Clair-Obscur @ Bourse de Commerce

 

Peter Huyghe, Camata, 2024

Pierre Huyghe's video installation, Camata, 2024 fills the gallery beneath the Bourse cupola for the latest exhibition. Set in the Chilean Atacama desert, the film watches as three solar-powered mechanical arms move around a skeleton from the early twentieth century left lying on the desert floor. Cameras are placed on each arm, one moving on a semi-circular track around the skeleton, one outside the track simply observing, and one inside, probing, peering, and engaging with the skeleton and various glass balls, amulets, and a mirror. Of particular fascination is the film's editing which is done in real time by an AI algorithm. When Camata was shown in the Palazzo Grassi in Venice, the algorithm was determined by human movement within the exhibition space, but it was unclear if this was also the case in Paris. In addition to being mesmerizing to watch as mechanical arms move around, in and out of close up, themselves fascinated by the skeleton, Camata creates sophisticated dialogues between technology and human, life and death, processes of surveillance and objectification. Similarly, given the age of the skeleton and its enigmatic story, human time is thrust into tension with technological time in the film. A discourse on celestial time also emerges as we watch day turn into night through changing light in the sky, the appearance of stars, and the waxing and waning of sun and moon. Added to these already complex times is the seeming unpredictability of the editing created by algorithms. In keeping with Huyghe's concern for the inexplicable, for the blurring of boundaries between machine and human, Camata sits somewhere between science fiction and a scary reality in which machines very quickly take on human qualities. 

Sigmar Polke, Axial Age, 2005-2007

Also challenging boundaries between human and celestial, as well as having interesting things to say about time, is Sigmar Polke's cycle Axial Age. The installation consists of nine panels made with varying techniques and media from Antiquity through contemporary, including acrylics and toxic, artificial pigments. The result are a series of transparent panels resembling discoloured stain glass windows, "graffitied" by time. The panels bring to mind sacred images, speaking to an era that has been desecrated, and simultaneously, rescued from the dustbins of history.

Philippe Parreno, La Quinta del Sordo, 2021

Philippe Parreno recreates Goya's black paintings in, La Quinta del Sordo, 2021, a film that underlines the darkness of Goya's paintings. As the camera moves into tight closeup, the viewer feels intimately connected to the melancholy faces and the frescoed works. Sound is key to Parreno's re-presentation, as the environment of the recreated space dominates the soundtrack. We hear mechanical sounds, crying, light gurgling water, moaning. Once again, the past (images) and the present (sounds) come together on these sensuous walls, seen lovingly through Pareno's camera. As the film progresses, the light changes, becomes progressively brighter until the camera and light together remove the images and reduce the paintings to surfaces. Then we see shadows of leaves from a tree outside a window falling on an abstract painting. Parreno's film was actually one of the only ones in the exhibition which is directly and obviously about light and darkness, as it quite literally brings the ghosts of the past out of the shadows, into the light of the present. 

Robert Gober, Untitled, 1991

Robert Gober, Untitled, 1990 

I was also thrilled to see a few pieces by Robert Gober in the first floor galleries as he is not an artist that we often see in Europe. Gober's unique installations of amputated limbs, in the case of those on display here, trapped in a suitcase, descending in a glass case are always emotionally moving, and simultaneously, somewhat scarey. A work in beeswax and human hair shows a pillow merged with a torso, one side a man, the other a woman. The disfiguratioin of both bodies and objects, the loss of boundaries between the two, making the piece surreal, and provocative. Gober's surreal objects show the sad, desperate deformation of humanity. 

Alina Szapocznikow, Fiancé folle blanche, 1971

There were lots of other works in the exhibition, many of which I could and would love to write about here if space permitted. But I will just mention the few pieces by Alina Szapocznikow, a Polish sculpture whose work was new to me. Szapocznikow made incredibly powerful depictions of women's entrapment and enchainment to male sexuality. A work such as Fiancé folle blanche, is reminiscent of a small statuette that could be placed on a wedding cake. For all its critique of heterosexual relations, the woman is as happy in her naked pose with a penis as her support, as the penis is happy with her embrace. There is no sense in which the woman is a victim to the male organ. But still, we can't help wondering if she had any choice.

Clair-Obscur is another sprawling exhibition loosely cohered around a theme that itself moves from clarity to obscurity across three floors and a range of media at the Bourse de Commerce. And like previous of the Pinault collection's themed exhibitions, Clair-Obscur contains some exceptionally strong works and others that pale, mainly due to their uncertain relevance to the exhibition. Similarly, because a number of the films are long, and reveal themselves over time, it is an exhibition that is difficult to appreciate in one visit. That said, the richness of some of the works make for a rewarding few hours.

Wright of Derby : From the Shadows @ National Gallery, London

Joseph Wright of Derby, Experiment on a Bird in an Air Pump, 1768

The Wright of Derby exhibition at the National Gallery in London is small, glowing, and, on the day that I visited, all but empty. National Gallery visitors will be familiar with Joseph Wright of Derby's  Experiment on a Bird in an Air Pump (1768) as it is one of the many treasures on permanent display. The painting is arguably his most complex of those in the current exhibition as it encapsulates all of the themes and concerns that preoccupied him throughout his oeuvre. The lecturer performing a scientific experiment to an audience with differing levels of ambivalence, fascination, wonder, disgust, and trepidation takes up Wright's concerns of looking and the role of light as central to the spectacles of entertainment that were so in vogue in the second half of the eighteenth century. Film scholars have always been fascinated by this painting because it is cinematic in its bringing to life of a narrative about life and death through the use of artificial light. The boy in the background is also a key figure in his creation of a tension that runs through many of Write of Derby's paintings: the conflict between natural and artificial light put into play as he opens the curtain to reveal the moon.

Joseph Wright of Derby, Three Persons Viewing the Gladiator by Candlelight, 1765

Wright of Derby is also said to have been influenced by Caravaggio, but like Georges De La Tour, Wright of Derby using different kinds of light to meet very different ends from those explored by Caravaggio. For Caravaggio, light often had a mystical or religious significance, and for Wright of Derby, in his paintings, light was not only artificially produced, but even when the source is not visible, it is clear that it is realist. There is no transcendence or spiritual elevation in Wright's paintings. Similarly, for Wright, light is an experiment, measuring time, whether it is the transience of life or the structures given to us by the light of the natural world. Light creates small, intimate worlds, caverns in which scientists perform experiments, blacksmith's work, and children look on, sometimes fascinated, and at others, repelled by what they see.

Joseph Wright of Derby, An Academy by Lamplight, 1769

In keeping with his interest in education in his time, Wright often painted scenes from the academy, in which students and teachers appear to be learning technique. Like the Experiment on a Bird in an Air Pump, the looks of the figures in other works are characteristically going in different directions, creating crossed sight lines, multiple centres of a painting, and suggesting movement where there is none. This type of scattering of sight lines is characteristically cinematic, used to create character, tension, and narrative. In Wright's paintings it also creates isolation, where each figure is alone, perhaps looking outward as well as inward, but always in their own world. Thus, again unlike Caravaggio, in Wright's paintings, we see multiple types of looking in a single image. It is not only about spectacle and modern regimes of looking thanks to entertainment, but there is also a more traditional introspection.

Joseph Wright of Derby, The Alchymist in Search of the Philosopher's Stone, 1795

In another tension set up by Wright in many of the paintings, very public moments of display are often made intimate and secret thanks to the light and figures needing to huddle around the experiment. Or not. In The Alchymist in Search of the Philosopher's Stone,1795, the boys in the workshop are not even looking at the alchemist's discovery of phosphorous while he is astounded at his discovery. The scene takes place in a dark, shadowy workshop, but it is we, not the boys who are invited into the protagonist's experiment. This opening out to the viewer is also a common occurrence of Wright's paintings, yet another sign of his interest in modes of looking, regimes of visuality and the rise of optical entertainments, such as the magic lantern, being developed in his midst. 

Joseph Wright of Derby, A Philosopher giving that lecture on the Orrery
in which a Lamp is put in the place of the sun, 1766

The exhibition text claims that Wright of Derby was guided into his particular focus thanks to the fact that he wanted to do something different from what others in his midst were doing. On arrival in London, he had to stand out from the crowd, particularly because, as a young man from Derby, rather than a born and bred Londoner, the doors were not always open to him. As a man with his pulse on the dramatic upheavals in his world, Wright's insight into the role of painting in the middle of these changes, was visionary. He moved painting into the realm of performance and spectacle, at a time when it could so easily have been over shadowed or even left behind by other media. 

Kathleen Jacobs @ Karsten Greve

Kathleen Jacobs, Storm, 2023

I stumbled on this lovely group exhibition at Karsten Greve on my way home from the Martha Jungwirth exhibition at Thaddaeus Ropac. Despite including pieces by very well known artists such as Louise Bourgeois, Pierre Soulages, and Cy Twombly, the discovery for me were the paintings of American artist Kathleen Jacobs. In fact, it was her abstract grey painting seen through the street window that templed me inside. 

Jacobs time consuming process of wrapping trees such that
canvases come alive through interaction with the weather 

Jacobs tends to use a single palette that nevertheless results in a myriad of colors and levels of transparency thanks to her lengthy process conceived to weather the paint. Jacobs begins by stretching  canvases and wrapping them around trees, and then, over months, sometimes years, applies layers of paint. In turn, when enough pigment stays on the canvas, she begins to rub it like paper over a woodblock. The imprint is then touched up in her studio, colors added, highlighting the shapes of bark, pulling out the contours of grain. For exhibition, the canvas is mounted and turned horizontally.

Kathleen Jacobs, Lumen, 2018

Even without knowing of Jacobs' painstaking and unique process, it's possible to see that her paintings are made over time. The paint is visibly diluted by weather and absorbed by the canvas until it is nothing but surface. Similarly, though it is not possible to pinpoint the precise process simply from looking, the final paintings resemble nature. We see in them skies, seas, clouds. That said, there is always something ambiguous, something we can't quite place because above all, they are, like all abstraction, inviting us to see something that might not be in the painting. Once they are explained, they hover between the natural landscape and a fascinating revision of woodcuts - by which she is influenced. Simultaneously, the paintings' contemporary relevance is unmistakeable as they are literally tree hugging works that make a gentle cry for the preservation of the forests without which the paintings would not be able to be made.

Kathleen Jacobs small works on exhibition
Galerie Karsten Greve

On the gallery's upper floor, a series of small works line the wall. They are delicate and peaceful, reflective and meditative. As often is the case with paintings of this size, small opens out to large expansive worlds. Similarly, it is in these small works on the upper floor that we see the texture of the canvas become more prominent than the paint to the point where color resembles the veins of granite or marble. To be sure however, it is not the size, but the process that ensures they are quietly revealing their substance.

Martha Jungwirth, Geh nicht aus dem Zimmer @ Thaddaeus Ropac

Martha Jungwirth, Untitled, 2025

Martha Jungwirth's unique abstract paintings are often at odds with what she says about them. The title of the exhibition being a case in point. "Don't leave the bedroom" is the first line of a poem by Joseph Brodsky, about hunkering down and staying home. While her painting is intimately connected to her body and expressionistic, its brilliant colour and sensitive form reaches out to all of us in the world beyond the bedroom.

Martha Jungwirth, Untitled, 2025

Jungwirth is also quoted as saying that, for her, painting is about abundance and the plenitude of colour, and while we see this in her use of bright, intense colour, some of her paintings are as spare as any abstract paintings we would ever see. Strokes over brown paper are her signature. On exhibition in the first floor gallery, a burst of yellow paint on clean cardboard is bold and energetic without need for the distraction of other elements. Similarly, though the colours are rich, glorious and often filled with joy, the most striking of her works are arguably those in a single colour palette. The vivid fuschias are resplendent under Thaddaeus Ropac's skylight, but the paintings are also thoughtful and reflective. 

Martha Jungwirth, Untitled, 2025
Detail

Perhaps the varied significance of Jungwirth's paintings are not contradictory? Maybe these different aspects of the same painting sit comfortably together? For example, the vivid and confident colours contribute to the paintings' gentle femininity, their inwardness and simultaneous struggle against expectations. They are not only boistrous and bold. Indeed, there is something else about these paintings that makes them soft and delicate, intimate, beyond colour.

Martha Jungwirth, Untitled, 2025

Jungwirth says that her painting is intuitive, but what does that mean when translated into paint? She explains it further in this lovely video on the gallery website. Jungwirth literally reacts to something she hears or sees and the emotions flow through her body onto the page or paper. This spontaneity and the resultant traces in paint and pencil that allow us to see the artist's hand at work remind me of Cy Twombly's large canvases, even though the end result of Jungwirth's looks quite different. The similarity is in the intuition that drives the image - looking at brush strokes that resemble writing in paint, we see both artists in process, moving across the support, thinking, improvising, suggesting as they go. The intense coagulations of paint that arise when Jungwirth stops —or perhaps they are the squirts of paint coming from the tube that enable her to begin? —are moments of pause, interruption, and simultaneously, potentially heightened emotion. Similar markings can be found on Twombly's paintings as he moves across and around his canvas.

Martha Jungwirth, Untitled, 2025

Even though Jungwirth's strokes are entirely abstract, we see the physicality of the drawing and painting. Witness, for example, the different pressures she applies to the tool, the brush, the dirty finger prints around the edges of the brown cardboard surfaces that she uses as support. In some of the drawings, we also see traces of a face, a body part, an eye, suggestions of a hand. But it's not so much the forms discovered in the drawings as it is the recording of the hand as it moves over a page that centre Jungwirth's painting and drawing in her body. It's as though we are watching the body move, as though she translates her inner responses to events into images. Perhaps, even more than can be said of Twombly's paintings, Jungwirth's are made to be felt, sensed, before they are intellectually understood.

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The paintings on display at Thaddaeus Ropac's Marais gallery are inspired by the Brodsky poem, inspirations which then appear in drawings, doodlings made at home, in front of the television, showing current events, others' artwork. The drawings are Jungwirth's intuitive response. She calls the drawings diaristic, made by only half looking at the paper. Jungwirth draws and paints on paper, meaning that the works are fast, and enjoy a fluidity thanks to the even surface of the cardboard / paper. In this, the paintings themselves are like drawings, immediate, with minimal temporal duration, expressions of the body. They are in this sense, automatic writing in paint. Her paintings are marks that arrive before consciousness.

Georges de la Tour, Entre Ombre et Lumière @ Musée Jacquemart-André

Georges de la Tour, Le nouveau né, c. 1645

It was no surprise to see the extraordinary creations in and of light in Georges de la Tour's paintings now on exhibition at the Musée Jacquemart-André. De la Tour has a reputation as the seventeenth-century master of artificial light. Even if his paintings are rarely shown, the proliferation of copies and fakes makes them ironically familiar. Other than his crafting of light, perhaps the most exciting element of these paintings was the exaggerated intimacy of the scenes, the way that figures hovered around candle or torch light in small, enclosed spaces, always at night time, always in meditative poses. Even when the figures are in action, they are stopped still, reflecting, thinking, as if caught in a photograph. 

Georges de la Tour, La Madeleine Penitante, c. 1635-40

There was something about these paintings that made me see them as well ahead of their time. The use of light as more than illumination of a scene, often becoming the very subject of the scene, such that many other details of the paintings fade into the background. The fact that all the women, whether it is a religious figure or a peasant, look to be the same model hardly matters once we are pulled into the private world of her thoughts, effulgent in an illuminated space. That said, their pensive faces and often deliberately positioned hands are quietly expressive, even if we cannot access what those emotions are.

Georges de la Tour, La Femme à la Puce, 1632-1635

As the line between secular and religious becomes blurred in the paintings, it hardly matters if we are looking at the Virgin and St Anne or a pregnant peasant woman, a contemplative villager or a saint, La Madeleine or a prostitute. What matters is that all the figures appear to engaged in a transcendent experience and invite us into their private world. Though de la Tour was clearly a man committed to the scriptures, particularly as they were represented in painting, he was more interested in composition, lighting, and creating internal emotional worlds through soft orange glowing flames. 

Georges de la Tour, Les Joueurs des dès, 1651

So little is known about de la Tour during his lifetime. From records, it is know that he was born and lived in Lunéville, a small town in Lorraine. Where he learned, not just to paint, but to create worlds of mystery and contemplation through candle light, is itself a mystery. While historians continue to debate the unknowns of de la Tour's life, the lack of information also means that we are free to let our imaginations roam as we contemplate the paintings. There is widespread opinion that he must have visited Italy and been exposed to Caravaggio's painting - because of the light - but Caravaggio was doing something very different with light. Caravaggio's light and shadow was conceived and executed to energize, to sweep his figures into scenic action, and create perspectival lines. De la Tour used it for the very opposite reasons: to create secret, inward worlds. I saw a number of other resonances, for example, El Greco's long delicate fingers and hands placed in strategic positions, as well as his figures huddled around a flame in paintings such as An Allegory with a Boy Lighting a Candle in the Company of an Ape and a Fool, 1577-79. 

El Greco, An Allegory with a Boy Lighting a Candle in the Company of an Ape and a Fool, 1577-79

There is also something about these works that made me think that de la Tour was the Manet of his day, painting people on the street as the result of their environment, in unforgiving worlds. His paintings of old peasants against grey backgrounds, in what look to be theatre costumes reminded me of Manet's street portraits. Like Manet, de la Tour seemed to have empathy for those who had been left out of the prosperity of their time, giving them dignity and personality through painting where they may have had little in life.

Georges de la Tour, Vieillard, and, Vieille Femme, 1618-19

Though the Musée Jacquemart-André's exhibition spaces are themselves small and at times too intimate as viewers are squeezing past each other moving between rooms, the hanging of the paintings was quite wonderful. That said, the lighting often conflicted with the light given off by the painting. Each painting has been lit to ensure that the only place from which to look at it without glare is directly in front. However, this was not always possible with the crowds. Nevertheless, a patience with the crowds will bring the rich rewards of these quiet meditative works. 

Philip Guston, L'Ironie de l'Histoire @ Musée Picasso

Philip Guston, The Studio, 1969

The recent exhibition of Philip Guston's paintings doesn't explicitly address the "irony" of history that is mentioned in its title, but the connections are clear. At least, there are various possible interpretations, all of which are plausible. Staging an exhibition of Guston's political work at the Musée Picasso, alongside works by Picasso, itself strongly suggests an ironic repetition of history. Though the connection between the two artists is evident, it was brought into the foreground in this exhibition. Guston was influenced by Picasso's deformed and mutilated figures in his depiction of the Nazis' bombing of Guernica, as well as his repeated satirisation of the Spanish dictator, Francisco Franco. When Guston moved to figuration after sixteen years of painting abstraction, wanting to represent the violence of late 1950s and 1960s America, and the absurdity of president Richard Nixon, he had a ready example in Picasso's depictions of the same from thirty years earlier. 

Philip Guston, Poor Richard, 1971

Juxtaposing Picasso's political portraits and Guston's Nixon paintings and drawings, together with some of his depictions drawn from the media representation of the Second World War, the war on America's streets in the postwar period, and the violence of the Vietnam War demonstrates a repetition of history that is logical as well as ironic. Once Guston moves to his representations of white supremacy in the American South and his deformed, grotesque bodies, intertwined in bloody revolt, he expands Picasso's vocabulary. In addition, this connection highlights just how political Guston was. His engagement with the corruption of power in the satirical portraits and drawings of Nixon, especially when his face is one big scrotum and his nose an erect penis, seems as essential to the resistance as marching on the streets. Despite the pushback from artists and critics in his time, Guston's work from the 1960s and 1970s is incredibly radical once he returns to figuration. The return was anything but a turning away from the search for freedom of expression and liberation as some said of these paintings the time. Though perhaps we have to be in an era of explicit American violence all these years later to see the irony.

Philip Guston, Painting, 1954

Included in the exhibition are two exquisite abstract works, hung to illustrate Guston's ties to abstract expressionism. I was drawn to these two works both because they were new to me, but also, because they show Guston's connection to Mondrian. In this work, we see the vibrations and rhythms of Mondrian, as well as the direct, spontaneous expressive brushwork of De Kooning, without the references to self. The Structure of a work such as Painting (1954), its short, thick horizontal and vertical strokes makes the painting appear predetermined. Contrarily, the cloud of red and orange, literally floating on a pink and creamy background gives it a mystery and a surreality. (Note that the reproduction doesn't do the painting justice).

Philip Guston, Large Brush, 1979

Of course, Guston is continually painting himself, if not his personal subjective self. Rather, he is always looking for his self as artist. His persistent question through the exhibition and across his oeuvre is, what is the place of the artist within the idiocy and violence of this country at war? In one of the most disturbing paintings that could well be a self-portrait, a brush is dipped in a saucepan of red paint. It is as though the paint is boiling over, streaming down the sides of the pan as the brush is taken out, getting ready to paint. Of course, the red paint is recognizeable as blood. The painting is disturbing because it brings together the social violence and the artist's responsibility to that same violence, a responsibility taken up in representation. 

Philip Guston, Untitled, 1980

The exhibition finished with a series of works painted between Guston's first heart attack and his death a year later. Guston had a looming sense of his own death, but this didn't stop him painting, it just meant smaller canvases. In his final year, he painted curious, misshapen objects often looking like the spoils of war: bombs, a patched up grey teapot/satchel/elephant, what could be a landmine, all floating in a background of grey paint. To the end, death, violence and the battlefield were the preoccupations of this great American painter.

The greatest irony that will occur to many visitors to the exhibition is still another one. As we watch the United States whither in the face of the current administration's corruption and blatant power grabs, it is for artists to speak truth to power. And ironically, some of the most outspoken critics of current American politics (if we can even call it that as it is more like gangsterism) are the country's comedians. I came away from the exhibition wondering whether more American painters would take up Guston's mantle and speak out against the current regime, thus extending the lineage from Picasso. 

Kerry James Marshall, The HIstories @ The Royal Academy

Kerry James Marshall: The Histories, at the Royal Academy in London opens with some of Marshall's most brilliant pieces, summarising and portending the treasures to come in the exhibition. Included in the first room are paintings about painting: models, artists, studios, museums, students, visitors. All of the stages of production, exhibition and reception of painting are on display in this impressive introduction to his career. Ultimately, his oeuvre, in one way or another, is dedicated to the practice of representation in painting and what it means in the world, how painting has been commodified, or not, throughout history. Within this frame is another concern that runs deep into the oeuvre: blackness. How black people perform identity, are represented, seen, received and commodified, in art and in life. He asks what it means to be black, what it means to be seen as black. Marshall's concerns are sweeping and profound, ricocheting well beyond what lies within each painting's frame.

Kerry James Marshall, Untitled (studio), 2014

So many of Marshall's paintings are about looking; who looks, who is looked at, how we look, and most importantly, changing the perspectives and angles from which we look. From the opening of the exhibition, in works grouped together for their representation of the art world—models, studios, museums, students of art—paintings are filled with reflections, mirrors, and the performance of the one in the image. In a painting such as Untitled (Studio), 2014, the artist poses the head of her model before a spotlight, as if it is a photograph. The painting is already started on the left of Marhall's canvas, though it could be a different painting. A dog looks on, a nude model in the background appears to watch as does a man dressing behind a sheet that is both the red background in Marshall's painting and a screen for the man. There is so much going on in this painting, all of the layers skewed by the angle from which the viewer of Marshall's painting is anticipated. 

Kerry James Marshall, School of Beauty/School of Culture, 2012

In a later room, paintings set in a beauty school find related performances in mirrors and narratives of being looked at. As spectators, we are again placed at a very strange perspective, looking up as if watching a theatrical performance. The head of a blond white woman is shown in the foreground, skewed, elongated, compressed, in an obvious echo of the skull in Hans Holbein's The Ambassadors (1533). Rather than a reminder of the transience of life as is Holbein's skull, Marshall here seems to remind his viewer of the fabrication of the image of women. Where we stand in relationship to the image will depend on whether or not we see the entire woman's head. As with Holbein's painting, the out of place head is only fully visible from certain angles. As such, the curious motif is surely commenting on perspective and the importance of where we stand and how that takes on a larger thematic meaning. How we see women, depends on where we stand. In a twin work De Style (1993) [drawing on Manet's Bar at the Folies Bergères], men in a barber shop perform as if for a camera. Again through the use of mirrors, we see both opposite walls and the men having their hair done. Thus, Marshall draws on the history of art to converse on manufacturing an image, the importance of being seen in a particular way, and the distortions we bring to images. In addition, both of these works are particularly about creating a black identity, being seen as black, and being consumed by a viewer. That said, for Marshall all of the actors in his paintings are black, and therefore, the layers of representation and meaning are both racialised, and without borders.

Kerry James Marshall, Invisible Man, 1986

In a series of works that draws on literature rather than painting, Marshall cleverly paints invisible men. The faces and bodies fade into the black of the background, with only eyes and teeth canb be seen when standing at a distance. In these paintings he draws again on the racial stereotypes of how black men are seen (and consumed) by a white culture. For example, The Wonderful One, 1986 references the singing and dancing minstrel. What's interesting is that all of Marshall's figures are painted black, not brown, and black itself is rich and textured. Even when the works are not specifically about invisible men, there is always a facelessness to his figures because of their blackness. In a painting such as Vignette, 2003, a boy and girl are running through a love fantasy. The figures are silhouettes that have lost their corporeality to the fantasy of their love story, signified by butterflies and colourful birds all around them. This facelessness is also surely a comment on our blindness to them as people. White faces would have identities where black do not: black people are invisible in a particular way, and Marshall draws on this to show us that their skin colour (black) makes them less than human, diminished in the eyes of the beholder. 

Kerry James Marshall, Vignette, 2003

There is so much more to say about this exhibition, but people will need to go and see the brilliance of Marshall's paintings—both in their intellectual engagement and sparkling colour, even when the paintings are black—for themselves. The reworking of art history is everywhere, both in the representation and absence of black people. And always, Marshall does multiple things at once. To give a last example, in Gulf Stream (2003), he references Winslow Homer's famous painting and by painting gold netting around the frame, creates a keep sake, a lovely postcard of the charmed life of black people on the boat. He both confronts Homer's representation and the slave trade in a cheeky revision of the historical narrative. 

Kerry James Marshall, Gulf Stream, 2003

I came away convinced that Kerry James Marshall is the Manet of our time. Like Manet, he is a painter who is deeply concerned with the social issues of his time, motivated more than ever to shift painting beyond its familiar limits, while all the time paying homage to those limits as what enable his brilliance. In addition, like Manet, Marshall paints in a realist style that is not quite realist, altering the perspective through which we look at and see the world, drawing our attention to our blind spots.This might be the best exhibition of 2025, and as it makes its way to the Kunsthaus Zurich in 2026 and Musée d'art moderne de la ville de Paris in 2027, my hope is that not only more and more people will see the works, but that Marshall's work continues to receive the recognition and applause that it so richly deserves. 

The House on Utopia Parkway, Joseph Cornell's Studio Re-Created by Wes Anderson

View of exhibition from opposite side of rue de Castiglione

Gagosian has outdone itself, yet again, with an exquisite exhibition in its rue de Castiglione window. Filmmaker Wes Anderson has recreated Joseph Cornell's studio in which he lived and worked until his death in 1972. The studio was in the basement of his mother's house in Queens where he lived. Cornell was known in his neighborhood as the solitary figure walking the streets of Queens and sifting through odds and ends in flea markets and antique shops. He was obsessive, and meticulous, a man who created beautiful worlds that meant everything to him. He may have been a recluse and somewhat of an oddball, but as a collector, an archivist of memories and emotions, and creator of curious worlds inside boxes, his work also enjoyed an enormous influence on mid-century American art. 

Installation View Gagosian Gallery, rue de Castiglione

Anderson's installation—done together with some of his longtime collaborators—is not the studio itself, rebuilt and transposed to Paris, but a recreation. Some of Cornell's possessions are too fragile to move, and others not available, so Anderson remade these objects as close to the original as possible. That said, a number of Cornell's most well known boxes, themselves now archival objects, are in the display. I must say, knowing the sheer amount of junk that Cornell kept in the basement, I was expecting his studio to be messier, more like Francis Bacon's than Cezanne's orderly arrangement of objects. But, of course, Cornell's studio as represented in this exhibition, was scrupulous, with every object in a box, labelled, ordered, neatly stored and within easy access. In addition, Cornell's tools and materials—glues, brushes, pliers, and metal wash basins—looked as though they were waiting to be used. 

Joseph Cornell, Rose Hobart, 1936

For me and my students, Cornell is known for his found footage film, Rose Hobart (1936) one of the earliest examples of surrealist collage on film. Cornell took images of the actor Rose Hobart from a B-movie adventure, and re-edited them into a hommage to the actor, replaced the soundtrack with Brazilian samba, slowed it down, and projected his 19 minute film through a blue filter. The film says everything about the eccentric Cornell who was fascinated from a distance with the exoticism of film, the eroticism of the star, and his drive to creatively reconceive the world as the rest of us saw it.

Installation view with reflection of Gucci sign

The most glorious thing about this exhibition was how the installation became a repetition of Cornell's boxes. Viewers peered in through the gallery windows at all the objects, drawings, and everything in its place in the same way that we would before his boxes. Along with some of Cornell's most well-known boxes—Lauren Bacall and the medicine cabinet—there were film cans, photographs, drawings, boxes waiting to be filled, pictures from books, books with the pictures town out, pieces of wood, iron, biscuit tins, scrap books, little bottles, jars, baskets—all the bits and pieces that would eventually make their way into Cornell's boxes. As I peered through the windows of the gallery on a bitterly cold January 2, hoards of tourists walked past, their legs and feet reflected in the window together with the exquisite tiles of the arcade. Further complicating the view into Cornell's studio is the reflection of the Gucci hoarding on the building construction on the opposite side of the street. This Gucci kind of consumerism would be the antithesis of everything Cornell valued: his love of things thrown away, deemed to be of no value to anyone else, but of great value to him. The forgotten, that which has been left behind by capitalism and the drive to entertain - like the genre actor Rose Hobart—was his treasure trove. 

Installation view @ Gagosian Gallery

Cornell never left America, in fact, he rarely ventured far from New York. But, he was the sort of person who had a voracious appetite for the world, for things, for adventure. National Geographic magazines, Baedekers, well-read and loved books, films watched, these were the source of Cornell's fascination for the world. He knew Paris from the movies, fellow artists, and from encyclopaedias, books, and magazines that he found in junk sales, so I am sure, he would have been tickled to see his work on display through a prominent city window. That said, I can't imagine that he would have felt comfortable on rue de Castiglione, just up from the Place Vendôme with Napoleon looking down on him. What Cornell would have thought aside, well done Wes Anderson and Gagosian, for inviting us to peek into the past, so lovingly recreated, as Cornell did his boxes, amid the freneticism of contemporary Paris.