the difference between a dead eye and a live eye? It looks exactly the same. During the Renaissance there was much discussion about painting and whether one could stand in front of a portrait and feel that it had captured the soul or the breath of a person. What was the nature of that skill? I feel like a lot of the AI stuff today is trying to do that too, but they don’t have very good images yet. It’s all functional or cybernetic. I haven’t seen any robots that pass a sort of breathing-likeness test. But the great painters, the great sculptors, did something that we still haven’t outdone in terms of capturing what it is to be alive. Rembrandt’s Lucretia [1666]—such a raw, emotional face. I find in your work, Louise, the way you paint the body—it’s corpuscular and full of pulse, and all those subtle things to do with the surface tension of flesh, with nerves right under the skin. Those things feel very much alive for me in your work.

LB That’s very nice! Thank you.

SH I agree. What distinguishes lifelikeness from life? There have been so many attempts, of course, at defining life, and there’s still no consensus as to what life is, and whether, for instance, a virus is alive or not. But there’s something about emotional presence—something that transcends its reality.

EK People say, “Well, why don’t you get your sculpture to move animatronically, instead of just using stop-motion? Why not use silicone?” I know I’m not going to fool anybody, nor do I want to. I want the tension between what a thing depicts and what it is.

LB I feel the same way. Not making it realistic makes you feel it more , paradoxically.

I’M INTERESTED IN MOVEMENTS THAT ARE MOSTLY UNCONSCIOUS, OR SO ROTE THAT THEY BECOME UNCONSCIOUS, AND WHAT THEY COMMUNICATE.

—Louise Bonnet

PÉJÚ OSHIN I was so excited to see your new film, the great north . Thank you so much for the invitation.

JENN NKIRU Thank you for coming. The film is still so fresh for me—I finished editing just days before the first screenings. From commission to completion, I had it in production for five years. Factory International commissioned it toward the end of 2019, but then covid happened and we didn’t begin shooting until January 2023. I was deliberate about waiting until I could give it my full attention. For me, creating requires a concentrated, unrestricted mode of working, and I’m glad I held out for that.

This film became the first project produced under my new imprint, mothership, and it’s completely and independently produced by me. Seeing it on-screen feels like the culmination of so many dreams I’ve had around art, ownership, and practice. It lives up my intentions. This is what happens when you have the freedom to work unbridled.

I’m deeply thankful to Factory International in Manchester for their trust. They didn’t know exactly how the eventual film was going to unfold, but they had such great belief in my vision and the project and they part-funded it. Originally the commission was for a five-to-eight-minute piece, but it quickly became clear that this story couldn’t fit into that framework. It had to grow into what it is, a nearone-hour odyssey.

PO During the screening, you spoke about spending a lot of your time in the archives while making this film. And archives, generally, are interesting because they can be a space where things either go to die, they’re hidden to never be seen again, or where they’re allowed to keep breathing. You seem to have the latter view: the archive as a living organism.

JN People often assume that an archive represents a fixed moment in time, something rooted in

the past. But for me it’s essential to make archives active, alive, and in continuous dialogue with the present. There’s a saying: people don’t truly die when they pass away, they die when people stop saying their name. That idea resonates deeply. History is a teacher and there’s so much to learn from those who came before us. By nature I’m a bit of a nerd—I love immersing myself in reading, exploring, and letting my mind wander through ideas and connections. For me it’s in that process of exploration that the past transforms into a living force, constantly reframing the present and taking on expanded possibilities for the now and next.

PO You present the credits at the end of the film as a kind of bibliography. I’d love to hear more about that choice.

JN I don’t make films because I’m a cinephile. For me, film is simply the most expansive container for the ideas and forms I’m drawn to. My work often borrows from a range of disciplines, so it always feels essential to credit and share those sources. What’s the sense in knowledge if it’s not shared, you know? My work is a sharing. The bibliography becomes an invitation, a launchpad for onward exploration. If the film resonates, you can follow the threads and engage with the ideas further, discovering more in your own way.

PO What are some of your favorite disciplines that you’ve been able to weave into this new world that you’ve built?

JN Two critical themes in my work are sound and movement. A friend recently joked—because I sound-designed this piece as well—“You’re really a musician moonlighting as a filmmaker” [laughter ]. But I don’t see those kinds of distinctions. For me, sound and image are inseparable. When I see images, I hear sound—it’s always been that way, and I thought it was perfectly normal. Sound and music

JENN NKIRU: THE GREAT NORTH

are my first loves, and while the image technically comes first in filmmaking, for me the sound often leads. I’ll hear something and then think about the image that needs to meet it. Sound is omnipresent in my work, a force that magnifies and deepens the visual.

Movement, too, is a language I deeply enjoy. When words fall short, movement has the ability to tap into another depth—it becomes a kind of spiritual interpretation of the body, a way the body translates sound and emotion. Movement bypasses intellectual barriers and goes straight to feeling, cutting directly to the emotional core.

In this most recent piece, architecture—specifically shape—also plays a significant role. I’m not just thinking about architecture in a physical or environmental sense, I’m thinking about the architecture of the mind, somatic architecture, and how we internalize and externalize space. My work often meditates on the externalization of interiority. To borrow Tina Campt’s framing, it’s about visually interpreting the Black interior. These ideas—sound, movement, and the interplay between interior and exterior spaces—are the key elements driving my work.

PO I can definitely see those three disciplines influencing, or in relationship to, your work. You mentioned music or sound as being your first love—I think I remember you talking about that being an introduction from your dad?

JN I grew up surrounded by so much sound. My godfather played a huge role in shaping my sonic palette—we spent so much time together, and he introduced me to an entire world of music and culture. My parents were just as influential. They had this amazing combined record collection and Saturday mornings were my time to explore it. I’d pull out every record, scatter them all over the living room, and just listen. There’s even a photo of me putting a record on the player while still in Pampers [laughs ]—I was tiny but already completely immersed in sound. Music was my first doorway into art and culture, and it’s shaped so much of who I am.

This year has been especially exciting in that journey. I did the sound design for a piece I created with Kamasi Washington and George Clinton called get lit—an incredible experience that’s deepened my connection to sound. I’ve been diving into

the craft of sound design: working with stems, playing with time by stretching, compressing, reversing, and slipping sounds. I’m constantly thinking, How can sound act as a motif? How can it carry the weight of a visual? How does it propel the story forward? And what happens when sound and image truly meet—what new emotional or imaginative spaces can we unlock? It’s so fun to play.

I wouldn’t call myself a musician, I don’t play any instruments, though I did tinker with drums, percussion, and piano as a child. But sound and music have always been a natural part of my life. They feel like an old friend—ever present, guiding me, inspiring me, and encouraging me to think expansively about how stories can be told.

PO I love that. It feels like there are these cycles for you; there’s a constant return to different influences. With movement, I think about [the choreographer] Ivan Blackstock as a longtime collaborator for you. He worked with you on the movement for the great north , right?

JN Yes. Ivan Blackstock, an incredible choreographer, movement director, and dancer, has been

a key collaborator of mine since 2017, which somehow feels like a lifetime with the way the world is moving. He has such a deep fluency in the language of movement, in ways that I don’t. My connection to movement is very instinctual, while his is steeped in the technical and formal aspects. He’s brilliant. That balance makes working with him so rewarding. Film is such a team sport, and I’m endlessly grateful for the collaborators I work with. To be transparent, their patience with me is something I deeply appreciate. I’m very particular in my thinking, and often they’re pushed to work in ways that stretch beyond what they’re used to. But that’s where the magic happens.

I love watching people discover themselves within the process. It’s beautiful. That was especially true with the editor I worked with on the great north . It was our first time working together and I told him, “This is going to be trial by fire.” I’d say, “For this scene, we’re going to play some jazz— does this piece work? Are you ready?” And he was not only willing but he started offering ideas of his own. Watching someone lean into the work, grow with it, and make it their own—it’s such a brilliant, energizing thing.

PO Yes, and the third thing you mentioned, architecture, made me really excited, because I’m very interested in the built environment. There’s so much that the built environment does, particularly in creating and storing and holding memories. What happens when the physical body’s no longer there, but there are still these remnants of the people and the culture that existed in those spaces? Thinking about the role of architecture in the film, you collaborated with [the design collective] Resolve, whom I love.

JN Me too! Shout out to Akil Scafe-Smith and the Resolve Collective—brilliant people. Architecturally I had this self-generated thesis about the use of red clay or red earth in Sudano-Sahelian architecture and how its construction relates to the abundance of red brick we see in British architecture. I began by looking at the Great Mosque of Djenné in Mali, which is made entirely of mud clay. What’s fascinating about it is the permanent scaffolding built into the structure, both inside and out, and the annual communal ritual where the entire community comes together to replenish and rebuild it, literally keeping it standing.

In the UK, so many iconic red-brick buildings were constructed by working-class people who often never got to enjoy the interiors of those spaces. At first, the connection between Manchester and Mali felt random, even to me. Why was I trying to tie these two places together? Looking back, it was pure curiosity and artistic indulgence. Had there been an exec beyond me, I’m sure I might have been told to cut it out. But I find that once you start putting seemingly disparate ideas together, the connections that emerge can be profound. I’ve been rereading Sam Selvon’s novel The Lonely Londoners [1956], and there’s this moment where the redness of the earth in the West Indies is described and one of the characters relates it back to England. I thought, “Wow! You see?” No idea ever exists in isolation— no thought is ever the first time a thing has been thought about. These connections are always there, waiting to be uncovered.

PO There are historical through lines.

JN Yes, always. When I think about African history, so much of it is oral rather than written. Including it in film makes it feel real in a different way—it transforms what might otherwise feel like hearsay or fleeting into something material and tangible. The question of how something becomes “real” is such an interesting exercise to me because it’s deeply tied to power, agency, and repetition.

For example, in the film there’s this story I’ve heard repeatedly: that Marcus Garvey, when visiting England, would distribute copies of his paper The Negro World to navy men in places like Liverpool and Cardiff. This isn’t something I’ve seen documented anywhere—I’ve searched high and low—but it exists on this communal level, passed down through elders who say, “Yeah, Garvey used to do that.” And it’s been repeated so often, it feels undeniable. But then the question for me that always arises is, How do we write these oral histories into the larger narrative of history? How do we ensure they’re not lost?

Admittedly, working with limited resources has also shaped my creative approach. I often find myself pulling together whatever fragments I can find and trying to create a sense of order that will resonate with my audience. The Pan-African Congress of 1945, for instance, which took place in Manchester, is a pivotal moment, but there are no moving images of it, only still photographs. I asked

myself, How do I imbue a static photograph with feeling? I ended up using a piece of jazz music plus some sound design I made to breathe life into those shots, to give them renewed rhythm and energy.

For me the challenge is always, How do we materialize these histories in a way that makes them real, that makes them alive again? Film allows me to do that—I get to bridge the ephemeral and the material, turning memory into something tangible and felt.

PO Right, the documentation itself isn’t what makes something valid or real.

I want to go back to something you said earlier: how your environment can shape the lens through which you’re viewing the world. We’re both from South London, and I suppose there are a couple of things I’m thinking of right now: in the film you draw these parallels of north and south, and I was thinking about how here in the UK we have a different north/south divide from in the US, and from the concepts of the Global North and the Global South. The South here in the UK is seen as being more affluent than the North of England, yet in America the South is seen as less affluent than the North, just as the Global South is seen as less affluent. But you also expose within the film that at one moment Manchester was the richest city in the world. I’m interested in how you’ve navigated showing these comparisons of north and south, especially with you being from South London, a city in the South of England.

JN It’s funny, isn’t it? Being from the south of the south [laughter ]. When you think of the north in the United States, it’s places like New York and the East Coast states, and when you think of the South—Deep South—you think of Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas. But the UK flips that entirely. It’s one of the only examples I know of where the north is less affluent and the south is wealthier. That inversion fascinated me while making the film. How do you tell the story of an anomaly?

I was also struck by how divided the country feels—not just geographically but culturally, linguistically, socially. The North and South of England have distinct identities, and that’s something I’d always noticed but never had the right forum to explore. This film became the space for that inquiry.

One of my entry points was the influence of cotton. During the Industrial Revolution, Manchester was the richest city in the world, a powerhouse of

production—but it wasn’t near the capital and it didn’t grow cotton. That was one of the first things I thought: Wait a minute, how was Manchester producing one-third of the world’s cotton when the plant doesn’t grow there?

When we screened the film in Manchester, I collaborated with David Olusoga, who’s been exploring these same historical questions. We both agreed: once you start looking into it, the conversation inevitably leads back to empire and imperialism. The Global South was powering this northern industrial boom, with cotton being grown in current and former colonies under exploitative systems. The wealth of Manchester—and the wealth of Britain—was built on the labor and resources of other parts of the world. This link between the Global South and the industrial north, mediated by empire, became a central thread in the film. It’s impossible to talk about Manchester’s history without acknowledging that truth.

PO Most definitely. You spoke about taking into account expressions of Blackness and Black culture and its histories—about there being so many different ways to exist in Blackness. How do you approach weaving together all of these elements while maintaining this sense of universality?

JN I’ve realized that I’m constantly making the work. I’m so curious as a person, and always have been—I’m always listening, observing, and bookmarking experiences. It’s like I’m gathering ingredients for this ever-evolving cake I’m going to bake. My process then becomes about reconciling all of these fragments, asking, Okay, what belongs here? What’s going to shape this story?

In doing this, I often confront the gaps in mainstream culture’s understanding of Blackness and personhood. There’s such a narrow and, frankly, reductive lens through which it’s often seen. For me, Blackness is not solely a fixed identity category, it’s a container space for our imaginaries—expansive, fluid, without edges. It’s like water, adapting, moving, and holding infinite possibilities. My work is always seeking to explore Blackness through the lens of possibility and acceleration—this idea that Blackness holds the potential to propel us into uncharted territories, to imagine futures we haven’t even begun to consider.

Black media, particularly music, have been doing this for decades. Take techno and jazz, for example: both genres gave us a language that transcends

the finite constraints of the spoken word. It charts emotions, experiences, and ideas in ways that other forms simply can’t. That’s the energy I aim to bring into my work: pushing beyond what’s known, creating something that speaks to both where we’ve been and where we want to go.

PO I think the film does the important job of giving people space to dream and reimagine—going back to the archives, going back to the history books. As I’m saying this, the still images from the film are coming to mind. And even though those images are still, what you do is create a kind of emotion and a movement around them, so they’re not just stuck there in that moment. The viewer can time travel a little bit.

JN That makes me so happy. At the core of so much of my work is a desire to remind the audience that imagination is always available to them.

My hope is that the work functions as an invitation—especially from a Black perspective—to hold onto and honor the spiritual insights that are deeply embedded in our experiences.

It’s also about rejecting, in many ways, the Western, linear, Enlightenment-era mindset that

insists that something must be written down or factually proven to hold value. There’s so much richness and validity in oral and visual traditions, in intuition, and in forms of knowledge that transcend the confines of the written word. A key invitation in my work is to engage with that spiritual wealth—to be exploratory, to listen deeply, to sympathize, and to interpret. It’s about stepping into a space where the unseen and the intuitive are given their full weight and where imagination becomes a powerful generative force.

PO I love the idea of continued exploration. I see the connections from this project back to your previous ones, like your films black to techno [2019] and rebirth is necessary [2017], as well as to your commercial work with Kamasi and Beyoncé. It’s beautiful to see this continuation, this expansion, this growth. You’re able to traverse from the top end of art making into everyday, accessible forms like the music video, which comes into everyone’s home on a TV screen or laptop or iPad. You’re keeping a broader group in mind and helping people build a visual vocabulary that they might not ordinarily have access to. Through the multilayering

of references that you put into the work, you’ve expanded your public’s literacy to express what they see and know to be true.

JN That’s what I’ve always wanted to do—and what an executive once told me I could never do. “You can’t have a career like that,” they said. My response? “Watch me.” I’ve never been bound to any single medium or genre; my commitment is always first to the idea. Sometimes the best vessel for that idea is a piece of art, sometimes it’s a music video, sometimes it’s a commercial, and at other times, a film.

On a personal level, it’s so important for me to be able to speak to multiple people from multiple backgrounds in my work. While I’m often speaking first to a Black audience, my audience is far-reaching, spanning different cultures, ages, and interests. My aim is always to balance universality with specificity, to craft work that is deeply personal yet universally resonant. To me, no audience is too small or too big, too niche or too mainstream. Everyone deserves to engage with ideas that expand their world, and I’ll embrace whatever medium allows me to make that connection with my audience.

ADRIANA VAREJÃO: DON’T FORGET, WE COME FROM THE TROPICS

Through June 22, the Hispanic Society Museum & Library, New York, is presenting a solo exhibition of Adriana Varejão’s work, including a new series of paintings from her Pratos (Plates) series and a sitespecific outdoor sculpture. To accompany the show, Varejão has curated a selection of historical ceramic plates from the museum’s collection. Here, Louis Vaccara details the conceptual and formal references—and evolutions—in these works.

Reflecting on the tropics in his memoir Tristes Tropiques (1955), Claude Lévi-Strauss asserts that “history is only ever the superficial part of the iceberg. The essential truth lies elsewhere, in the depths of the mythological substratum.”1 Adriana Varejão’s exhibition at the Hispanic Society Museum, Don’t Forget, We Come From the Tropics , probes the layered histories and mythologies of the Amazon rainforest, inviting New Yorkers to engage with stories from the heart of the tropics and the lungs of the Earth. The title, drawn from a famous declaration by the Brazilian modernist Maria Martins, evokes Brazil’s vibrant ecological and cultural vitality while reflecting Varejão’s baroque sensibility—one mirroring the hybridity and abundant excess of the tropics. Her new sculptural paintings and painted sculptural installation explore a convergence of artistic mediums, fine art and craft, humanity and nature, and history and myth, connecting us to the Amazon as a living, breathing repository of knowledge.

The exhibition premieres the latest additions to Varejão’s Pratos (Plates) series (2011– ). Inspired by the delicately textured plates of the sixteenthcentury French potter Bernard Palissy and the nineteenth-century Portuguese ceramicist Bordalo Pinheiro, Varejão’s Pratos set surreal and sensual depictions of nature, femininity, and birth on large fiberglass tondos with protruding threedimensional elements hand-sculpted by the artist and painted in oil. The sculptural aspect of these paintings evokes the theatricality of Baroque architecture, where ornate sculptural reliefs break free from the surfaces of walls and ceilings to create an immersive sense of movement and drama. While Varejão’s previous Pratos delved into the ocean’s depths, these new works reflect her continued engagement with the Amazon rainforest, stemming from her participation in the inaugural Bienal das Amazônias in 2023 and marking two decades since she began her research in the region.

The Hispanic Society’s main gallery includes a Baroque-revival arcade of grand terra-cottacolored archways. In response to this distinctive architecture, Varejão has installed her Pratos as freestanding sculptures within these archways, inviting us to move around them and appreciate their three-dimensionality and the contrasts between their two sides. On the front of each plate, exuberant imagery of Amazonian flora and fauna— including a mucura (Amazonian opossum), guarana (an Amazonian fruit resembling the human

eye—“fruit like the eyes of the people”), botos (pink river dolphins), a matamata (river turtle), and an urutau (nocturnal bird)—highlight the seductive intricacies of nature. On the reverse, Varejão has painted designs adapted from historical ceramics in the collection of the Hispanic Society and beyond, including Spanish Valenciana, Ottoman Iznik ware, Ming dynasty Hongzhi porcelain, and pre-Columbian Amazonian Marajoara pottery. This simulation of artisanal styles traversing continents and millennia reflects an artistic process that is as baroque as it is anthropophagic—devouring and reimagining unexpected cultural encounters. The juxtaposition of the two sides of each plate— between natural and human-made patterns— encapsulates a tension between organic vitality and humanity’s desire to immortalize, offering an interplay between the moving, breathing organisms of the Amazon and the crafted, enduring patterns of human history.

When painting the animals in her latest Pratos , Varejão drew inspiration from the scientific drawings of the seventeenth-century Portuguese friar Cristóvão de Sá e Lisboa, who drew to document the findings of his expeditions in colonial Brazil. These early attempts to catalog the wonders of the Amazon reflect both humanity’s admiration for nature and its desire to control it. Now, they foreshadow the region’s destruction. The Amazonian species depicted in Varejão’s Pratos , many now endangered, are at once powerful and vulnerable, embodying the kind of fusion of opposites typical of the Baroque. Creatures such as vibrantly patterned poisonous dart frogs exemplify this paradox, combining vivid beauty with inherent toxicity, attraction with repulsion, and life with death. This harmony of extremes, central to the Baroque ethos, has always permeated Varejão’s work.

I am deeply influenced by how the Baroque plays with duality and contrasts. In my paintings, I seek a paradox of opposites—a tension between aesthetic beauty and historical violence, a dance of extremes.

—Adriana

Varejão

Expanding on the tensions between nature and humanity, Varejão’s monumental sculpture outside the museum on the Audubon Terrace activates the institution’s bronze statue of El Cid (1927) by Anna Hyatt Huntington. In Varejão’s site-specific work, a vibrantly painted fiberglass sucuri (an Amazonian anaconda) coils around the bronze warrior, subverting the statue’s symbolism of imperialism, masculinity, and human dominion over nature. In counterpoint to this equestrian figure’s demonstration of control over a domesticated animal, the presence of the snake introduces an unexpected collision between the tamed and the wild. Surrounded by the permanently inscribed names of historic conquistadors on the Audubon Terrace, the snake disrupts this colonial space and creates a confrontation between humankind and nature. Martins too made serpentine, anachronistically Baroque sculptures, and by referencing her in the exhibition’s title Varejão bridges her legacy and Huntington’s, two pioneering female sculptors from opposite hemispheres.

The embrace of the serpent in both Varejão’s outdoor sculpture and her Pratos invites reflection on the forces at work in the plight of the Amazon, where nature is both enduring and endangered. Across cultures, the serpent is an ancient symbol of rebirth, transformation, and the feminine divine. In Varejão’s Guaraná (2024) plate, three

Amazonian boas slither around venomous dart frogs and a three-dimensional assemblage of ripe guarana fruit burgeoning from a deep-magenta background. The plate’s luminous surface, speckled with white flecks, evokes a cosmic void or a swirling nebula of stars. This imagery conjures the cosmic mythologies surrounding guarana, a surreal-looking fruit ubiquitous in Brazilian consumer culture as the inspiration behind the name and flavor of the country’s national soda. In the Amazon, guarana plays a role in the origin myth of the Sateré-Mawé people, one of the largest of Brazil’s 255 Indigenous groups. Recounted in Seth Garfield’s book Guaraná: How Brazil Embraced the World’s Most Caffeine-Rich Plant (2022), the myth describes a deity, Jurupari, who transforms into a serpent and kills a beloved young boy. After the tragedy, the boy’s mother transforms her pain into an act of creation, decreeing that his eyes be planted to grow a fruit capable of healing all ailments. From the tears of the tribe and the boy’s buried eyes sprouted the guarana plant, its red, eyelike berries symbolizing resurrection and healing. Today, the Sateré-Mawé people call themselves “the children of guarana.”2

The first work from this new body of Pratos , Mucura of 2023, debuted at the Bienal das Amazônias that year alongside Varejão’s multimedia installation Em Segredo (In secret, 2023). Em Segredo juxtaposes a colonial botanical illustration, in the upper part of a canvas that unrolls from the wall down onto the floor, with a painting of a banana leaf on which rests a sculpted fetus. Beneath the banana leaf is a text reading “Ya pihi irakema ,” a Yanomami phrase that directly translates as “I’m contaminated” but is used to describe the transformative experience of falling in love—a phenomenon in which one’s body and mind are consumed by another person, rendering one vulnerable yet profoundly alive, much like the act of creation itself. As David Servan-Schreiber writes, “To say ‘I love you,’ the Yanomami say, ‘Ya pihi irakema ,’ meaning ‘I have been contaminated by your being’—a part of you has entered me, and it lives and grows.”3

Mucura revisits these concepts of creation and the body. Within the verdant contours of the rainforest, light pierces a dense canopy of cascading vines, emitting a lush glow, as if the forest were alive with secrets. Emerging from within these vines is a silhouette of the artist’s own pregnant body, painted after an old photograph, merged with the head of a mucura , the Amazonian opossum. The mucura is among the most fertile mammals, capable of up to three pregnancies annually, and it is remarkably resistant to snake venom. A symbol of femininity, fertility, and resilience, these ancient marsupials embody survival and continuity in the world’s largest ecosystem.

In Urutau (2025), Varejão continues her exploration of Amazonian stories of the feminine divine by depicting the nocturnal bird the urutau , a name meaning “mother of the moon.” The haunting song of the urutau has inspired legends about women changing into these birds and singing to the moon after experiencing heartbreak. These stories have added weight through the significance of the moon: in Tupi mythology, it was the moon goddess Jaci who gave birth to the entire Amazon River and all the life it sustains. In Urutau , Varejão evokes a moonlit forest where the bird spreads its wings and looks down at us with a piercing, fiery gaze. The background is deep midnight blue marked by bright white brushstrokes, three-dimensional

Previous spread: Adriana Varejão working on Guaraná (2024) in her studio, Rio de Janeiro, 2024. Photo: Vincente de Mello

This spread: Installation view, Adriana Varejão: Don’t Forget, We Come From the Tropics , Hispanic Society Museum & Library, New York, March 27–June 22, 2025. Photo: Maris Hutchinson

Following page: Installation view of Adriana Varejão’s Sucuri (2025) and Anna Vaughn Hyatt Huntington’s El Cid Campeador (1927) in the courtyard of the Hispanic Society Museum & Library, New York. Photo: Maris Hutchinson

butterflies adorning eyelike patterns orbit the scene like celestial messengers, and the moon, positioned at the center of the plate, casts its silvery light, inviting reflection on nature’s quiet power and enduring mysteries.

Varejão’s new Pratos pay homage to an overlooked worldview in which women and nature are valued sources of creation, renewal, and resilience. In stark contrast, the relentless destruction of nature for profit, driven by male political leaders and corporate magnates, underscores the gendered power dynamics of our climate crisis. Through this lens, Varejão’s work draws attention to stories from the periphery that demonstrate reverence for the natural world and critique the dominant forces that imperil our planet. This perspective has been central to her practice since the 1990s, long before decolonial discourse was as prominent in the art world. When the Brazilian curator Adriano Pedrosa was organizing Varejão’s first retrospective, Histórias às margens (Histories at the margins) at the Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo in 2012, he described the show’s title as referring to the “histories and stories often forgotten or relegated to the margins by historic tradition, irrespective of whether they refer to Brazil, Portugal, China, art itself, the Baroque, or colonization. Varejão researches these histories, and interweaves them in her paintings.”

This spirit of inquiry continues in Varejão’s current exhibition, where she places her new works in dialogue with historical ceramic plates from the Hispanic Society’s collection. The museum, which holds over half a million objects from the Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking world, contains thousands of ceramics from which Varejão has curated a selection of twenty. By situating these plates alongside her own monumental plate paintings, Varejão raises provocative questions about the hierarchies of aesthetics. Historically, ceramics have been relegated to the edges of museum collections and referred to as “craft” or “decorative arts,” secondary to painting and sculpture. In creating sculptural paintings inspired by ceramics, Varejão challenges these assumptions and raises the question, Why are certain forms of artistry considered artisanal rather than fine art, and who determines these distinctions? Her works blur these boundaries, demonstrating how ceramics, with their history in every culture, can engage with contemporary issues and enrich our understanding of art.

Through her sculptural paintings and painterly sculpture, Varejão challenges us to expand our understanding of art and craft, humanity and nature, and history and myth. She embraces the Amazon as a baroque body—an ever-growing rhizome with a multiplicity of histories and stories, much like the diverse organisms that flourish in the rainforest itself. By weaving the mythological substratum of the tropics into her art, Varejão centers the Amazon as a profound source of cultural depth, inviting us to take a closer look at its histories and to heed the knowledge and inspiration it can offer the world.

Earlier versions of this essay were published as part of the press materials for the Hispanic Society Museum & Library, New York.

1. Claude Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques , 1955, Eng. trans. John Weightman and Doreen Weightman (New York: Penguin Classics)

2. Seth Garfield, Guaraná: How Brazil Embraced the World’s Most Caffeine-Rich Plant (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2022)

3. David Servan-Schreiber, The Instinct to Heal: Curing Depression, Anxiety and Stress without Drugs and without Talk Therapy, 2003 (American ed. Emmaus, PA: Rodale, 2005)

A conversation between Harry G. David, collector of contemporary African art, and the artist Romuald Hazoumè ahead of his exhibition Les fleurs du mâle at Gagosian, Athens.

ROMUALD HAZOUMÈ AND HARRY G. DAVID

This page: Romuald Hazoumè, Bouga, 2024, plastic, feathers, and copper, 21 ¼ × 23 5⁄8 × 8 ¾ inches (54 × 60 × 22 cm).

Photo: Thomas Lannes

Opposite: Romuald Hazoumè, Peutêtre, 2004, inkjet print on baryta paper mounted on Dibond, 47 ¼ × 31 ½ inches (120 × 80 cm), edition of 6 + 2 AP

HARRY G. DAVID I’d love to share a little bit about my experience with your work. I was born and raised in Nigeria and spent a big part of my childhood in Lagos, and I continue to go to Nigeria for business quite a few times a year. I’ve been collecting art from very early on and I made the switch to collect exclusively African contemporary art in the diaspora about fourteen years ago. I first came across your work around that time, and I was struck by how tactile it was. I found it very interesting that I was handed the art, which usually doesn’t happen. I loved the simplicity and the immediacy of these everyday materials that you turned into something extraordinary. Even today, fourteen years later, when I see the work, which I live with as well, it still creates the same sensation.

I’m curious to hear more about your upcoming show. I was intrigued by the title Les fleurs du mâle , which echoes Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal [1857], but you’re playing on words: mâle as in “male” rather than mal as in “evil.”

ROMUALD HAZOUMÈ Yes, I don’t know Baudelaire well but the title has stayed with me. And for me, right now, we’re in a bad situation in terms of war and global conflict. My English will not be perfect to say deeply what I want to say, you know? But I will try. The problem we have right now is, a few men who decided to make war think the war they’re waging is against another people, or another country. But I’m not sure it’s against only another country, it’s also against their own country too; their people are in danger too. These men decide to make war because they want to stay in power, and to do so they think they need to create a situation of instability, where people depend on them for protection. But it’s not true. When you kill people outside your country, you kill people inside your country too. You kill everybody.

I decided in my work to reflect the real faces of people I meet. I was in Serbia for a big show and went to a place where many minority Romani people live. I was inspired by their stories and faces. Then I also made works inspired by Senegal, near Dakar. I burned the masks with fire. And for me it means, Okay, we bombed you, we tried to kill you, and although you survived, you can’t talk anymore. We don’t want you to talk; we don’t want you to say “Help me,” no. We send you bombs like flowers, and after we say to you “Don’t talk.” This is exactly what’s happening in Congo right now. In Congo, they kill people and they think what they’re doing is right. But it’s not right. They send bombs to kill people only for energy, for mineral resources, for greed. Exactly like what Putin is doing right now in Ukraine. It’s been dangerous for Putin’s people in Russia, too, not only for Ukrainian people. Don’t make a war. Talk. It’s these men who make trouble for other humans. And that’s why I say les fleurs du mâle

HD It’s very deep material, yet interestingly enough, many of your titles are quite humorous, I find. They’re tongue-in-cheek. You use titles like Afro-dite [2024]. You use titles like Moustache [2023]. Your thoughts are quite complex. Could you elaborate a little bit on your use of dark humor?

RH We need hope in our lives right now. You living in Greece, me in Africa, people in America, all around the world, we need hope. I’m afraid of artificial intelligence. I’m afraid of war. Many people want peace. And with a lot of people who are very depressed right now, I ask, “What can I do for them?” My answer is just to give them a little humor, to still have a little hope. I don’t make masks because people ask me to make masks for a gallery

or for a collector; I make masks because I need to express something inside me. I make a mask because the mask is necessary to help people. And how to help people today? Not everybody can collect my works. But they can look at them and read their titles. And if they smile when they read it, I’ve given them something in a way.

You know, I travel a lot; I’m just coming from three days in Cairo. And I hope one day a few masks will come from the many teachers I met there, the way I did with the mask titled Moustache —it’s somebody. It’s somebody at least seventy years old. But inside his head he’s about forty years old. He has very white hair on his head but his moustache is very black, like somebody of twenty-five or thirty. It’s so remarkable; it means this guy, inside his head, is still new. That’s full of hope. He’s still fighting. He’s saying to people, “No, don’t think I’m old.” And we must take this example. We’ll still be strong, moving, walking. When inside your head everything is perfect, your body can be perfect. And remember to smile a little bit, it’s good for life.

HD So this person who looks seventy and is forty inside, who is that person?

RH It’s somebody I met when I was walking outside. I don’t want to say his name because his name is not necessary.

HD Okay. But it’s a person, it’s somebody who has influenced your work?

RH Yes. You know, the Harry David in his bed has a mask, okay? When Harry David gets outside the house he has a different mask. When he’s in Lagos as a businessman, he has yet another mask. That’s three masks in one day. It’s exactly like me, exactly like everybody. We have our real faces, and what I try to do is make the real faces for the people I meet. I make these works true.

HD Do you start with your concept or your vision of the person behind the mask? Or do you start with the material first? What’s your process?

RH Normally I collect all the materials first. I then develop the plans inside my head, but they change every thirty minutes. When I find materials that fit these pieces, I put them in my studio to use in maybe ten years or maybe ten minutes. If you were in my studio right now, you’d see I have about a hundred pieces. And they will not get out. People come and say, “Ah, this is finished.” I say, “No, no, it’s not finished.” If it’s finished, it’ll get out. If not, it’ll stay there for many months or years.

The material is very important to me. When I walk in Brazil or Cairo or Paris, anywhere, I try to find materials. When I find a material, I put it in my studio so I can look at it every day.

HD It’ll find its life at some point in your process.

RH Yes.

HD We have seen your art touch upon big questions: slavery—

RH Yes.

HD The legacy of colonialism—

RH Yes.

HD The uneven distribution of resources around the world—

RH Yes.

HD Pollution—

RH Yes.

HD And waste. Do these concerns remain constant in your current and future work?

RH Yes. But they evolve. The themes remain constant because they have new iterations and evolutions. The slavery you mentioned, I’m not talking about the old slavery; I’m talking about our reality today, everywhere—in Europe, in America, everywhere. Because in a few years we’ll have a new

Opposite: Romuald Hazoumè, Les fleurs du mâle, 2024, plastic, fishing nets, and copper, 14 ¼ × 14 ¼ × 7 7⁄8 inches (36.2 × 36.2 × 20 cm). Photo: Thomas Lannes

This page:

Installation view, Romuald Hazoumè: Les fleurs du mâle, Gagosian, Athens, March 11–April 26, 2025. Photo: Stathis Mamalakis

kind of slavery. With artificial intelligence, many people will become new slaves. New slaves? How? They’ll have no jobs and those in power can use them as they want. It will be very dangerous. I put these ideas in a corner in my head and I continue to work to say what I want to say to the world, what I want to say to my people. We as African artists, we work for community. What we’re doing is calling attention to themes people may not have thought about before. And for me, I will continue to work on new themes and develop new ways of working. I’m never satisfied by what I’ve made. I’m continually questioning my work and doubting. So I tune it, I tune it, I tune it, I tune it.

One example are my works about immigration. I made pieces for the Musée du quai Branly in Paris. The name is No Return . It’s made with flip-flop sandals, like what people wear on the beach. These flip-flops are used by immigrant people from Africa because when they jump from the boat, the shoes won’t go underwater, won’t sink. They’re not heavy, they’re floating. For me, it’s necessary to continue to call attention to people and their plights through my work, to help people. And my community right now is not only my people in Benin, it’s not only my people in Africa, it’s all people who are suffering everywhere, who might have no hope.

HD The previous work you showed us, Les fleurs du mâle —I found that very touching. It lends the exhibition its name. I’d be curious to hear a bit more about its making and materials.

RH In Benin many people use fishnet. There’s an old fishnet and a new kind. In these kinds of pieces I use the new fishnet, because that fishnet is not for catching fish, it’s just to clean the body. People sell it at the market. You put soap on it and use it as a sort of washcloth. It was so interesting to find all the colors together like that, and I used it to make the flowers in the piece. Those flowers are in several colors to represent several people. It’s what we call in our culture la multitude La multitude is when you show you’re not alone. When you put a sign with several colors and disparate things together like that, it means, I’m not alone. The fishermen in our country, for example—they’ll never go fishing by themselves. We’re several people, very different,

but we’re a group.

HD Thank you, I didn’t quite realize that this was a fisherman’s net. The vibrant colors remind me of one of your paintings, Homme vivant [Living man, 2009], with its bright pink. Your paintings aren’t shown as often but I believe that one will be part of the Athens exhibition, along with some others?

RH Yes, yes. I’ll give some background to that painting: in our country we have something we call very simply Fa. It’s our divination system, a big cosmology. This divination comes from a small village in Nigeria, in Yorubaland, that we call Ife. It came from Nigeria to Benin, Togo, and Ghana. We use it to think about life’s big questions. We’ve found solutions for everything in our bible, what we can call our bible, which is the Fa.

We used symbols at the beginning, when we didn’t know how to write because we had had no contact yet with white people and their alphabets, Greco-Roman or Latin. People have said we have no history; no. We’ve been thinking about life and documenting its big topics before many people in this world. In our symbology we designed life like a circle. And we give that circle a word, a word we call a proverb or a device, and we associate a word with particular colors and particular plants. When you know the colors, the symbol, the plants, and the word, you know how to read the problem. There are sixteen symbols and each is very, very strong. And we say our life is a combination of four elements: water, wind, fire, and earth. Every country in Africa, every tribe in Africa, used symbols at the beginning. But don’t think it’s only in Africa. It was everywhere. Whether you go to Greece or Egypt, whether you go to Mexico, whether you go to South America where the Incas were, everybody at the beginning of history used symbols. The symbols mean something to the Incas. They mean another thing to Benin people, to people in Zaire or in South Africa. In each place it means something different. And that symbol in the painting I call Un Vivant . It’s representing a person in life. It’s just a line, a vertical line. But when it’s horizontal like that, it means a dead person. And the dark color represents the earth. The earth is our world when the guy’s still in life.

GIUSEPPE PENONE

THOUGHTS IN THE ROOTS

3 April - 7 September 2025

Made po ssible by

Eugenio López Co -pro duced by

Giuseppe Penone

Breath the Shadow), 1999. Wire mesh, laurel leaves, bronze. Dimensions determined by the site. Photo © Archivio Penone.

Richard Avedon

In the American West at Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson in Paris

The first-ever European exhibition of the entire 103 works featured in Richard Avedon’s 1985 iconic book!

To mark the 40th anniversary of Richard Avedon’s iconic work In the American West, the Fondation Henri CartierBresson (Paris), in collaboration with the Richard Avedon Foundation (New York City), presents, from April 30 to October 12, an exclusive exhibition focused on this emblematic series.

Between 1979 and 1984, commissioned by the Amon Carter Museum of American Art in Fort Worth, Texas, Richard Avedon traveled across the American West to photograph over a 1,000 of its inhabitants. For five years, Avedon photographed miners, herdsmen, showmen, salesmen and transient people, amongst others with rich histories, alone or in small groups, before his camera, against a white background that enhanced their features, postures and expressions, for a striking portrait of the territory and its residents, in stark contrast to traditional depictions and glorifications of the legend of the American West. The force of the 103 works that compose the book makes In the American West a pivotal event in Avedon’s career, and a milestone in the history of photographic portraits.

For the first time in Europe, the exhibition at the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson presents the whole series of images included in the original publication, while also showcasing the stages of its production and reception.

Curated by Clément Chéroux, director of the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson, the exhibition includes a full selection of engravers prints, which served as reference materials for both the exhibition and the 1985 book, as well as previously unpublished documents, such as preparatory Polaroids, test prints annotated by the photographer, and correspondence between the artist and his models.

To mark this anniversary, Abrams, the book’s original publisher, is reissuing the long out-of-print book.

KAT HLEEN RYAN

.0 5— 12 .1 0

Kathleen Ryan, Deluxe, 2023 Cour tesy the ar tist and Christen Sveaas Ar t Collection

GAME CHANGER

KAY BEARMAN

Gillian Pistell celebrates the life and work of Kay Bearman, a pivotal force in the cultural life of mid-century New York.

Kay Bearman began working at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1960. She had just graduated from Smith College a few months before and decided to move to New York, rather than return home to Memphis, because she was “going out with somebody who was here.”1 The relationship ended soon after but Kay stayed, despite not knowing anyone else in the city. She started to look for a job, mainly sticking to arts organizations to keep some semblance of relation to her degree in art history. She tried the Frick, but didn’t speak German; she tried Artnews , but there were no openings. So she went to the Met, where she was given a job in the museum’s slide library typing up labels.

With a couple of intermissions, Kay worked at the Met for the next sixty years, staying there until 2021—only a global pandemic could keep her from the institution that had become her second home. 2 She not only witnessed but also took part in many important moments in contemporary American art. We know the names of the people— men—whom Kay worked with after years of hearing of their often history-changing accomplishments: Leo Castelli, Philippe de Montebello, Henry Geldzahler, and William Lieberman, not to mention artists such as David Hockney, Jasper Johns, and Frank Stella, to name just a few. In many ways Kay made those accomplishments possible; she was the rock that supported them, doing the dirty work and minutiae that made their jobs run smoothly. And it all started from the desk of the slide library.

In 1960, the Met’s slide library was a hub of activity within the museum. Curators from every department would pop in and check out slides for lectures and whatever classes they were teaching. Among those curators was Geldzahler, a favorite of Robert Hale, head of the Department of American Paintings

and Sculpture, but seemingly of no one else. Geldzahler was tasked with keeping the Met current on contemporary art. He took a liking to Kay; perhaps she was already displaying her charming, diplomatic but get-the-shit-done attitude. Soon, Kay became what he called “Assistant Henry.”

Geldzahler introduced Kay to his New York art world—which was, in effect, the New York art world. She accompanied him to artists’ studios, parties at artists’ studios, and meetings with collectors. In 1965, however, Castelli’s assistant Nina von Eckardt left her position. Kay later reflected that it was perfect timing; she and Geldzahler had stumbled upon a few “personal conflicts” so she moved to the Leo Castelli Gallery, trading one art world insider for another.3 Kay stayed with Castelli for four years, sharing his desk and her opinions on the art and artists that came through the gallery’s door.

“The ’60s and who Leo was at that time, and who Leo was showing, and what was going on in the art world, at least to me, was the most exciting period of the art world,” Kay reminisced later. 4 And it certainly was. She was there for Andy Warhol’s Flowers Paintings and Wallpaper and Clouds exhibitions (1964 and 1966), as well as Robert Rauschenberg’s White Paintings show (1968), among other history-making presentations. She was at Castelli with Ivan Karp, who would go on to open the acclaimed OK Harris Gallery in SoHo; “the Davids”—White and Whitney— whose respective careers in art curation and criticism skyrocketed in the following decades; and a young Patterson Sims, then still a graduate student, who would likewise enjoy a celebrated curatorial career. Years later, Sims recalled his first encounter with Kay: “I asked a young woman at the desk if I might be directed to Ivan Karp. Kay Bearman . . . laconically

I quickly realized that she, perhaps more than the art that I was working with, was one of the Met’s greatest treasures. She was a trove of not just institutional but art history, and her stories were legend.

pointed at the space’s center room, which I’d always considered off limits. Kay, along with her then Castelli colleagues . . . would all become powerful presences in the contemporary art world.”5

Geldzahler called Kay back to the Met in 1969. Tasked with curating one of the shows honoring the museum’s centennial, he had decided to focus on New York’s contemporary artists, and Kay worked with him to get New York Painting and Sculpture: 1940–1970 hanging on the Met’s walls. “Kay’s sense of organization and her hard work made it possible to do the show on such short notice,” Geldzahler acknowledged soon after the show’s opening.6 Kay’s hard work was noticed elsewhere in the museum and she was moved to the office of de Montebello, who was then the vice director of curatorial and educational affairs. Although she filled that role only briefly, she quickly proved herself invaluable to de Montebello—a relationship that would keep her connected to the Met even after she left with Geldzahler to join the city’s Department of Cultural Affairs.

Kay quickly rose through the

ranks during her time with the city. First, she oversaw the Institutional Services department, which distributed the city’s funds to its various cultural institutions. By 1982 she had moved to the New York State Council on the Arts, where she was named the deputy director for visual arts. It was in this position that Kay really grew her art-world connections; the job took her all over the state, and everybody had to go through her to get approval for state money.

By 1984, the Met’s newly appointed curator for twentiethcentury art, William Lieberman (who had been hired away from the Museum of Modern Art), needed reinforcement as he negotiated the construction of the Lila Acheson Wallace Wing, which was to be dedicated to twentieth-century art and would open in 1987. De Montebello, who was then the museum’s director, reached out to Kay. Her official title was administrator of the department of twentieth-century art, but in reality she was the museum’s lifeline to Lieberman, who was notorious for his eccentricities. Kay did not leave the Met again; in her remaining thirty-seven years there, she stayed with her department as it saw new curators arrive and evolved into the Department of Modern and Contemporary Art. But her presence stretched beyond that department. She was the Met’s first woman courier to oversee art transportation across the Atlantic, and she helped start the museum’s Antonio Ratti Textile Center, which required a digital database that Kay helped extend to the rest of the museum—what would become “The Museum System” (TMS), a collections-management program that is now used by a vast range of art institutions around the world. I met Kay in 2013, when I joined the Met’s Modern and Contemporary Art department as a research assistant. I quickly realized

that she, perhaps more than the art that I was working with, was one of the Met’s greatest treasures. She was a trove of not just institutional but art history, and her stories were legend: chauffeuring Johns’s pet marmoset to South Carolina; calling Mrs. Warhola to reassure her that “Andy’s OK” every day her son was on his first trip to Europe after he was shot; and attending her first Happening, where Lucas Samaras whispered to her, “Tell Henry I’m going to kill him” (Kay thought he was serious and frantically searched for Geldzahler to warn him).

Kay did not think of herself as an integral part of this history; she was never one to seek to the spotlight, preferring to pull the strings from behind the scenes. But that does not mean history can overlook her. Kay was there, she did many amazing things, and made even more amazing things happen. She adapted as the times and her role evolved and grew. Sadly, Kay is not alone. There many people littered throughout art history who remain unacknowledged, and too often they are women.

Kay passed away in 2023. During one of her last days, she looked through old photographs from throughout her life and said, “It’s so nice to have so many memories.”7

1. Kay Bearman, in Sharon Zane, “Metropolitan Museum of Art Oral History Project,” March 12, 1998, Bearman family archives.

2. Bearman retired in 2016 but stayed on as a volunteer for the Modern and Contemporary Art department.

3. Bearman, in Zane, “Metropolitan Museum of Art Oral History Project,” March 26, 1998.

4. Ibid.

5. Patterson Sims, “Appreciation: Ivan Karp (1926–2012),” American Art Journal 27, no. 1 (Spring 2013): 104.

6. Henry Geldzahler, letter to Mrs. Leo Bearman, November 12, 1969, New York Painting and Sculpture files, Correspondence: Positive, Metropolitan Museum of Art Modern and Contemporary Archives.

7. Bearman, quoted in “Kay Bearman Obituary,” The Daily Memphian , October 4, 2023. Available online at www.legacy.com/us/ obituaries/dailymemphian/name/kay-bearmanobituary?id=53260210 (accessed February 22, 2025).

Kay Bearman, Andy Warhol, and Ivan Karp at Leo Castelli Gallery, New York, 1965.