In the 1960s, art dealers and publishers Aimé and Marguerite Maeght decided to create a private foundation that would showcase their collection, based on models they had seen in the United States. They were encouraged by Cubist artist Georges Braque who saw in the project a way for them to cope with the loss of their son Bernard, who died of leukemia in 1953. The first of its kind in France, the Fondation Maeght opened in July 1964. At its inauguration, then minister of culture André Malraux said, “This is not a museum, but a place made from love and for the love of art and artists.”

Today, the museum is home to some 13,000 objects, including 2,000 works by Joan Miró (the largest collection in France), as well as site-specific installations by Braque, Pierre Tal-Coat, Marc Chagall, Pol Bury, Germaine Richier, and Alberto Giacometti, whose sculptures fill the courtyard.

Closed on and off for the past seven months, the Fondation Maeght reopened its long-awaited expansion last month. “We had the idea for the expansion in 2004. It was what my grandfather wanted, but we could not find the right person for the job,” said Isabelle Maeght, the Maeghts’ granddaughter, during a press conference.

Designed by Paris-based firm Silvio d’Ascia Architecture, the new section adds 5,005 square feet to the museum’s footprint, without disturbing the original architecture by Josep Lluís Sert, who also built Miró’s studio in Mallorca. Instead, d’Ascia chose to dig four extra galleries under the existing building; the largest of which lies below the Giacometti courtyard. (They are only visible from the Chemin de Rondes, which runs behind the museum.) The largest one lies below the Giacometti courtyard.

“This is an extension project by subtraction,” d’Ascia said during the press preview. “As an architect it is important to know when to set one’s ego aside, especially in the face of an invisible project. I had to adopt a silent approach not to disrupt the foundation’s already perfect balance.”

These new underground galleries overlook a pine forest and the Mediterranean Sea, thus keeping alive the dialogue between art, nature, architecture that served as the foundation to the Maeghts’ vision for their museum.

Adrien Maeght, 94, the Maeghts’ son and current president of the foundation, added, “The basement rooms designed by Silvio d’Ascia have brought the site into the 21st century.”

The expansion will now allow the foundation to display its permanent collection (downstairs in the expansion) alongside temporary exhibitions (upstairs in the original building), like its current one for Henri Matisse and Pierre Bonnard. The new “Galerie de la Bibliophilie” opens the renovated building, showcasing selections from the 45,000 books in the foundation’s collection. Down a dozen steps are paintings by Pierre Soulages, Jean Paul Riopelle, Jean Messager, Fernand Léger, and others. The final room is dedicated to recent acquisitions, including a figurative painting by Hélène Delprat, who will be the subject of a solo show at the foundation by next spring.

The budget for the expansion project amounts to €5 million, including €1 million from Adrien Maeght and €500,000 each from the French state, the Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur region, and the Alpes-Maritimes department. The Dassault family also gave €1 million, through their “History and Heritage” fund, managed by the grandchildren of Marcel and Madeline Dassault who were friends of the Maeghts and attended the foundation’s 1964 opening. The company Triverio, which oversaw the original building’s construction 60 years ago, participated as corporate sponsors. “Without friendship this foundation would not even exist,” Isabelle Maeght said several times throughout the preview.

The theme of friendship also played a role in the Bonnard-Matisse exhibition, as both artists were friends with the Maeghts. “Bonnard and my father first met in Cannes in 1936 through a lithograph to be printed,” Adrien Maeght writes in the exhibition catalog. Bonnard then introduced Aimé Maeght to Matisse in 1943, but they only became close after Matisse and Marguerite randomly met in a doctor’s waiting room; “a man sat down next to her and asked her to pose for him,” and she soon became his “active agent.”

Today, about 40 drawings of Marguerite by Matisse remain; several of them are featured in the new collection hang. “At the age of fourteen,” Adrian continues in the catalog, “I had the privilege of attending one of these posing sessions and of making an eight-minute film—the only document I know of showing Matisse drawing.” Also on view is Matisse’s Le Buisson (The Bush), which hung above Bernard’s bed during his illness.

Featuring both artist’s landscapes and visions of Saint-Tropez’s light, self-portraits and several portraits of their recurring models, the exhibition mostly avoids pairing works by Bonnard and Matisse side by side. That’s intentional, according to the show’s curator, Marie-Thérèse Pulvenis de Sévigny, a former conservator at Nice’s Musée Matisse. The focus here is on the Maeghts and their relationship to the artists: Bonnard encouraged them to open a gallery in Paris, and Matisse was chosen for the inaugural show in 1945. “What matters here is the synergy between the three, which served as a springboard for the foundation,” she said.

His brilliant graphic sense produced Intimacies, a suite of ten prints depicting couples in domestic or hotel interiors, published in 1898. Vallotton relied on the most reductive formal means—the simple contrast of black on white—to establish richly ambiguous scenarios, hardly clarified by suggestive titles inscribed at the bottom of each block: The Lie, The Irreparable, or Five O’Clock (that hour when French men typically met their mistresses). Betrayal and blame are broadly assigned: in the Munch-like scene of The Triumph, a pitiless woman disdains her distraught husband; in Extreme Measure, it’s the sobbing wife who’s devastated. The lady in evening dress in Money seems unmoved by the disputation of her male companion, his intentions abstruse. Vallotton places him literally on the dark side, merging his figure with the shadows. Ironically, a year after he created this image, the artist left his own longtime mistress to marry a wealthy widow—for money. He was unhappy ever after.

Money’s composition is remarkable, fully two-thirds of it given over to solid black. In a similarly bold move, to cancel the edition, Vallotton cut up his woodblocks and compiled a single-sheet graphic novel, sans text, featuring an evocative detail from each print in Intimacies. One thinks of Zola—but also of Chris Ware—as these mute vignettes of passion and alienation form a disjunctive narrative of intimate sexual relations in Vallotton’s modern world.

Pierre Bonnard, Fenêtre ouverte sur la Seine (Vernon) [Window Open on the Seine (Vernon)], 1911–12, oil on canvas.

MURIEL ANSSENS/VILLE DE NICE MUSÉE DE BEAUX-ARTS JULES CHERET

“Bonnard’s art for art’s sake”
By John Alford
Summer 1948

Relating the works of this “last Impressionist” to nineteenth-century ideas in his exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art

The first response of anyone visiting the memorial exhibition of the paintings of Bonnard now on view at the Museum of Modern Art in New York will depend on the habits of mind of the observer. Most people will respond almost certainly to the vibrant but harmonious color of the pictures. The effect is of a light-filled space in which chromatic and linear patterns excite the senses as they are excited when going from a cool room into the glow of a hot afternoon in early summer, before the grass has seared and the leaves have taken on the flatter opaqueness of August. It is tremendously sensual, with an impact that affects not only the eyes, but the dilations of veins and the nerve-ends of the skin. To that degree the art of Bonnard is “abstract.” It creates a patterned stimulus to which we respond primarily with our senses, without identifying the source of excitation as a person, a house, a flower, or a tree.

But Bonnard’s painting is also concrete and representational, and it is quite possible that someone of more socially determined habits would first be aware not of the chromatic orchestration, but here are the interiors of rooms; scenes of family breakfast with bread and fruit and gay checkered line; views from open windows into gardens, or over suburban roofs with summer landscapes, with glimpses of river or sea.

Pierre Bonnard, Le Jardin (The Garden), 1936, oil on canvas.

ROGER VIOLLET/MUSÉE D’ART MODERNE DE LA VILLE DE PARIS

Both observations are, of course, essential to a full understanding and enjoyment of his art. For, from first to last, it was fostered and determined by a sense of fragile well-being, by the love of a condition that was transitory either because of the mortality all organic life is heir to, or because of some sense of cultural culmination in the age in which he himself matured. More than a painter of domestic contentment, Bonnard is a painter of domestic love, not concentrated on a single person nor a group of people who by ties of blood he could call his own (though such an element is present in his observation of the children of his sister, Andrée Terrasse), but of a domestic love suffusing all elements of a pattern of life which he had good fortune to inherit and the skill to bring into being again in his imagination and by his craft.

Bonnard painted many “still-lifes” of fruit. But his fruit is never simply form and color, an ideal of abstract organic order, as it was with Cézanne. It is fruit that has the warmth of the sun on it; that is going to be velvety to the touch and cool and sweet in the mouth. It is part of the anticipation of getting up in the morning and of coming in from the garden for lunch; of going out again to cultivate or to pick for the next domestic meal. For though the subject of his painting may be merely a bowl of fruit, his theme is always the order of a sensuous and self-disciplined pattern of life.

His sensuous intensity, which was both personal and of great cultural significance, suggests that Bonnard was aware in some measure that the way of life he painted was under threat of dissolution. His art, in fact, is related to a particular moment in the history of French culture and of Western civilization. The praise of urban and domestic order was not at all new either in European or in Oriental art. It is the theme of Jan van Eyck’s portrait of Jan Arnolfini, and of Carpaccio’s Dream of St. Ursula. It is inspired Vermeer’s View of Delft and countless Dutch interiors. Watteau, doubly prescient, harps endlessly on its fragility. Chardin, for whom the bowl of fruit had the same significance as for Bonnard, lingers over it with patient affection. The English “conversation” painters of the eighteenth century treat it with an ostentatious assurance. But in the first half of the nineteenth century it disappears with the Romantic flight from urban actuality. Whatever the creators of the new industrial order thought of “self-help” and laissez-faire, the art they fostered and patronized shows little sensuous affection either for the new artifact shell or for the new mechanical disciplines they were bringing into being.

The greatest critic of the new drabness and of the ledger mentality of industrialized commercialism was Baudelaire, with his gospel of sensory and emotional vividness at any cost; the gospel of heroic humanism even if it must be achieved in Flowers of Evil. But the best known document in English expressing the critical doctrine, is the conclusion to Pater’s volume of papers on The Renaissance. That essay, written in 1868, is an astounding exposition of what was to become common practice in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. In it, he comments on the dissolution under scientific analysis of the objects we familiarly identify as permanent forms, into perpetually changing elements and forces not available to direct sensory observation; and on the similar dissolution of what we assume to be our permanent personalities or minds into an evanescent pattern of sensations or “impressions” finally disrupted and ended by death. “Our one chance” was to cultivate the vivid moment. “Great passions may give us this quickened sense of life . . . only be sure it is passion.” “Of such wisdom . . . the desire of beauty, the love art for its own sake has most. For art comes to you proposing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass, and simply for those moments’ sake.”

Pierre Bonnard, The Studio with Mimosas, 1939–46, oil on canvas.

PHOTO: ©CENTRE POMPIDOU, MNAM-CCI DIST. RMN-GRAND PALAIS/CENTRE POMPIDOU

The relation to Impressionism of this concentration on the quality of the transitory moment, in both its objective and its subjective aspects, is clear enough to need amplification here. For Baudelaire, it was already part of the characteristic structure of “modern” culture, as is explicit in his essay on the urbanity of Constantin Guys. And for the Impressionists, too, the spectacle of the dance hall and the theatre, the animation of picnics and race-courses, the bustle of the streets, the drift of smoke in railway stations are as frequent and characteristic types of stimulus as the shifting pattern of tones in landscape and sky. On these terms the city and urban culture are readmitted to the imaginative repertory of the creative artist. For a couple of decades or more the sensory aesthetics of Impressionism and the doctrine of art for art’s sake are inextricably interwoven. The alliance, however, was more an accident of history than a result of any necessary limitation in the creative process of the artists. Within a few years art for art’s sake had degenerated to the charming trivialities of Whistler’s Nocturnes and the smart-alec epigrams of Oscar Wilde. But Impressionist painting, though it is essentially an art of momentary record, is great art precisely when and because it is something more. The cultivation of the quality of the passing moment “simply for those moments’ sake” is actually the negation of great passion. Great passion is always concentrated on future ends of a stable and funded kind; on self-realization, on social and economic security, on the security of love in which the whole personality, including but not limited to the senses, is involved. That is why Toulouse-Lautrec, with his sordid sincerity—his real “flowers of evil”—is potentially a more intense and more moving artist than the detached Degas. And again, this moral inclusiveness is what gives the sense of an intimate, sensuous human order, to so many of the great paintings of Renoir.

The enjoyment of such painting is not simply the enjoyment of art for art’s sake, nor only of “moments as they pass and simply for those moments’ sake,” but also of the achievements of at least some of the basic purposes of human endeavor, with its essential disciplines and codes. For, though the purpose of such painting is not practical morality, it touches our interest at points where moral tension makes both artist and spectator are most aesthetically alive. The point is one around which criticism has been revolving for a century and on which it has still reached no stability. But it is fundamental for an understanding of the painting of Bonnard.

A perception of the weakness of Impressionist aesthetics led to the secession of both Cézanne and Gauguin, and it is significant that Bonnard started his artistic career in the shadow of Gauguin’s “synthesism” and in relation with the Nabis group. Less of an intellectual than Sérusier or Maurice Denis, more balanced and serene in temperament than Gauguin, his adherence was tentative and temporary. Yet his habitual procedure in painting was closer to theirs than it was to that of the Impressionists, whose “instantaneous” quality Bonnard so strongly recalls. Like Degas in his old age, he never drew from the model, but would watch and absorb and filter his impressions till an image crystallized to express the character of what he loved. If it was Gauguin’s intention to concentrate “all Tahiti” in a single image, Bonnard did this for his cultural environment, and with less ado.

Pierre Bonnard, Le Café (Coffee), 1915, oil on canvas.

TATE

Among the gestures of Gauguin, rebellious against the encroaching commercialism of his age, was his intermittent practice of the decorative crafts. Bonnard, too, in his youth, was more than touched by the ripples of the “art and craft” movement and by the prevalent cult of Japonaiseries. The roots of the habit flowers in more than Bonnard’s occasional screens and illustrated books. The life he records is suffused not only with the sense of domestic well-being, but with an equally strong sense of domestic “well-making,” of man’s functional and affectionate relation with the earth and its materials. The love of craftsmanship issues in the quality of all his painting, and is much more than decorative craftsmanship. It is part of the commentary on the Paris of the nineties and of the series of records of the intimacies of the house and the garden, the kitchen and the table. The furniture hardly needs the visible presence of the user to make its humanity immediately apparent. Indeed in a number of his canvases one’s discovery of the human figure is subsequent to one’s imaginative seizure by a patently domestic moment among food and crockery, or among the tables and chairs of a garden terrace. Bonnard’s serenity floated not seldom on a humor that was untouched by any sort of malice. In his old age, as the intimates of his own generation died, these things, and the nude human figure, and the humanized landscape of Le Cannet, remained as symbols of a culture that was also passing.

The quality of transience in Bonnard’s imagery is unique. For where, as in the work of Monet, it is recognized by an insistence on the momentary effect of atmospheric light, and in that of Degas by an attitude caught in transition from one posture to another, in the paintings of Bonnard it is not merely the movement of light or of a figure that have been arrested, but the whole passage of time. This is due, I think, to a combination of a highly sophisticated use of the Impressionists’ tricks of candid camera attitudes and of composition, with an extreme vividness of sensory quality. Monet recorded each season of the year and each hour of the day. With Bonnard it is always spring or early summer and high noon. But the impact of form, color, and luminosity are such as we can only experience at rare moments of hypersensitivity, when time, it seems, stands still. This is emphatically a savoring of the “quality of the moments as they pass,” but equally emphatically not merely “for the moment’s sake.” For the moment itself is both a symbol and a fruit, which in turn has a seed and a flower and fruit, as in all processes of growth and maturation.

In connection with the Bonnard retrospective, the Museum of Modern Art has published a catalogue of the exhibition with a long biographical and critical essay by John Rewald; 109 reproductions of paintings, drawings, and prints; and five colorplates. Distributed by Simon and Schuster, New York, it sells for $5.

A version of this story originally appeared in the Summer 1948 issue of ARTnews on page 17 under the title “Bonnard’s art for art’s sake.”

Judy Chicago, Driving the World to Destruction, from the series “PowerPlay,” 1985.

PHOTO: ©DONALD WOODMAN/ARTISTS RIGHTS SOCIETY (ARS), NEW YORK; ART: ©JUDY CHICAGO AND ARS, NY/COURTESY THE ARTIST; SALON 94, NEW YORK; AND JESSICA SILVERMAN GALLERY, SAN FRANCISCO

This season brings long-overdue surveys for artists like Vija Celmins, Graciela Iturbide, Zilia Sánchez, Judy Chicago, Hans Hofmann, and Margaret Kilgallen, as well as the latest editions of major international exhibitions like the Kochi-Muziris Biennale and the Guangzhou Triennial. It’s also a winter of firsts. The National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea will stage the biggest Marcel Duchamp show to date in Asia, with many of the objects on view having been drawn from the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s world-class collection of the artist’s work, while America will get its first-ever Sri Lankan art survey this December in the form of a 250-work exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Below, a look at the winter’s most promising shows.

NATIONAL

December

“Judy Chicago: A Reckoning”
Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami
December 4, 2018–April 21, 2019

Many know Chicago solely for The Dinner Party (1974–79), a landmark installation now permanently housed at the Brooklyn Museum that creates the setting for an imagined gathering of 39 historical female figures, from Boudica to Frida Kahlo. In the intervening years, Chicago has produced a formidable body of work, however, much of it dealing with the representation of women and rituals throughout art history. This full-career survey, which will bring together works from her early days as a feminist-art pioneer as well as more recent figurative paintings, includes Purple Poem (for Miami), a brand-new site-specific smoke piece. —Alex Greenberger

Scowen & Co., Entrance to the Buddhist Temple, Kandy (Ceylon), ca. 1880–90, albumen silver print.

©MUSEUM ASSOCIATES, LACMA/LOS ANGELES COUNTY MUSEUM OF ART, GIFT OF GLORIA KATZ AND WILLARD HUYCK

“The Jeweled Isle: Art from Sri Lanka”
Los Angeles County Museum of Art
December 9, 2018–June 23, 2019

No American museum has ever put on a survey of Sri Lankan art before, so LACMA is breaking new ground by bringing together 250 artworks spanning nearly 2,000 years of the country’s history. The show will feature precious decorative objects, 19th-century photographs depicting the South Asian country’s scenery and monuments. These, along with ivories and textiles, reflect Sri Lankan exchanges and interactions with European colonizers. The show draws on LACMA’s own rarely displayed collection of Sri Lankan art. —Claire Selvin

“Vija Celmins: To Fix the Image in Memory”
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
December 15, 2018–March 31, 2019

Celmins is best known for her photorealistic paintings that depict natural environments—the sea, for instance, or the moon’s cratered surface—with a masterful level of detail that can at times border on abstraction. The artist’s first North American retrospective in 25 years will feature around 150 paintings, sculptures, and drawings. Next fall the exhibition travels to the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Breuer building in New York—as it happens, the very same building where Celmins had a major traveling exhibition in 1992, when it was home to the Whitney Museum. Celmins’s celebrated seascapes will appear alongside her Pop-inflected paintings of consumer goods. —John Chiaverina

January

Margaret Kilgallen, Untitled, ca. 2000, acrylic on paper.

COURTESY RATIO 3

“Margaret Kilgallen: that’s where the beauty is.”
Aspen Art Museum, Colorado
January 12, 2019–June 16, 2019

Kilgallen, who died at age 33 in 2001, was of the main artists associated with the Mission School, a loose group based in California’s Bay Area known for its work made using humble materials that drew inspiration from all kinds of countercultural activity in 1990s America. This retrospective is the largest presentation of Kilgallen’s work since 2005, and it will use the artist’s exhibition history as a compass to explore her wide-ranging influences, which include the history of printmaking, American folk art, and feminist theory. The exhibition’s title is drawn from a quote from Kilgallen in which she discussed her disinterest in mechanical work and instead opted for something different and entirely handmade. —J.C.

Graciela Iturbide, ¡México…Quiero Conocerte! (Mexico…I want to get to know you!), Chiapas, México, 1975, gelatin silver print.

©GRACIELA ITURBIDE/MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS, BOSTON, GIFT OF THE ARTIST

“Graciela Iturbide’s Mexico”
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
January 19, 2019–May 12, 2019

Iturbide has long trained her lens on the contrasts she has observed in Mexico, with particular attention to seemingly opposing forces that coexist—ancient traditions and contemporary culture, life and death—and the rituals related to them. This exhibition will feature 125 photographs from throughout Iturbide’s five-decade career, among them her intimate documentary-style images of indigenous peoples in Mexico, including the Seri in the Sonora Desert and the women of the Juchitán people (part of the Zapotec culture) in Oaxaca, as well as recent work depicting items in Frida Kahlo’s bathroom and plants at the Oaxaca Ethnobotanical Gardens. —Maximilíano Durón

“Lucio Fontana: On the Threshold”
Met Breuer, New York
January 23, 2019–April 14, 2019

There are few more iconic photographs of an artist at work than the one of Fontana holding the knife he’d just used slash one of his paintings. His slashed paintings reflected the traumatic violence in Italy, where he was based, following World War II, yet they also served as dramatic experiments that questioned whether painting really was a two-dimensional medium at all. Those works rightfully garnered him acclaim, but he produced much more than that, making room-size light installations and abstract sculpture alongside his paintings. This retrospective aims to show the full scope of his work, and the exhibition will emphasize the role Fontana’s birth country, Argentina, played in his practice. —A.G.

Robert Mapplethorpe, Candy Darling, 1973, four dye-diffusion transfer prints (Polaroid), in painted plastic mounts and acrylic frame.

©ROBERT MAPPLETHORPE FOUNDATION, USED BY PERMISSION/SOLOMON R. GUGGENHEIM MUSEUM, NEW YORK, GIFT OF THE ROBERT MAPPLETHORPE FOUNDATION

“Implicit Tensions: Mapplethorpe Now”
Guggenheim Museum, New York
January 25, 2019–July 10, 2019; July 24, 2019–January 5, 2020

The two-venue retrospective at the Getty Center and LACMA made 2016 the year of Robert Mapplethorpe in Los Angeles. This year Mapplethorpe mania comes to New York. To mark the 30th anniversary of the artist’s 1989 death from AIDS-related causes at the age of 42, the Guggenheim will present a yearlong, two-part exhibition of his work. Drawn primarily from a 1993 gift of 200 photographs from his estate, the show’s first part will bring together a variety of works—celebrity portraits, nudes, flowers, self-portraits, and images of the S&M community, as well as collages and mixed-media constructions. The second part will explore Mapplethorpe’s lasting influence on contemporary art, pairing his work with that of others in the museum’s collection, such as Rotimi Fani-Kayode, Lyle Ashton Harris, Paul Mpagi Sepuya, and Catherine Opie. —M.D.

“Liz Magor: BLOWOUT”
Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, Cambridge, Massachusetts
January 30, 2019–March 24, 2019

Best known for her sculptures and assemblages of dissimilar materials, Magor has made a new body of work for this show incorporating Mylar, which is often used to create transparent commercial packaging. The Canadian artist introduced what she has called “agents” to her materials, causing them to slowly deteriorate in various ways. In April, the show, Magor’s first in a museum on America’s East Coast, will travel to the Renaissance Society in Chicago, the exhibition’s co-organizer. —C.S.

February

Kevin Jerome Everson, IFO (still), 2017, film.

©KEVIN JEROME EVERSON/COURTESY THE ARTIST, TRILOBITE-ARTS DAC, PICTURE PALACE PICTURES, AND THE INSTITUTE OF CONTEMPORARY ART AT THE UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA

“Colored People Time: Mundane Futures”
Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia
February 1, 2019–March 31, 2019

The three-show series “Colored People Time” will examine ways in which slavery and colonialism affect the present and the years to come. “Mundane Futures,” the series’ first exhibition, will feature work by Martine Syms, Kevin Jerome Everson, Aria Dean, and Dave McKenzie, with a focus on the future of black cultural production. The show will position Syms’s film The Mundane Afrofuturist Manifesto (2015), in which the artist reads a text about a new kind of black aesthetics for the 21st century, with two different historic texts: Sutton Griggs’s 1899 black dystopian novel Imperium in Imperio and the Black Panthers’ Ten-Point Program from 1972. “Mundane Futures” will be followed by installments called ”Quotidian Pasts” and “Banal Presents.” —C.S.

Frida Kahlo, Appearances Can Be Deceiving, n.d., charcoal and colored pencil on paper.

©2018 BANCO DE MÉXICO DIEGO RIVERA FRIDA KAHLO MUSEUMS TRUST, MEXICO, D.F. / ARTISTS RIGHTS SOCIETY (ARS), NEW YORK

“Frida Kahlo: Appearances Can Be Deceiving”
Brooklyn Museum, New York
February 8, 2019–May 12, 2019

In 2014, curator Julie Rodrigues Widholm told ARTnews that Kahlo has “been so overshadowed by her celebrity that her work has become lost.” Could this be the exhibition that finally saves the Mexican Surrealist painter from her own celebrity? For what is being billed as the largest Kahlo show in America in a decade, the Brooklyn Museum will home in on how the artist carefully crafted her identity. The show will include her clothes, personal possessions, and examples of contemporaneous films and propaganda, as well as works from the museum’s Mesoamerican holdings. If the show’s title is any proof, it will shed light on never-before-seen aspects of Kahlo, whose work frequently dealt with the complexities of being a female artist in the first half of the 20th century. —A.G.

“Maryam Jafri: I Drank the Kool-Aid But I Didn’t Inhale”
Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles
February 10, 2018–June 23, 2019

How or why some consumer products fail to sell is the subject of Jafri’s 2014–15 series “Product Recall: An Index of Innovation,” a grouping of appropriated advertisements alongside ad copy and information that came with these goods. (One work in the series includes boxes from a line of frozen vegetables that were advertised using language that urged consumers not to buy them; the reasons why they never found their audience are obvious.) This show, Jafri’s first museum show in the U.S., will include a new version of that series, which the artist has called an “alternative history” of consumer culture. —A.G.

“Nari Ward: We the People”
New Museum, New York
February 13, 2019–May 26, 2019

Bringing together over 30 sculptures, paintings, videos, and installations, this show, Ward’s first New York museum survey, traces the artist’s 25-year career. The show will present some of Ward’s early sculptures—including the large-scale environments Amazing Grace (1993) and Hunger Cradle (1993)—made with materials the artist found in Harlem. The exhibition takes its name from Ward’s 2011 piece of the same title, in which the opening words of the preamble to the U.S. Constitution are rendered in hand-dyed shoelaces—a way of reclaiming the text, the artist has said. —C.S.

Zilia Sánchez, Amazonas (Amazons), from the series “Topologías eróticas” (Erotic Topologies), 1978, Acrylic on stretched canvas.

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY ART MUSEUM, NEW JERSEY

“Zilia Sánchez: Soy Isla (I Am an Island)”
The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.
February 16, 2019–May 19, 2019

One highlight of the 2017 Venice Biennale was a suite of shaped canvases by Cuban-born artist Zilia Sánchez. This show, Sánchez’s first-ever retrospective, will feature some 65 paintings, sculptures, sketches, and other pieces made over the course of her seven-decade career. The works often tackle metaphysical themes, employing geometries and imagery related to female mythological figures, including the Amazonians and Antigone. Sánchez has discussed her work in terms that refer to her alienation—both as a Latin American artist and as a woman—hence the show’s title. —Shirley Nwangwa

“Hans Hofmann: The Nature of Abstraction”
February 27, 2019–July 21, 2019
Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, California

It’s impossible to imagine a history of American abstract art in the postwar era without Hofmann, who taught many budding New York painters of the time—including Helen Frankenthaler and Lee Krasner—in the ways of color theory and modernist styles. Hofmann’s work, with its juxtaposed swatches of opposing colors and uneven textures, is lesser known than that of his students, so this show will bring together nearly 70 works to spotlight how he translated European techniques for American audiences. The show will travel in the fall to the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts. —A.G.

Hans Hofmann, The Vanquished, 1959, oil on canvas.

JONATHAN BLOOM/©THE REGENTS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA/UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA BERKELEY ART MUSEUM AND PACIFIC FILM ARCHIVE, BEQUEST OF THE ARTIST

INTERNATIONAL

December

Jaume Plensa
Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona
December 1, 2018–April 22, 2019

Curated by Ferran Barrenblit, this show will provide a comprehensive view of Plensa’s work from the 1980s to the present. The artist’s koanic work plays on the yin and yang of various phenomena—how darkness can accentuate light (and vice versa), and how silence can emphasize noise. Plensa’s fantastical, oversized sculptures, in which human forms appear to materialize from amalgams of text, have forged his reputation as one of Spain’s foremost artists. Because Plensa hails from Barcelona, the MACBA show will act as a homecoming of sorts. —Annie Armstrong

Alex Katz, Paul Taylor Dance Company, 1963–64, oil on canvas.

BAYERISCHE STAATSGEMÄLDESAMMLUNGEN, MUNICH/UDO AND ANETTE BRANDHORST COLLECTION

Alex Katz
Museum Brandhorst, Munich
December 6, 2018–April 22, 2019

“Sincere art is art that relies on subject matter to carry it,” Katz told Calvin Tomkins in a New Yorker profile earlier this year. “An honest painter is one who doesn’t paint very well.” Included in this show will be Katz’s stylized portraits of notables from the New York art world, among them the late dancer Paul Taylor, whom Katz painted as a stark white figure against an all-black background. As part of the show, alongside Katz’s portraits and landscapes, the museum will premiere a new documentary about the artist. —S.N.

“The Street: Where the World Is Made”
MAXXI, Rome
December 7, 2018–April 28, 2019

Street scenes are among the most pervasive subjects in art history, having appeared in everything from ancient Roman frescoes to Romare Bearden paintings. But what value do they have for artists today? That query formed the basis for this exhibition, curated by Hou Hanru. Included will be work by Gimhongsok, Francis Alÿs, and Yael Bartana, among many others. —A.G.

Rosana Paulino, Geometria à brasileira (Brazilian Geometry), 2018, digital printing, collage and monotype on paper.

PRIVATE COLLECTION

“Rosana Paulino: The Sewing of Memory”
Pinacoteca Estado de São Paulo
December 8, 2018–March 4, 2019

Concerns regarding the status of black women in Brazil run through much of Paulino’s output, which will be surveyed here in this 140-work show, the largest devoted to the artist in her home country. Spanning the last three decades, the show will feature works that recontextualize images created by European colonialists and scientific practitioners. Fabric will appear throughout these works; the artist has said that the material is a symbol of how men and women might be able to heal themselves following intense trauma. —A.A.

“Pedro Figari: African Nostalgias”
Museu de Arte de São Paulo
December 12, 2018–February 10, 2019

Figari’s work has rarely been surveyed despite his having long been considered one of the most notable modernists in Latin America. This show will span the full breadth of the Uruguayan artist’s career, with a focus on how his background as a human rights lawyer influenced his paintings. Many of his subjects were black Uruguayans, whom he depicted performing quotidian activities, such as dancing or honoring the dead. Though he transitioned from law to art late into his career, he produced some 4,000 Impressionism-inspired pictures in just 15 years; the MASP show will offer a sampler of them. —S.N.

Pedro Figari, Candombe, n.d., oil on card.

MUSEO BLANES, MONTEVIDEO, URUGUAY

Kochi-Muziris Biennale
Various venues, Kochi and Kerala, India
December 12, 2018–March 29, 2019

For the fourth edition of this biennial, curated by artist Anita Dube, the Pavilion at Cabral Yard, which acts as the show’s central space, will host both physical and digital programming. In addition to talks, screenings, and performances, the venue will hold public displays of online content in a “web-integrated space.” Dube has called her show a “knowledge laboratory”; among the artists she has selected to participate are Barthélémy Toguo, the Guerrilla Girls, Shirin Neshat, and William Kentridge. —C.S.

Oskar Kokoschka, Flute Player and Bats (Wiener Werkstätte postcard no. 73), 1907, color lithograph.

©2018 FONDATION OSKAR KOKOSCHKA AND PROLITTERIS, ZURICH/ALBERTINA, VIENNA

Oskar Kokoschka
Kunsthaus Zurich
December 14, 2018–March 10, 2019

Kokoschka created much of his energetic, sometimes humorous figurative work in direct opposition to the wave of state-sanctioned art that took hold throughout Europe during World War II. This has made him a peculiar figure in art history—the late Austrian artist is famous for his contribution to German Expressionist painting, for example, even though he intentionally kept some distance from the movement during its heyday, in the 1920s. This retrospective aims to better situate Kokoschka in the art world of his time; it includes around 200 works that cover the full spectrum of his output, from paintings to prints. —J.C.

Guangzhou Triennial
Guangdong Museum of Art, China
December 21, 2018–March 10, 2019

The sixth edition of the Guangzhou Triennial, titled “As We May Think: Feedforward,” will investigate ideas related to technology, machines, and humanity. The triennial will include an archival exhibition, curated by Wang Shaoqiang, the director of the Guangdong Museum of Art, as well as a three-part themed exhibition organized by Philipp Ziegler, Angelique Spaninks, and Zhang Ga. Work by 49 artists, including Gilberto Esparza, Tomás Saraceno, and Liu Wa, will be featured. —C.S.

“The Essential Duchamp”
National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea, Seoul,
December 22, 2018–April 7, 2019

In honor of the 50th anniversary of the death of the pioneering conceptual artist Marcel Duchamp, the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea is mounting the most comprehensive exhibition of his work in the Asia-Pacific region to date. Comprising some 150 works, many of them sourced from the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the show will include the artist’s famous Fountain (1917/50) sculpture—a readymade constructed from a urinal tipped on its side—and other groundbreaking “readymades” alongside archival materials. There will also be a digital replication of Etant donnés (1946–66), the artist’s final major work. —J.C.

January

Pierre Bonnard, The Fourteenth of July, 1918, oil paint on canvas.

PRIVATE COLLECTION

“Pierre Bonnard: The Colour of Memory”
Tate Modern, London
January 23, 2019–May 6, 2019

Back in 2006, New York Times critic Michael Kimmelman waited in line for 20 minutes just to get to the front door of the Musée d’Art Moderne in Paris’s Pierre Bonnard retrospective. It was worth it, he wrote: “the show is sublime.” Now Bonnard is set to draw crowds at Tate Modern. Spanning nearly 40 years of the French artist’s career, this show will feature close to 100 works, and will highlight Bonnard’s expert use of brilliant color in his intimate, melancholy paintings. In his landscapes and scenes of domestic life, he evoked the passage of time through experiments in color. Included will be some of his most famous works, among them depictions of his wife, Marthe de Méligny, in various states of undress. —S.N.

Morag Keil
Institute of Contemporary Art, London
January 30, 2019–April 14, 2019

For her first major institutional show, the Scottish artist Morag Keil will present a grouping of new and existing works, all of them restructured specifically for this exhibition. Keil works in a variety of mediums, including film, installation, painting, and drawing, and often investigates how technological change, branding tactics, and media platforms affect our everyday lives. Included in the show will be a remodeled version of her 2016 video Passive Aggressive, which appropriates clips from animations, reality TV, and footage of motorcycling, and explores the blurred boundaries between fantasy, technology, and surveillance. —J.C.

Morag Keil, passive aggressive, 2016, installation view at Eden Eden, Berlin.

HENRY TRUMBLE/COURTESY THE ARTIST AND GALERIE ISABELLA BORTOLOZZI, BERLIN

February

“Victor Vasarely: The Sharing of Forms”
Centre Pompidou, Paris
February 6, 2019–May 6, 2019

With recent major exhibitions of artists like Julio Le Parc and Bridget Riley, Op art is back in the spotlight. Widely regarded as the movement’s grandfather, Vasarely is finally getting his first retrospective in the city he called home after 1930. The show spans the full arc of the Hungarian-born artist’s career, starting in the 1930s with his proto-Op experiments. Also included will be examples of Vasarely’s eye-popping abstractions, which appear to warp before one’s eyes, and his later works, from the ’60s and ’70s, which responded to the look of advertising and mass media from the era. —A.A.

Victor Vasarely, Re.Na II A, 1968, oil and acrylic on canvas.

PHOTO: CENTRE POMPIDOU, MNAM-CCI/BERTRAND PREVOST/DIST. RMN-GP; ART: ©ADAGP, PARIS/COLLECTION CENTRE POMPIDOU, PARIS, GIFT OF THE ARTIST

“Roppongi Crossing 2019”
Mori Art Museum, Tokyo
February 9, 2019–May 26, 2019

The theme for the 2019 edition of “Roppongi Crossing”—a triennial held by the Mori Art Museum that offers something of a scene report on the Japanese contemporary art world—is “Connexions,” a reference to how artists are attempting to find points of unity in an increasingly fractured cultural and political landscape. More than 20 artists have been selected for this year’s edition. Their contributions will include Aono Fumiaki’s junk assemblages, ANREALAGE’s “form-changing clothes,” and Takekawa Nobuaki’s Cat Olympics, a sculpture that ponders the hype surrounding the 2020 Tokyo games through an absurdist feline lens. —J.C.

Bruno Gironcoli
Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt
February 14, 2019–May 12, 2019

After years of relative obscurity, Gironcoli’s work has recently seen a revival, thanks to a major show of the late Austrian sculptor’s work earlier this year at the Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig in Vienna. Now the Schirn Kunsthalle will offer its own survey of Gironcoli’s metal sculptures, which resemble nightmarish versions of sci-fi machines. Their allusions to technology spiraling out of control have proven influential for young artists. The Schirn show will focus specifically on Gironcoli’s late works, from 1990s and 2000s. —S.N.

Mary Maggic, Housewives Making Drugs (still), 2017, video.

COURTESY THE ARTIST

“Producing Futures—An Exhibition on Post-Cyber-Feminisms”
Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Zurich
February 16, 2019–May 12, 2019

Ever since 1991, when the collective VNS Matrix disseminated its Cyberfeminist Manifesto both on- and offline, artists have envisioned a number of ways technology might disrupt our relatively conservative understandings of gender binaries and norms. But what is the state of cyberfeminism today? With this show, the Migros Museum will survey artists concerned with digital technology’s impact on the body—and consider the relevance of cyberfeminism in the present. The show’s artist list includes Guan Xiao, Tabita Rezaire, Anicka Yi, Juliana Huxtable, Wu Tsang, and more. —A.G.

A version of this story originally appeared in the Winter 2019 issue of ARTnews on page 22 under the title “Editors’ Picks.”

Pablo Picasso’s Fillette à la corbeille fleurie (1905) sold for $115.1 million.

© CHRISTIE’S

In 1968, David Rockefeller was part of an unusual syndicate formed by a small band of deep-pocketed collectors with close connections to the Museum of Modern Art that engineered a $6.8 million all-in arrangement with the heirs of Gertrude Stein to buy a group of artworks she had owned.

The banker, philanthropist, and statesman was the perfect candidate for the syndicate, especially since his mother, Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, was one of the founders of the museum. In addition to David, his brother Nelson R. Rockefeller was also in the elite group, along with CBS head William S. Paley, publisher John Hay Whitney, and Andre Meyer. David picked up a second chit since William A. Burden, one of the original syndicate members, dropped out.

The members met on a Sunday in December 1968 in an old Whitney wing of the museum and drew straws from a crumpled felt hat for their choices, according to a published account by David Rockefeller. David was lucky, drawing the longest straw, and chose Picasso’s stunning Rose Period flower seller from 1905 for what was then something less than $1 million dollars.

Earlier this evening, as part of the first leg of sales from the estate of Peggy and David Rockefeller at Christie’s, that painting, dating to 1905 and standing a full five feet tall, sold to an anonymous telephone bidder for $115.1 million, against a presale estimate in the region of $100 million, making it the second most expensive Picasso to sell at auction, behind Les femmes d’Alger (version ‘O’) from 1955, which sold for $179.3 million at Christie’s in May 2015.

There was a palpable feeling of anticipation in Christie’s salesroom in the lead-up to the sale. The Museum of Modern Art’s director, Glenn Lowry, was in the room, an unusual sight at an auction, and could be seen chatting with megadealer Larry Gagosian. Attendees hoping for fireworks may have been disappointed with the steady pace of the proceedings, but what the sale lacked in drama it made up for in a staggering sum: the 44 lots of 19th- and 20th-century art all sold—a rare “white glove” sale, in industry parlance—and together fetched a staggering $646.1 million.

That result easily hurdled presale expectations set in excess of $490 million (a number of the top entries were “estimate on request” lots without the usual low-to-high estimate figures) and shattered the long-standing record for a single-session, single-owner sale, set in Paris in February 2009, when Impressionist and modern art from the Yves Saint Laurent and Pierre Bergé Collection fetched €206.1, or $266.7 million. (The highest tally for any single auction session, however, still stands at $852.8 million, set at Christie’s New York in its November 2014 postwar and contemporary art sale.)

Henri Matisse’s Odalisque couchée aux magnolias (1923) sold for $80.75 million.

© CHRISTIE’S

In the Saint Laurent sale, elaborately staged at the Grand Palais, a Henri Matisse painting, Les coucous, tapis bleu et rose from 1911, made top lot and a record €35.9 million (beating an estimate of €12 million–€18 million), then the equivalent of $46.4 million. Tonight, a different Matisse, Odalisque couchée aux magnolias from 1923, bested that record, bringing in $80.75 million (estimate on request in the region of $70 million).

All prices reported include the hammer price plus the buyer’s premium for each lot sold, calculated at 25 percent of the hammer price up to and including $250,000; 20 percent of that part of the hammer price that exceeds $250,000, up to and including $4 million; and 12.5 percent for anything above that.

All of the Rockefeller property was backed by a financial guarantee provided by Christie’s and a pell-mell assortment of 13 third-party backers announced by lot number only just before the start of the evening action. Remarkably, all of the proceeds from the sale, as well as from subsequent ones this week and lots sold online, will go to Rockefeller-supported philanthropies including the American Farmland Trust and Harvard University.

Ten of the 44 lots offered sold for over $15 million and, of those, seven exceeded $30 million. And seven artist records were set, led by a Claude Monet “Nymphéas” painting that fetched $84.6 million (estimate on request in the region of $70 million).

The evening got off to a fruitful start when Pablo Picasso’s exquisite and Cézanne-esque gouache and watercolor on paper Pomme (1914), originally owned by Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas and given to the couple by Picasso as a Christmas present, made $3.8 million, soaring past its estimate of $1 million–$1.5 million. Like many of the sale’s top entries, it was acquired as part of the syndicate.

Next up was Juan Gris’s Cubist-styled still life La table de musicien from 1914, executed in gouache, colored wax crayons, charcoal, and paper collage on canvas. It brought in $31.8 million (unpublished estimate in the region of $20 million). The Rockefellers acquired the painting at Parke-Bernet Galleries, a forerunner of what would become Sotheby’s in the United States, in March 1966 for $45,000.

Following the Gris was a 19th-century wild life entry, Eugène Delacroix’s magnificent and playful Tigre jouant avec un tortue from 1862, which realized a record $9.9 million (estimated at $5 million to $7 million).

Paul Gauguin’s La Vague (1888) sold for $35.2 million.

© CHRISTIE’S

The price points aimed higher with Paul Gauguin’s rather radical, bird’s-eye view of La Vague from 1888, featuring a Hokusai-influenced wave, giant rocks, and two tiny figures in the Brittany surf that brought $35.2 million (estimate on request in the region of $18 million), selling to New York private dealer Nancy Whyte. It last appeared in public in 2002 at the Metropolitan Museum’s aptly titled “The Lure of the Exotic—Gauguin in New York Collections.”

A second Gauguin, more traditional ravishingly color saturated, Fleurs dans un vase, from 1886–87 and worked again from 1893–95, went to an anonymous telephone bidder for $19.4 million (estimate: $5 million to $7 million). It last sold at auction at Christie’s New York in May 2006 for $4.5 million.

Interiors and still lifes dominate the Rockefeller cache, and in stand-out fashion, as evidenced by Pierre Bonnard’s generously scaled and light-filled Intérieur (Appartement de Bonnard à Paris) from 1914 that realized $6.61 million (estimate on request in the region of $6 million).

Claude Monet’s Nymphéas en fleur (ca. 1914–17) sold for $84.7 million.

© CHRISTIE’S

Among the Rockefeller painterly crown jewels, Claude Monet’s cover lot, square format, and gloriously purple-hued Nymphéas en fleur (ca. 1914–1917), acquired by the art-loving couple in 1956 through Knoedler & Co. in New York, made a record $84.7 million (estimate on request in the region of $50 million). Five bidders, four of them on telephones, chased the painting in a marathon battle won by Xin Li Cohen, deputy chairman of Christie’s Asia, who was bidding for a client on the phone.

The couple benefitted in many acquisitions, including that of the Monet, from the sage advice of Alfred H. Barr Jr., the Museum of Modern Art’s brilliant founding director.

In that same vein, the record Matisse odalisque also went to Xin’s bidder, though no paddle number was announced by ace auctioneer and Christie’s global president Jussi Pylkkänen, so one couldn’t tell if it was the same buyer of the record Monet.

Paul Signac’s sun-swept Pointillist seascape Portrieux La Comtesse (Opus no. 191), from 1888, brought a rather anemic $13.8 million (estimate on request in the region of $20 million). The couple acquired the painting at Parke-Bernet Galleries in 1957 for $31,000.

Signac’s mentor, Georges Seurat, made a bigger splash with La rade de Grandcamp (Le port de Grandcamp) from 1885 that sold to Gary Tinterow, director of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, seated in the front row of the salesroom, for a seeming bargain at $34.1 million (estimate in the region of $40 million).

Buttonholed on the stairway outside the salesroom, Tinterow would only say, “We did not buy the painting for the museum.”

When the Rose Period Picasso came up, Pylkkänen opened bidding at a breathtaking $90 million and jogged along at $2 million increments until the hammer fell at a rather disappointing $102 million, presumably just $2 million or so above the confidential third-party backer. The pale and boyishly figured flower seller, with startling dark eyes and holding up a small basket of red poppies, wears nothing but a pearl necklace. Gertrude Stein and her brother Leo acquired the work from the ne’er-do-well art dealer and former clown Clovis Sagot in 1905, for the equivalent of $30. Picasso reportedly bickered about the price but was hard up enough to accept his measly share. The picture was last seen in New York at the Museum of Modern Art’s exhibition “Masterpieces from the David and Peggy Rockefeller Collection: From Manet to Picasso” in 1994.

(Speaking of Manet, as in Édouard, his small jewel-like still life Lilas et roses from 1882, no bigger than a sheet of typing paper, went to yet another telephone bidder for $13 million, topping an estimate of $7 million to $10 million.)

Less known but thoroughly rare and unquestionably top-rated, Armand Seguin’s Les delices de la vie (ca. 1892–93), a stunning four-panel screen in oil on canvas and laid down on board, depicting a rather hedonistic dance hall scene, sold for a record $7.7 million (estimated at $1 million to $1.5 million) to Geneva-based art adviser Thomas Seydoux.

Exiting the ticket-entry-only salesroom, Seydoux described the painting as “a wonderful piece, really rare and of a high quality that’s hard to find.”

He was less impressed with the overall tenor of the auction, noting, “It seemed lacking in fire power. There are great results on paper but it was a bit slow”—a sentiment shared by several other expert observers.

After the sale, Christie’s specialist Marc Porter read a statement from David Rockefeller, Jr., on behalf of his extended family. “We are now very well on our way to achieving the goal our parents set for their philanthropic legacy,” Porter channeled Rockefeller, “and we are eagerly looking forward to what the rest of this historic week will bring.” The Rockefeller cavalcade continues throughout the week, including Wednesday evening’s Art of the Americas auction.

Installation view of “Samara Golden: A Trap in Soft Division” (detail), 2016. Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.

COURTESY THE ARTIST

After being closed for nearly three years of construction, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art reopened to the public this past May with 170,000 square feet of exhibition space—more than double what it had before—and a boatload of marquee art on a 99-year loan from the collection of Gap founders Doris and Donald Fisher. The material in that haul is blue chip—curators will need to find ways to counterbalance its conservatism—but there is no doubting its towering quality.

The museum’s opening was one of the main events on the art world’s spring calendar, and the usual globe-trotting suspects could be spotted all over town, many admitting that they had not been to the City by the Bay in some time. Galleries and museums, nonprofits and project spaces put on their Sunday best and offered up their choicest wares. The big question on everyone’s minds: is San Francisco, flush with tech money, shedding its sleepy reputation and joining the ranks of the world’s art capitals?

One clear sign of change is located directly across the street from SFMOMA, a Gagosian Gallery (number 16 in the empire), which inaugurated its space with “Plane.Site,” an exhibition that paired 2-D and 3-D works—one of each—from international brands like Mark Grotjahn, Jasper Johns, Pablo Picasso, Richard Serra, Andy Warhol, Rachel Whiteread, and, for a bit of hometown flair, the late, great, underrated artist and architect David Ireland. A Bruce Nauman mobile of disembodied resin-and-fiberglass heads delivered some welcome complexity to what was otherwise little more than an anodyne display of attractive high-end goods.

Laura Owens, Untitled (detail), 2016, acrylic, oil, Flashe, silkscreen inks, charcoal, pastel pencil, graphite, and sand on wallpaper, dimensions variable, installation view. CCA Wattis.

JOHNNA ARNOLD/©LAURA OWENS/COURTESY THE ARTIST; GAVIN BROWN’S ENTERPRISE, NEW YORK; SADIE COLES HQ, LONDON; AND GALERIE GISELA CAPITAIN, COLOGNE

In October, S.F. stalwart John Berggruen Gallery—in business for nearly half a century—will move to a space next to Gagosian San Francisco. Until then, Berggruen is still operating out of its airy two-floor space nearby, where it presented “The Interactive Character of Color, 1970–2014,” a fine display of works in various mediums by Bridget Riley. What is there to say about Riley but that, at 85, she remains woefully underappreciated in the United States? Trademark stripe and ripple paintings hung alongside more intricate compositions involving intercutting patterns as well as the odd misfire (like a weird 2011 number with overlapping circles in various shades of yellow). Riley’s canvases set the eyes dancing, but it is her drawings and prints that break hearts—her genius brushes aside typical issues of medium and scale. Riley’s works on paper promise an intimate experience and deliver one more grand. They disclose huge secrets tenderly.

Riley has inspired some questionable work by young artists (the derivative, Op-minded paintings of Tauba Auerbach and Hugh Scott-Douglas come to mind), but she feels like a fertile source for Laura Owens, whose multivalent paintings are puzzles for the eyes. Owens’s solo exhibition at CCA Wattis, “Ten Paintings,” was the best show in town. She covered the walls with wallpaper that at a distance appeared to be a vastly enlarged view of crumpled white paper. Up close, though, it seemed to be the work of a gargantuan dot-matrix printer run amok—just maybe trying to make a late J.M.W. Turner painting out of cascading black and white squares. Bits of newspapers, strips of telephone books, and hijacked fragments of Owens’s MS Paint–style paintings appeared as well, printed or painted directly on the wallpaper. It was difficult to ascertain how, exactly, some images were made.

Digital or real? Mark or print? Owens strives to create environments that render such binaries moot. That’s an impressive endeavor, but also a frightening one, mirroring, as it does, the contemporary breakdown between the physical and the virtual. Particularly intriguing here was that her actual painterly moves were more subtle, more restrained than in the past, with only a few of the huge, frosting-like brushes of paint she has bestowed on recent works, like the “12 Paintings” shown at 356 Mission in Los Angeles in 2012. She’s honing her art, getting weirder, creating not so much a painting show as a gallery-size collage of information and static—although when the exhibition closes, slicing up the walls will produce ten individual paintings, which will cartwheel off to new, independent lives.

Isaac Julien, Pas de Deux, 1989/2016, Kodak Premier print, Diasec mounted on aluminum, 71" x 102⅜". Jessica Silverman Gallery.

COURTESY THE ARTIST AND JESSICA SILVERMAN GALLERY

In a back gallery, Owens showed her grandmother’s humble little needlepoints of flowers and landscapes, suggesting that all those dots in the front room were—again, just maybe—a stitching pattern for a sprawling tapestry that she was only beginning to fill in. A few strips of faux-fading paper embedded in the wallpaper had telephone numbers (all area code 415, San Francisco’s) and an invitation to text questions. I gave it a whirl and recorded voices responded from behind the walls: “The thing is, I just don’t feel like telling you the answer,” one said. “Sometimes,” another replied. No easy answers. Owens knows we would have it no other way.

Samara Golden’s show at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, “A Trap in Soft Division,” also harbored mysteries. The gallery it was housed in appeared, at first glance, to be empty. On the floor, in the center of the room, though, mirrored tiles reflected the gallery’s grid of 18 recessed skylights above, each containing a model of a room with a window and a sofa. All the rooms had the same basic layout but with variations—different objects strewn about or subtly different decorations—suggesting that we were spying on an apartment over time, or even seeing it in different universes. A Yayoi Kusama “Infinity Room” redirected from hypnotizing abstraction toward the messy stuff of the world, it was a show about time and the way things change, about how little decisions can have larger consequences. It was deeply moving.

For raw charisma, though, it is difficult to beat the works of Isaac Julien, who had his debut show with Jessica Silverman Gallery, “Vintage,” with photographs connected to three of his films. Two beautiful young black men in tuxedos dance through smoke in a huge black-and-white C-print, from Looking for Langston (1989); a man, reaching upward, is seen from behind in dramatic silhouette, in an image from the S-M–imbued Trussed (1996); and in photogravures related to The Long Road to Mazatlán (1999–2000), smiling cowboys gazeout, a little dazed, at the viewer. Julien’s work succeeds by crafting and reinforcing circles of seduction—drawing you first to the actor, then to the scene, then to the story, with technical prowess.

Red Horse, Drawing of Dead Cavalry Horses, from “Red Horse Pictographic Account of the Battle of the Little Bighorn,” 1881, graphite, colored pencil, and ink, 24″ x 36¼”. Cantor Arts Center.

NATIONAL ANTHROPOLOGICAL ARCHIVES, SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, NAA MS 2367A, 08569900

At the northwest edge of the city, the Legion of Honor had a blockbuster Pierre Bonnard show, “Painting Arcadia,” which I could have happily spent a day in, and across the Bay Bridge was the wide-ranging “Architecture of Life” at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (recently expanded and remodeled by Diller Scofidio + Renfro with mixed success). Organized by BAMPFA’s director, Lawrence Rinder, it combined renowned treasures like Ruth Asawa’s hanging wire sculptures and a Caillebotte bridge scene with obscure jewels like musicologist Harry Smith’s string figures and Lee Bontecou’s swirling sci-fi drawings.

Down south, on the peninsula, the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University showed “Richard Diebenkorn: The Sketchbooks Revealed,” featuring selections from 29 notebooks recently given to the institution by the estate of the Bay Area painter’s widow, Phyllis Diebenkorn. They would be a pleasure at any time, but they were doubly so since Diebenkorn and his gang of mid-century Bay Area denizens are not prominently featured at SFMOMA.

And then, presenting the sort of work that gets short shrift almost everywhere, there was the Cantor’s “Red Horse: Drawings of the Battle of the Little Bighorn”—a dozen works, on loan from the Smithsonian, that the Minneconjou Lakota Sioux artist Red Horse made in 1881, five years after Custer’s defeat. It was a rare privilege: the drawings had not been displayed in 40 years. Red Horse depicts the violence with graphite, colored pencil, and ink, drawing with simple lines and gently shading patches. The Native Americans are portrayed in detail, adorned in ornamented garments and headdresses. The U.S. soldiers are distinguished only by their facial hair, all nearly identical. Blood is everywhere—spilling out of the neck of a horse and the heads of men who have been scalped. “No prisoners were taken,” Red Horse is said to have remarked, while explaining the rows of dead army men. “All were killed; none left alive even for a few minutes.” Words fail.

A few minutes away, in Palo Alto, Pace has opened its newest space with a small sampler of James Turrell works—one color-shifting wall piece and some of his holograms, which always feel a touch goofy and flat. A long line of people waited along velvet ropes at the opening, a sign of the Bay Area’s fervent interest in contemporary art.

Mindy Rose Schwartz, Before (detail), 2008, mixed media, 30″ x 18″ x 6′. Queer Thoughts at Et al. etc.

COURTESY QUEER THOUGHTS

Back in the city, in the fast-rising Dogpatch neighborhood sits another sign of increasing engagement (and one of the most-talked-about ventures in town): a chicly refurbished warehouse called the Minnesota Street Project, a for-profit enterprise started by area collectors Deborah and Andy Rappaport aimed at uniting many of the city’s dealers in a single location. With poured cement floors, sleek staircases, and room for ten galleries, it has the vibe of a high-end mall—wan, and, depending on your temperament, maybe even a little depressing. The quality of exhibitions varied.

The most hotly anticipated outing at Minnesota Street was the temporary joint venture by New Yorkers Anton Kern and Andrew Kreps, which turned out to be a lackluster affair, the two sharing two rooms to present a few works by their gallery artists. Kern had a bronze sculpture by Mark Grotjahn and a large painting by Chris Martin, both strong and funky, and Kreps had an intricate Pae White mobile and a painting by Andrea Bowers, but the displays felt random. As at Gagosian, it looked like an art fair booth, albeit at a lower price point.

Et al., one of a handful of auspicious young outfits in town, won the Minnesota competition—Best in Mall?—with an untitled exhibition organized by the Chicago-turned-New York wunderkinds Queer Thoughts. The artists: Mindy Rose Schwartz, Stefanos Mandrake, Lulou Margarine, all bracingly cool figures. Margarine spilled a large quantity of cinnamon across the floor and hung cartoon flowers on the walls, pushing scatter and Pop art to deadpan extremes. Ditto for Mandrake, whose contributions included a rock of craggy black “unknown material” on the floor and a plastic deck chair on the wall. Schwartz showed a rococo sculpture–meets–cosmetics desk–meets–reliquary that featured swirly brass flowers, a drawing of a decapitated man bleeding into a river, and two ghoulish plaster heads. Florine Stettheimer would have loved it. It was an exhilarating display—the artists were given plenty of space to flex their muscles.

Top to bottom: Lali Foster, Debted, 2016, black glitter, pencil drawing, and Employee of the Month, 2016, ruled notebook, colored pencil, die cut legal paper.

COURTESY THE ARTIST AND VI DANCER

Another delightful surprise was VI Dancer, a project space operating in the sunroom of a third-floor apartment on a dead-end street South of Market. “Memo Ruth,” a sui generis solo show by New York artist Lali Foster, was on view, with paper leaves tossed around the floor, a clipboard on the wall holding a drawing of a makeshift trap, and an address book, open to the letter M. On the page was an immaculate drawing of a tough-looking Jennifer Melfi, the psychiatrist character from The Sopranos. On that series, Melfi was the victim of a sexual assault, the first one to be fully and forthrightly depicted on television.

As the sun set, the mood in that little room was haunted and thrillingly enigmatic. You could say something similar about San Francisco, where real-estate prices are soaring (making New York City’s seem reasonable by comparison), where institutions like SFMOMA and CCA are swinging for the fences, and where big-money dealers are beginning to dip their toes in.

To become a thriving art metropolis, the city could use more big guns of the Gagosian and Berggruen variety. But it also needs more of those scrappy, nimble, risk-taking venues like VI Dancer and Et al. Things are happening, but depending on the support that local collectors and museums provide, you sense it could all go either way.

A version of this story originally appeared in the Fall 2016 issue of ARTnews on page 142 under the title “Around San Francisco.”

Suspects in the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum heist.

COURTESY WBZ-TV

Ads for menswear designer Patrik Ervell’s S/S 2015 collection will show previously unseen photographs by the late photographer Peter Hujar instead of clothing. [T Magazine]

The 90-piece art collection of the late former chairman of Goldman Sachs, John Whitehead, will be the main feature at Christie’s Impressionist and Modern Art sale in New York this May. Including rare works by Monet, Van Gogh, Modigliani, and Pierre Bonnard, the entire collection is estimated around $40 million. [CNBC]

Dutch artist Rob van Koningsbruggen has been banned from the Stedelijk Museum for life after persistently (since 2012) threatening to urinate on works by Marlene Dumas and Luc Tuymans, among others. [Hyperallergic]

Today is the 25th anniversary of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum heist, during which two men dressed as police officers escaped with 13 paintings. The museum plans to hold virtual tours and lectures so visitors can still experience the stolen works. FYI: There’s still a $5 million reward for information leading to the paintings’ recovery. [WHDH]

Google has teamed up with the Mural Arts Program in an effort to digitally preserve street art. As part of the larger Google Art Project, the digital collection offers upwards of 10,000 images, 160 new exhibits and “GIF-iti” art from more than 30 countries. [Philadelphia Business Journal]

To celebrate the 12th edition of the Sharjah Biennial and 9th edition of Art Dubai happening now, here are few Persian Gulf-based emerging artists to get to know. [Dazed Digital]

Prado curator and Old Master scholar Gabriele Finaldi has been appointed the new director of the National Gallery. He will begin his new position on August 17, replacing Nicholas Penny. [The Art Newspaper]

Photos of David Musgrave’s show at Marc Foxx Gallery in L.A. [Contemporary Art Daily]

Saoula Raouda Choucair, Composition in Yellow, 1962–65, at CRG.

Some of the worst weather of the winter didn’t keep collectors away from the Seventh Regiment Armory building on Manhattan’s Upper East Side last night for the opening of the ADAA’s annual fair, The Art Show. Raymond Learsy, Martin Margulies, Howard Rachofsky, Agnes Gund, and other top art patrons braved the rainy, slushy night to have a first look at pieces ranging from paintings by household names like Bonnard and Matisse at Acquavella Galleries to small, delicate sculptures by Saloua Rauda Choucair, a Middle Eastern abstract artist whom CRG gallery is giving her first solo show in the U.S.

Michelangelo Pistoletto, Cordoni (Cords), 2015, at Luhring Augustine.

The fair, now in its 27th year, kicks off New York’s Armory Week, and in recent years it has been dominated by contemporary art, with booths featuring solo shows and, often, some daring installations. But compared to last year’s event, where artist Ann Hamilton created a pop-up photo booth in Carl Solway’s booth, this year’s is low on spectacle. The closest thing it has to that is a cleverly placed, far more subdued new piece by Italian artist Michelangelo Pistoletto. Entitled Cordoni (2015), it is a wall of mirrors with painted-on cordon ropes, the kind you might find at a line for a hot nightclub. The piece is at the booth of Luhring Augustine gallery, which faces the entrance to the fair, so that all arrivals catch a glimpse of themselves approaching Pistoletto’s velvet ropes. (“This is the best booth! The best booth!” a collector enthused.) A perhaps inadvertent metaphor for the art world’s current emphasis on event culture, the piece, priced at $1.2 million, was on reserve by the end of the night.

In general this year, galleries have tended to bring top-quality, but quieter art, like the elegant Brancusi sculptures at Paul Kasmin, and the suite of small, poetic paintings by Etel Adnan at Lelong, the latter priced around $30,000. As exclusive as its opening is, the Art Show is not a fair in which collectors seem to be in a rush to buy. Instead, the evening tends to be dominated by browsing, socializing, and lingering. In the booth of Chicago gallery Rhona Hoffman, several collectors were to be seen paging through a copy of painter Natalie Frank’s new book, hot off the presses, illustrating Grimms’ Fairy Tales. Drawings from the book go on view at New York’s Drawing Center in early April.

Donald Moffett, Lot 121814 (spore 1, radiant blue), 2014, at Boesky.

Besides the art, the theme of the night was the hours-long waits for Uber cars; due, apparently, to weather-related heavy traffic, the 5:30 p.m. opening, where visitors sipped from flutes of champagne and nibbled on squares of parmesan custard, was sparser than usual. But by 7:30 the aisles were packed, and artworks were spoken for. At Marianne Boesky, a group of new works by Donald Moffett, sea anemone-esque paintings on sculptural frames priced at $60,000 to $85,000, had sold out by evening’s end.

Painting is strong at the fair this year. Cheim & Read is offering abstracts by Al Held from the mid 1950s, 98 x 49 inch behemoths for $350,000 that show a strong Abstract Expressionist influence but have enough movement to compete with any of the young art being shown on the Lower East Side. Over at 303, small New England seascapes by Maureen Gallace are for sale for $47,000. These works are almost abstract, given their meaty brushstrokes. “In France we have a saying,” said the accented director Thomas Arsac, of the artist’s wet-on-wet style, “au premier coup.”

The Art Show’s booths, with low ceilings that give them the feel of a Park Avenue living room, are perhaps best suited to 2D works, like the proof edition of Lorna Simpson’s lithograph Wigs, on view at the Simpson solo show at Salon 94’s booth. Taking up an entire wall, the piece seems a steal at $200,000, especially since other editions are owned by MoMA and the Art Institute of Chicago. These booths don’t lend themselves to massive sculptures, but they work well for smaller ones. Marian Goodman has Tony Cragg sculptures, in a variety of materials from treated steel to unpolished marble. These range from $173,000 to $318,000 and a number sold during the opening.

Gianni Piacentino, Stereo, 1965, at Werner.

Luhring Augustine, with that show-stealing Pistoletto, wasn’t the only dealer showing Arte Povera. Michael Werner gallery had already sold one piece by Gianni Piancentino. Among the artists associated with Arte Povera, Piancentino, whose works are priced from $40,000 to $225,000 at Werner’s booth, may be less known, but he appeals to the connoisseur’s taste. “A lot of people don’t know him,” said Werner director Gordon Veneklasen, “but anyone who’s been involved in Arte Povera at all knows him.” The Prada Foundation, which opens a brand new building in Milan in May, has planned a show of Piancentino’s work. Rediscovered Italian postwar artists seemed to be having a moment at the fair, with Bortolami gallery showing sculptures in vitrines by Claudio Parmiggiani, who was also involved in the scene around Arte Povera.

Gutai, the mid-century Japanese movement, was also present. Dominique Lévy gallery, which is currently showing the work of Gutai artists Kazuo Shiraga and Satoru Hoshino at their location a few blocks from the Armory building, stocked their Art Show booth with works by Tsuyoshi Maekawa, abstract paintings that incorporate burlap, all from the 1960s, at the height of Gutai’s powers. The largest piece in the booth sold for $425,000.

The Armory Week action continues today, with the VIP preview day of The Armory show, on Piers 92 and 94.

For more Armory Week coverage, go here.

ALL IMAGES COURTESY THE ARTIST AND GALLERY

Emily Mason, Reactivated, 2013, oil on canvas.

COURTESY LEWALLEN GALLERIES

Allusions to the natural world abounded. Plated Leaves from 1979 is an explosion of autumnal shades, while Well Watered (2013)—at 60 by 50 inches one of the biggest paintings in the show—has some of the exuberance and jewel-like colors of a tropical waterfall. A few paintings reached back in time to summon the ghost of Pierre Bonnard. Entrance (2012), in particular, with its clusters of shapes at the edges of a yellow-green field, recalls one of Bonnard’s sun-drenched summer idylls. Mason is at her most powerful when she exploits her medium’s capacity for translucence, as in the shock of neon colors at the far right of Monadnock (1985).

Spontaneity is, of course, one of the hallmarks of Color Field painting, and all of Mason’s paintings depend on spur-of-the-moment decisions. This is perhaps most evident in her works on paper, which recall the theatrics of mid-century abstraction. But Mason’s drama is of a quieter nature than her AbEx predecessors; she seems not afraid to please while firmly holding her ground.

A version of this story originally appeared in the Summer 2014 issue of ARTnews on page 100.