YUAG acquired the portrait in 2016 from Caroline Phillips, a descendant from the matriarchal line of the Tucker family, who had enslaved (and later manumitted) Rose; she remained employed by the family until her death, around 1852. In the accompanying exhibition catalogue, YUAG curator Keely Orgeman suggests that Eliza Tucker MacGregor, a daughter in the family whom Rose raised (perhaps alongside her own son, Leonard), likely commissioned the portrait to keep as a memento of Rose when Eliza left New England for New York City as an adult. Given this history, all that was initially known about Rose came from Tucker MacGregor’s descendants. And, while it is remarkable to know anything about a formerly enslaved woman, curator Key Jo Lee, who wrote about the miniature in 2017, reminds us that “[d]espite any hopeful desire to see Rose’s story as ultimately triumphant, this narrative is complicated by her silence.” This tension—between the interiority of a Black woman tenderly captured by Goodridge and the weight carried in the image—complicates our understanding of the relationship between portraiture and slavery.

The complexities and contradictions presented by this work are decidedly foregrounded in “Mickalene Thomas / Portrait of an Unlikely Space,” co-curated by Orgeman and artist Mickalene Thomas. The exhibition borrows its title from a line in scholar Elizabeth Alexander’s essay collection The Black Interior, in which Alexander discusses Gwendolyn Brooks’s “The Sundays of Satin-Legs Smith”—a 1963 poem about an “eminent fop” insightfully described via an inspection of “the innards” of his closet—as a “portrait of an unlikely space.” Alexander offers Brooks’s work as a prime example of her text’s underlying query: “What do we learn when we pause at sites of contradiction where black creativity complicates and resists what blackness is ‘supposed’ to be?”

Featuring 45 artworks, the exhibition, which is on view until January 7, pairs historic objects and contemporary works. Small 19th-century portraits (painted miniatures, daguerreotypes, tintypes, silhouettes, and prints) featuring Black sitters—some known, some unknown, some free(d), some enslaved—make up an imagined community, in Thomas’s words a “chosen family,” in the exhibition space. These are joined by 20th- and 21st-century pieces by the likes of Lebohang Kganye, Sula Bermudez-Silverman, Curtis Talwst Santiago, Wardell Milan II, Devin N. Morris, Adia Millett, Mary Enoch Elizabeth Baxter, and Betye Saar. The curators chose the contemporary works to expand upon notions of “domesticity, family, interiority, intimacy, and ownership that existed under slavery and continue to affect our lives today,” as Thomas writes in her catalogue essay.

The show consists of four sections—“Solitude,” “Togetherness,” “Posing,” and finally “Holding”—that each embody domestic spaces, specifically the living rooms, of the 19th-century Black sitters. These sections build on Thomas’s established installation practice, but unlike her previous funky and vibrant 1970s-inspired interiors decked out with bright colors, lush fabrics, and bedazzled surfaces, “Portrait of an Unlikely Space” presents somber and restrained spaces that conjure the charged climate of antebellum era and speak to the importance of having access to spaces of respite. Several of the gallery walls are painted blue-gray or dark-brown, the latter of which is based on Thomas’s own skin tone, suggesting the artist’s physical embrace of these sitters. Other walls feature an African-inspired wallpaper designed by Thomas.

At the center of one gallery, atop stately emerald-green rugs, are high-back armchairs that have been upholstered with various patterned fabrics, a mixture of delicate floral prints and bold diasporic ones inspired by the textiles crafted and worn by Black women on both sides of the Atlantic. The low lighting in certain galleries, used to protect the light-sensitive historical objects, also lends a melancholic mood to the exhibition.

In the “Holding” section is a daguerreotype of a young Black man cradling a carpenter’s triangle. Because the curators have opted to go without wall texts, it’s only upon stepping out of the low-light gallery that visitors will learn that this elegantly posed man is Haywood Dixon, who was enslaved at the time his portrait was taken. Like Rose, Haywood did not commission his own portrait. Moreover, it was likely created to surveil and regulate his movements in the event that he ever fled enslavement.

The exhibition’s dialogue between images depicting 19th-century sitters and work by contemporary artists enacts Saidiya Hartman’s notion of “critical fabulation,” or an imagining of “what might have happened or might have been said or might have been done” by people—Black women, especially—whose voices have been purposefully obscured in historical records. Though this process, Hartman constructs alternative narratives that reveal the past as intwined with the present and allow for better futures.

Mary Enoch Elizabeth Baxter’s Consecration to Mary (2021–23), for example, re-narrates the story of an unnamed Black girl (perhaps as young as five or six years old) who was photographed nude on a couch in 1882 by the acclaimed (and now defamed) Philadelphia artist Thomas Eakins. In her 2019 book Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, Hartman meditates on the same photo, notinghow the photo “makes it impossible for her to be a child”; when reproducing the image, Hartman covered the girl’s exposed body with text as a way to mediate the violence perpetuated by Eakins.

In her artistic intervention, which mimics the pocketbook format of the other 19th-century daguerreotypes and miniatures in the exhibition, Baxter inserts herself into the scene, and gives the young girl a name, Mary. In one daguerreotype, she covers Mary’s body with a blanket, and in another, the artist tenderly embraces the girl, who is now positioned away from the camera and Eakins’s gaze. Instead, Baxter confronts us with her own unflinching gaze. In making photographic copies of the original daguerreotype, Baxter further refuses to replicate poisonous practices, as daguerreotypes were processed using toxic levels of mercury. Additionally, the complex technology of the daguerreotype references, as Baxter told ARTnews, “the inability for children to have the language to understand, talk, and process the violation.” In one final act, the third photograph in the series is a school photo of Baxter, implicating the artist’s experience as a survivor of childhood sexual abuse.

The exhibition closes with Imitation of Life, a 1975 assemblage pieceby Betye Saar that features a Mammy figurine set within an upright box with an open lid, onto which Saar has drawn a Black woman sitting with a child in her lap. Behind the figurine, who holds a grenade, is a newspaper advertisement for “a valuable Negro woman, accustomed to all kinds of house work,” who the ad notes would be sold separately from her four children. This final work brings us back to the first: Rose noted in her will that she did not know the whereabouts of her son Leonard, whose fate remains unknown to researchers today.

It is through these specific juxtapositions, of the historical with the contemporary, that we see the explosive potential of art in helping to reframe our understanding of the past. While Rose’s portrait is a stunning work of art and its backstory serves as a moving tale of interracial affection, the exhibition repeatedly reminds us that we can never know how Rose felt about the fact that her former enslavers wanted to keep a piece of her—even after she moved on. Engaging with Black American history—much like acknowledging and living with the difficulties faced by Black people today—can be an arduous task that requires a great deal of care, work, and purpose. But in placing history at the center of our present, an exhibition like “Portrait of an Unlikely Space” asks us to sit with the beauty and the pain.

Correction, December 29, 2023: An earlier version of this article misstated which Gwendolyn Brooks poem Elizabeth Alexander discusses when she writes about a “portrait of an unlikely space.” It is “The Sundays of Satin-Legs Smith,” not “Bronzeville Woman in a Red Hat.”

Claude Picasso died this year, along with his mother, the painter Françoise Gilot, and the notion that there is such a thing as too many Picasso shows. To mark the 50th anniversary of Picasso’s death, dozens of museums across the globe staged exhibitions devoted to the artist. Some were small, some were large. Some were widely seen, others largely ignored. All contained a familiar refrain: Picasso’s art still matters, like it or not.

But did we really need 50 exhibitions to figure that out? It was already self-evident based on museums’ permanent collection galleries, which almost always contain their prized Picassos. It was also obvious based on the glut of mid- and late-career Picassos that hit the auction block every year. (This year’s top lot was a $139.4 million Picasso painting of Marie-Thérèse Walter.) And by the way, good luck finding a museum bookstore that doesn’t have something Picasso-related, be it a 2024 wall calendar, a salt shaker emblazoned with his face, or a tea towel printed with his cutesy, pacifist dove image.

It’s safe to say that, because of all those shows, 2023 was the year of Picasso. But it’s also safe to say we learned just about nothing in the process.

Some museum shows tried to suggest that there was actually still more to be gained from studying Picasso. One was “Picasso in Fontainebleau,” a show at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (through February 17) that surveys one summer spent at a commune in the south of France in 1921. This is a remarkably specific slice of Picasso history—it occupies about a dozen pages of John Richardson’s 1,800-page biography of the artist—but curator Anne Umland suggests that it can teach us a lot about his method. She fixes on the fact that he was creating two major works at the same time: Three Musicians (1921), whose sitters fracture into a dazzling array of intersecting shapes, and Three Women at the Spring (1921), whose sitters wear drape-like dresses reminiscent of ancient Greece instead of contemporary France.

What explains the fact that Picasso was navigating “multiple temporalities,” as Umland puts it in the catalogue—that he was shuttling between classicism and avant-gardism simply by walking the short length of his studio, whose walls were hung with versions of both pictures simultaneously? The exhibition seeks to get to the bottom of things, burrowing so far down the rabbit hole that Umland has even created a gallery that reimagines Picasso’s studio down to its precise, cramped dimensions.

“Picasso in Fontainebleau” gets points for art-historical nerdiness, and for digging up oddities such as studies for Three Women at the Spring that show off Picasso’s knack for painting fattened fingers and bulbous palms. The problem is that “Picasso in Fontainebleau” comes up short. You get a sense of how rapidly Picasso was able to transition between artistic modes, but anyone with even passing knowledge of the artist’s oeuvre already understands that. You want it to go a step further, showing why these two paintings unlock something mysterious about the inner workings of Picasso’s mind, which remain just that: opaque and unknowable.

Where “Picasso in Fontainebleau” is successful, however, is in its implicit exploration of Picasso’s supposed genius. With its panoply of studies and failed artworks, the show sands down the notion that Picasso produced masterpieces overnight, that his first stroke was his best stroke. That sets it apart from a show like the Guggenheim Museum’s “Young Picasso in Paris,” which probably would have rankled Claude Picasso.

That small exhibition, which closed over the summer, asserted that Picasso père was more or less born with talent, with works that date to his early 20s. Some really are that good: Moulin de la Galette (ca. 1900), featuring revelers who flit through the darkness of a bar, remained striking. But others, like The Diners (1901), with its female figure who melts into the white table beneath her due to Picasso’s ill-defined brushwork, are slapdash and slack.

These were two of just 10 works in the entire exhibition, but you wouldn’t know it based on the crowds. When I visited the exhibition in June, visitors jostled for an unobstructed view of Moulin de la Galette. Meanwhile, Gego’s 160-work retrospective lining the rotunda was much more sparsely populated. Her wire sculptures swayed gently in the wind, with few onlookers to observe them as they did so.

Of the 50 shows mounted in the “Celebración Picasso” series, none were retrospectives. This didn’t mean there were no big shows—the Centre Pompidou in Paris, for example, has a blowout survey featuring around 1,000 works on paper by the artist. But mostly, what we got were scraps related to Picasso’s legacy, the result being that nothing felt grand enough to say anything major.

The tendency was particularly pronounced in New York. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, which has a world-class collection of Picassos in its arsenal, mounted a one-gallery show devoted to the Picasso masterpiece that never was: a vast commission for Hamilton Easter Field’s Brooklyn home. Field would’ve had a fabulous library lined with Cubism of the highest order were it not for his mother, whose conservative aesthetic sensibilities ended up influencing his own. The whole thing gradually came apart; the show (through January 14) endeavors to understand what could have been.

What we are left with, at the Met, are some of the works made in the run-up to the commission: tangles of brown and grey forms that cohere to form female nudes and still lifes (with the help of explanatory wall texts). Anna Jozefacka, the curator of the exhibition, makes a compelling case for how Picasso tried to fit his rough-hewn avant-gardism into a refined patron’s digs, finding along the way that the two were fundamentally incompatible. The show does provide an interesting case study for Picassoheads, but without the finished product, it all comes off a bit staid.

The Met’s Picasso show aims to unravel a side of Picasso that no one ever saw—in this case, because the work doesn’t exist. But in the case of “A Foreigner Called Picasso” at Gagosian gallery (through February 10), the side of the artist explored—his identity as an immigrant—was not always easy to see because Picasso sometimes hid it away as best he could.

The show is curated by art historians Annie Cohen-Solal and Vérane Tasseau; the former is the author of the terrific book Picasso the Foreigner, finally released in English this year after publishing in France in 2021. The book traces how Picasso, a Spaniard by birth, refashioned himself a Frenchman, only to unknowingly lead an antagonistic relation with the French state, whose officers surveilled him for years because of perceived connections to Communism. (In reality, he was not much of an activist for most of his career.)

Cohen-Solal’s book is a massive contribution to the crowded field of Picasso studies, which generally does not view the artist as a political subject. Unfortunately, the Gagosian show doesn’t offer the same thrills as its related book. That’s because much of what Cohen-Solal deals with in her writing isn’t all that visual: official documents, letters, and the like.

The exhibition attempts to provide a visual armature for all that text, but it’s not always easy to understand the relationship between the Picasso paintings and the Picasso file kept by the Sûreté General—especially because the show itself contains almost no captions at all. A section about how Picasso hunkered down during World War II, for example, is mainly composed of paintings of Dora Maar and Marie-Thérèse Walter. Notably, the exhibition does not discuss his failed attempts at becoming a French citizen during that period much, even though that is the subject of an entire chapter in Cohen-Solal’s book. This is a shame, and all the more so because the show is the kind of gallery exhibition many might describe as “museum-quality,” seeing as it has loans of important works from the Met and other institutions.

Not far away from the Gagosian show, Pace also has its own Picasso show (through December 22), this one focused on 14 sketchbooks. The sketchbooks included are meant to provide insights into Picasso’s process, with one dating to around the time he made Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907) intended to illuminate elements that didn’t make it into the final product. But these are simply sketches after all, and it’s worth remembering that although Picasso did periodically rip some from his notebooks and claim them as artworks in their own right, many are not major, since they were meant only for private consumption. Yet the show, with its darkened lighting, has the feeling of a space meant to inspire contemplation in the face of greatness.

Greatness, however, is decidedly not what is on view. Take one 1956 ink drawing of a couple caught in an erotic embrace. Unlike Picasso’s paintings, whose conflations of torsos, legs, arms, genitals, and facial features do offer their pleasures, this drawing comes off as a sloppy, testosterone-induced mess. Why, I wondered, does this man’s thigh awkwardly disappear into his lover’s crotch? Then I realized I had thought too hard about a work that Picasso himself probably tossed off—and maybe didn’t even want the public to see at all. For a man who is estimated to have made tens of thousands of artworks, it only makes sense that some of them don’t merit closer attention.

But no one can forget Guernica, or Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, or Picasso’s portraits of a sobbing Dora Maar, or his painting of a stoic Gertrude Stein, or his Cubist still lifes, or his Blue Period harlequins. That’s the implicit assertion of many exhibitions that appeared in museums and galleries this year that aimed to show Picasso’s enduring influence on contemporary artists. The sheer existence of these shows suggests that dealers, artists, and curators still cling to Picasso’s legacy, even as they critique it.

Yet some may wish to forget Picasso altogether, and one of those people is the comedian Hannah Gadsby, who, in their 2018 Netflix special Nanette, dressed down art historians for continuing to worship at the altar of a man who inflicted physical and emotional abuse on the women he called his lovers. Gadsby’s Brooklyn Museum show “It’s Pablo-matic: Picasso According to Hannah Gadsby,” arguably the most talked-about Picasso show of the year, was meant to expand the critique made in Nanette. It did so by putting art by the “passionate, tormented, genius man ball-sack”—the comedian’s words—alongside feminist works from the institution’s collection.

On paper (and without an embarrassing pun for a title), this is actually not a bad idea for an exhibition. If only Gadsby had succeeded in highlighting genuine connections between Picasso and, say, Nina Chanel Abney, whose work here alluded not to his art but to Édouard Manet’s. It was clear that the women artists in the show didn’t pay much mind to Picasso—the painter Joan Semmel even admitted to as much in a companion guide to the show. Ironically, Gadsby seemed to center Picasso within art history more than these artists did.

But let’s say you really wanted to move on from Picasso. What might that look like? The French artist Sophie Calle faced that quandary when she agreed to take over the whole of Paris’s Musée Picasso several years ago. This fall, she ended up coming up with one of the very few interesting Picasso-related shows mounted this year.

Calle told Art in America that she did not want to cancel Picasso. Her solution: empty the museum of his art and fill it with her own belongings and art. She kept a select few pieces by Picasso on view, but she relegated them to the basement and concealed some of them beneath paper. In Calle’s hands, those Picassos look more like objects packed for transport than they do immovable masterpieces. They are now things that are temporary, ready to pass on to another place.

If one was to visit the Musée Picasso right now, expecting to see Blue and Rose Period paintings and Cubist experiments, they might come away peeved and underwhelmed. In a strange way, that seems to echo Claude Picasso’s words from 2018: “Many people expect to make discoveries that, at the end of the day, they do not make, and they are not satisfied with what is on offer.” Perhaps Calle, in draining the Musée Picasso’s galleries of almost all things Picasso, had diagnosed the problem and found the only possible remedy for it: a temporary pause on the Picasso festivities that would allow for some actual thinking to occur. Finally, a moment of contemplation.

This documentary, which was shot partly using 3D cameras, is set mainly in two palatial French towns where Kiefer has set up shop: Barjac, the southern commune where he has erected a 98-acre compound that functions as an art installation in its own right, and Croissy-Beaubourg, the Parisian suburb where he currently runs a massive studio for his oversize art. Wenders, like many others who have visited those places, is clearly in awe of what Kiefer has done at both.

At many points in Anselm, Wenders’s camera sweeps around Kiefer’s many creations at Barjac. At dawn, it romantically encircles Kiefer’s steel sculptures of dresses, sans wearers; sometimes they are outfitted with objects like open books or metal globes for heads. In the fog, it traces Kiefer as he walks amid a suite of his towers that rise high into the air. On a sunny day, it floats godlike above it all, revealing the vast compound in all its glory.

Rarely, if ever, does Wenders show anyone other than Kiefer traipsing through Barjac, which dates back to the Renaissance. Perhaps that makes sense, given that the compound, known as La Ribaute, only opened to the public last year. (It’s also a two-hour drive from Marseille, not exactly a tourist destination itself.) But Wenders’s choice to depict a solitary Kiefer affirms this cloying film’s belief in the artist as a powerful soloist without really interrogating that line of thinking.

Witness the scenes set in Croissy-Beauborg, where Kiefer is shown creating paintings so big, they must be wheeled around. Most times, Kiefer is shown alone, slopping chunky paint onto his vast landscapes.

Yet it takes roughly half the film’s runtime to realize that Kiefer actually gets a good bit of help. We finally see assistants doing the hard stuff—melting down lead and gathering straw for Kiefer to apply to his canvases. Wenders, clearly fascinated by the artist’s sinewy body and the muscular prowess seemingly required to create such gigantic work, trains his attention mainly on Kiefer, who, donning a uniform of a black T-shirt, wields a flamethrower on these paintings to scorch them. Mostly not pictured: the people who help put out the fires, so that the works don’t burn to a crisp.

Some would prefer those paintings to be set ablaze entirely. Within the German art world, and in some cases beyond, Kiefer has been a controversial figure. During the ’80s, when his career was at its peak, Kiefer was criticized for resuscitating ideas and themes held up by the Nazis—the philosophies of Martin Heidegger, a faith in the German landscape. It did not help that Kiefer did a performance series during the ’60s in which he visited famous sites and photographed himself doing the Nazi salute while wearing his father’s Wehrmacht uniform. In 1975, art historian Benjamin H. D. Buchloh famously quipped that Kiefer was a fascist who thought he was an antifascist.

Wenders’s film does not elide these accusations. He features old interviews from around the time that Kiefer represented Germany at the 1980 Venice Biennale, where he showed his gigantic landscapes displaying barren fields. Were these works, with their emphasis on the greatness of the German landscape, a variation on a Nazi theme? Not quite, Kiefer tells a German journalist. “Because I was born in 1945, I have the chance to take up the subject again,” he says. Wenders doesn’t press it further.

In fact, he doesn’t press much with Kiefer, who rarely speaks on camera with Wenders. To its credit, Anselm is not a talking head–style documentary because it doesn’t have much talking at all. Twenty minutes passes before Kiefer’s voice is even heard; much of the musings about his art are intoned in a breathy, dense voiceover primarily by the artist. Instead, Wenders works observationally, conjuring the same melancholy struck through with awe that Kiefer does in the footage of him at work, sometimes in darkened spaces where he paints over images projected onto the canvas.

There are other artsy flourishes too. Anselm is being released in 3D, a format Wenders has used previously in the excellent 2011 documentary Pina, about choreographer Pina Bausch. But whereas Pina makes good use of its extra dimension to make the dancing feel more immersive, Anselm mainly feels like a further attempt to monumentalize its subject, not that he really needs it. (There are plenty of shots of Kiefer’s art in close-up, by the way, but his paintings, flat as their ideas may be, don’t require the added depth to make clear just how textured their surfaces are.)  

Then there are the reenactments, which see actors playing Kiefer at multiple stages in his life. In one, a young-ish Kiefer traverses a snowy field and snaps a picture with his camera. That picture then becomes a painting that stands for a lot: the coldness of the West German psyche, the untappable past hidden beneath the snow, maybe even the Blood and Soil metaphor used by the Nazis. Wenders’s reimagining of Kiefer’s process is meant to portray his tortured mindset. But the scene comes off as overly fraught, weighted down by the same baggage that many have claimed hinders Kiefer’s art.

Wenders’s point, perhaps, is really that Kiefer cannot run away from history. Neither ought we as viewers, Wenders seems to suggest, because the past is all around us, even when we can’t see it. Spoiler alert: by the film’s end, the actors playing Kiefer commune with the artist himself in expressive interludes set at Venice’s Palazzo Strozzi, where, in 2022, he memorably mounted his paintings floor to ceiling. But if we must return to the past, is it not too much to hope for something new to be said about it? The myths peddled in Anselm are the same ones that have been repeated over and over about Kiefer. Then again, maybe this is the point. Wenders includes footage from 1991, shot on the occasion of a Neue Nationalgalerie show in Berlin, in which an interviewer asks Kiefer if he’s retreating into falsehoods about German history. “There is no such thing as escaping into myth,” Kiefer tersely responds. “Because myth is present.”

You could travel all the way to West Palm Beach to visit ARTnews Top 200 Collector Beth Rudin DeWoody’s collection or take in closer ones like those of the Rubell Family and Jorge Pérez. At the museums, the offerings range from a disappointing solo for Miami-based Hernan Bas to a standout survey for Charles Gaines at the Institute of Contemporary Art. 

Below, a look at some of the good and the bad on view in South Florida ahead of the fair.

Collectors with an Eye

DeWoody and her curatorial team, Maynard Monrow and Laura Dvorkin, are on a roll this year. Those who made the trek to West Palm Beach to visit her private exhibition space, the Bunker Artspace, could find a group of spectacular exhibitions that acted as a testament to the depth of DeWoody’s collection. Thankfully, those shows also don’t take themselves too seriously.

The best of them was “Utility,” set in a gallery decked out to look like a utility closet. It was filled mostly with sculptural pieces depicting everyday household items, like a Target bag by Lucia Hierro, an iron by Willie Cole, and a copper FedEx box by Walead Beshty. But the starriest show was “Family Affair,” the result of a yearlong dialogue between DeWoody and dealer Peter Harkawik.

“Family Affair” is a maximalist, salon-style exhibition that is teeming with gems, some of which are placed in conversation with one another. There’s a wall devoted to works by members of the Saar family: Betye and her daughters Alison and Lezley. And there’s a section for the Mullicans: Lee and his wife, the painter Luchita Hurtado, plus their children Matt and Lucy. Harkawik, in an essay accompanying the show, says that his exhibition has “no curatorial position, nor does it make attempts at comprehensiveness, concision or timeliness.” Rather than making a grand statement about the art included, it makes the case for how creativity is passed down among the generations.

DeWoody kept especially busy this year, and with Monrow, Dvorkin, and Zoe Lukov, she curated the exhibition “Gimme Shelter” for the Historic Hampton House Museum of Culture & Art. A former Green Book Hotel, the venue was Miami’s only luxury hotel for African Americans during Jim Crow–era segregation. Presenting contemporary art upstairs—by the likes of Richard Mayhew, Carrie Mae Weems, Nick Cave, Terry Adkins, Lauren Halsey,Christopher Myers, Bony Ramirez, Kandy G Lopez, Devin Reynolds, and Moises Salazar—alongside two preserved rooms where Martin Luther King Jr. and Muhammad Ali once stayed was truly special. That the sense of history was palpable and its meeting cutting-edge, contemporary art poignant. That the Historic Hampton House was almost demolished more than 20 years ago shows just important it is to hold onto history like this.

Also in Miami proper, Jorge Pérez’s El Espacio 23 has “To Weave the Sky,” expertly curated by Tobias Ostrander, the Tate’s adjunct curator for Latin American art. Here, textiles meet abstract works, resulting in pure beauty. A recently acquired Lee Krasner work from 1951 and a 1973 Joan Mitchell hang near a woven floor piece by Ximena Garrido-Lecca. Elsewhere, an Etel Adnan tapestry is shown alongside her enamoring paintings.

The close-by Rubell Museum has given over several rooms to LA-based artists, including Patrick Martinez, Danie Cansino, Mario Ayala, Noah Davis, Sayre Gomez, Alfonso Gonzalez Jr., and Lauren Halsey. You will want to spend time with them all. And in the Design District, Craig Robins hosted a reception to see the works on view from his collection in the offices of his Dacra Development, while the Juan Carlos Maldonado Collection has recently moved to a new space and has on view works from his deep holdings of international geometric abstraction, including Gego, Josef Albers, Kenneth Noland, Noboru Takayama, César Paternosto, Glenda León, and Alexander Apóstol. Miami’s private collections continue to play to their strengths.

The State of Museums

While I was in West Palm Beach, before heading to the Bunker, I checked out the Norton Museum of Art, which has a significant collection of European, American, and Chinese art. While the older stuff is middling at best there, it’s clear that the museum has built up a formidable contemporary art collection. Works by Awol Erizku, Gisela Colón, and Cheyenne Julien—all acquired within in the past few years—show that the curators have their fingers on the pulse.

The state of museums in Miami and Miami Beach, where quantity trumps quality, is direr. Take the Bass in Miami Beach, which is staging so many shows that one devoted to Etel Adnan, an important artist whose spare landscapes are enchanting, ended up in a glorified hallway. An exhibition about Nam June Paik and his connections to Miami also didn’t feel scholarly enough to merit much attention.

The most buzzed-about Bass show, a solo exhibition for Hernan Bas, was another big disappointment. I’ve never been a fan of Bas’s painterly aesthetic; his handling of the figure is a bit uninspired, and his focus on specifically white gay subject matter has started to feel retrograde. But I went into the exhibition with an open mind, hoping to be swayed. I left feeling even less convinced than I was before.

Titled “The Conceptualists,” this series has Bas imaging different types of conceptual artists who take exacting approaches. The work that opens the show is also the first in the series, an artist who “exclusively mixes his paints with water from Niagara Falls,” per the work’s title. I’ll admit it made me chuckle. But further along was less compelling subject matter: artists who work with popsicle sticks, make snow angels out of blood, take Polaroids of themselves and put them on milk cartons. Conceptual art is an easy punching bag, and these tableaux featuring interchangeable white twinks are low blows.

Ironically, the biggest work in the show, the 21-foot-wide Conceptual artist #37 (he exclusively paints portraits of conceptual artists who have never existed), seems to assert Bas as a conceptual artist. In it, an artist stands in his studio surrounded with the various studies for the other artists as well as the calling cards of their practices. Good conceptual art is all about ways of working—how one executes an idea. Ironically, Bas doesn’t seem very interested in thinking much about it all. If he tried any of these approaches, he’d realize how bad the art is.

By the way, it’s worth remembering that although Art Basel Miami Beach is a selling event, museums are not immune to the whims of market either. Several works from this series have already been shown in the past year at two of the artist’s galleries, Victoria Miro in London and Lehmann Maupin in New York, who also provided support to the show. A few of the works at the Bass have been scooped up by collectors, who can now boast that their painting has the bona fides of being shown in a museum.

Across Biscayne Bay, at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, most shows also promise more than they offer. Exhibitions for the Egyptian-born nonagenarian Ahmed Morsi and the young Brooklynite Sasha Gordon are being billed as firsts for these respective artists, but they’re formless and small. These are mainly just milestones to put on the artists’ CVs. In the case of Morsi, a 13-painting show isn’t going to reveal much that hasn’t already been covered by his acclaimed 2017 retrospective at the Sharjah Art Foundation. As for Gordon, I was hoping to be learn a bit more about why the art world is buzzing so much about this young artist, but failed to do so.

There is, however, a solid Charles Gaines survey at the ICA. Focusing on works from the early ’90s to today, the two-floor show is highlighted by Falling Rock (2000–2023), a grandfather clock–like structure in which a 65-pound chunk of granite is lowered toward a sheet of glass every ten minutes. When I entered the gallery, the granite happened to crash into the glass, shattering it. It provided a welcome shock to the system amid mostly bland museum offerings here in Miami.

In 2018, these galleries started to shutter as the Met revised their skylights. With a cost of $150 million, the initiative is the largest capital project ever undertaken in the museum’s history. The gamble paid off: more natural illumination now flows into the galleries, which began reopening in 2020 and are now, at long last, completed.

When those galleries started the slow process of reopening during the height of the pandemic, new focuses emerged. Women artists, who had historically been all but shut out of the European painting department’s presentations, were given greater attention, and so were topics like colonialism, class, race, and gender. Now, the curators have delved even further into the process of editing a canon that went stale.

Starting today, visitors will be able to see all of the European painting galleries for the first time in half a decade. They look better than ever, and there is plenty to see—nearly 700 works are parceled across 45 beautiful spaces, many of which are shorn of walls that previously caused them to feel cloistered and hermetic.

Old friends return anew. All five of the Met’s Vermeers are afforded their own space all to themselves; they’re back after a sojourn in a sad special exhibitions space while the galleries underwent renovations. A host of works by Francisco Goya, Peter Paul Rubens, and Jacques-Louis David are here, too, along with many other jewels of the Met collection. But rather than simply offering these treasures once more, the curators, working under the leadership of department head Stephan Wolohojian, have sought to view them through fresh lenses.

Take the Giovanni Battista Tiepolo showstopper that has long greeted viewers to these galleries, an 18-foot-tall history painting called The Triumph of Marius (1729). Its title asserts its main character as the Roman general Marius, but one’s eye falls on Jugurtha, a North African king who, after being captured by the Romans, was chained up and paraded through the streets. It’s a violent spectacle that seems at odds with the majesty of Tiepolo’s rendering, filled as it is with waving flags and clustered onlookers, and the curators don’t entirely let him off the hook.

They’ve placed The Triumph of Marius beside a ca. 1764 lacquerware tray by José Manuel de la Cerda, a Purépecha painter in Mexico whose representation of an episode from Virgil’s Aeneid is encircled by racing horses and winding trees, all done in a style borrowed from Asian decorative objects. Admittedly, the Tiepolo and the de la Cerda don’t have much in common, beside the fact that they turn to ancient Rome for inspiration. But the point remains: both Tiepolo and de la Cerda were working in a Europe that had already been globalized, with the tendrils of its empire reaching all corners of the world via colonialism. A nearby gallery called “Tiepolo and Multiracial Europe,” featuring oil sketches depicting enslaved Venetians and personifications of Africa and Asia, only confirms that.

This is a permanent collection hang that boldly expands the very concept of European painting and sculpture. European Paintings is a common department name in many Western institutions, but it is something of a misnomer, the Met curators seem to say, because the continent’s influence extended across the Atlantic and even toward the Pacific.

A gallery devoted to the art of Spanish America proves the point. With a range of pieces produced in Mexico, Guatemala, Peru, and elsewhere, it features a ca. 1770–80 work by an unknown Cuzco painter that shows a sculpture of the Virgin Mary. This figure, known as Our Lady of Valvanera, was thought to have been hidden in a tree in Spain’s La Rioja region until it revealed itself in a vision to a thief, who, in this work, is shown kneeling beneath her. The painting, with its craggy Iberian peaks, speaks of an inseverable connection to Spain, which had colonized Peru more than two centuries earlier.

Elsewhere, there is an emphasis on Black and Brown figures who had previously been downplayed in these galleries. There’s a William Wood portrait of the Bengali nursemaid Joanna de Silva in a gallery titled “The British Atlantic World,” and a painting of Saint Maurice, a North African commander of the Roman legion, by Lucas Cranach the Elder and his workshop in a space about the Northern Renaissance. There’s even a Hieronymus Bosch painting of the Adoration of the Magi whose wall text centers around a Black king observing the proceedings.

This presentation does not wipe the canon clean—not entirely, at least. Even if certain thematic galleries wrest portraits and landscapes from the rigid grouping by nationality that had previously structured the galleries, much of what is on view still proceeds as it did before, now with a chronological orientation. The offerings run from Gothic Italy through Baroque Spain, from the Dutch Golden Age to Neoclassical France.

That is not to say that there are no fireworks along the way. In a touch that feels quietly revolutionary, women artists begin to take center stage by the end.

The star of the still life galleries is not Willem Claesz Heda, whose vanitas scenes feature tables laden with the remains of picked-over feasts, but Margareta Haverman, a Dutch painter who succeeded him. Her work A Vase of Flowers (1716), featuring roses and hydrangeas that are so bountiful as to nearly conceal the vessel which holds them, is something to behold. It is painful to learn that this is just one of two known paintings by her that remain. And in the French galleries, there’s a relatively new acquisition, Elisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun’s Julie Le Brun (1780–1819) Looking in a Mirror (1787), a painting of the artist’s daughter contemplating her own image. As this little girl peers into her glass, her reflected gaze meets the viewer’s.

Then, in a moment that feels like a true shocker, the curators bring things into the present. One of the final galleries of the European wing features a good deal of contemporary art. Self-portraits by the 18th-cenutry Frenchwoman Marie Victoire Lemoine and the 20th-century American Abstract Expressionist Elaine de Kooning are presented side by side, implying that women artists have been representing themselves for many, many years, even when no one took notice. An 1817 Jean Alaux painting of the artist Léon Pallière shares space with a 2014 Kerry James Marshall canvas in which all the figures—both the painter and his models—are Black.

Perhaps even more jolting is a gallery that divines connections between El Greco and European modernism. Set aside a few minutes to observe El Greco and Paul Cézanne’s views of Toledo and Fontainebleau, respectively. Few will regret pausing to compare the fractured planes of the Spaniard’s cramped hills and the Frenchman’s uneven rocks. Leave it to the Met to find a new take on a topic that’s grown old hat.

But these are the flashiest gestures in galleries that largely do not make much of their greatness. And so, some of the true revelations can get lost in the hustle. Here’s one: Pierre Jacques Volaire’s ca. 1776 painting The Eruption of Vesuvius, A View of Naples Beyond, in which a group of awestruck people cower beneath a blast of molten rock. The lava spews into the night sky, disrupting the serenity of the moonlit clouds above. The Volaire painting is a new one to the Met’s galleries—it was promised as a gift to the museum this year. Consider that a reminder that the museum likely has many more surprises in store for the years to come.

On the top floor of the museum’s East Building, visitors to the special exhibition galleries encounter Native Host for Washington, D.C. (2022), a sculpture by Edgar Heap of Birds (Cheyenne and Arapaho). The work recalls the kind of sign one might see on the side of a road leading to, say, the nation’s capital—except that, in this case, rather than confirming that the viewer has come to the right place, it reorients the very site in which it is set. The words WASHINGTON D.C. are reversed; beneath them is more text, TODAY YOUR HOST IS PISCATAWAY, referring to the Native Americans who lived here before European colonists forced them to vacate.

The dislocation continues in the galleries, where a 7-and-a-half-foot-wide painting by Julie Buffalohead (Ponca Tribe of Oklahoma) shows a concrete barrier with razor wire recalling the means used to quell Native activists during the 2016 Dakota Access Pipeline protests at Standing Rock. YOU ARE ON INDIAN LAND the barricade reads. Rather than officers in SWAT gear, it features bunnies with an inverted American flag and a wolf in a tutu waving a starred wand.

Both pieces are part of “The Land Carries Our Ancestors,” a vibrant group show organized with grace by artist Jaune Quick-to-See Smith (Citizen of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Nation). Smith has not endeavored to do a wide-ranging survey of contemporary Native American art. Instead, she focused on one slice of it: art dealing with the natural environment and Indigenous communities’ relationships to it.

Stylistically, the dozens of artworks here do not form a monolith. Within the same gallery are beaded Converses by Kiowa artist Teri Greeves alongside sculptures resembling mirrored shields by Cannupa Hanska Luger (Mandan/Hidatsa/Arikara/Lakota). Neither work depicts the land itself, but Smith asserts that both have a relationship to it—the Greeves kicks because they have touched the ground, the Luger shields because similar objects played a role in the Standing Rock protests.

There are, of course, landscapes too. Kay WalkingStick, a member of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma who is also of European descent, has a beautiful one called Ute’s Homelands (2022); it depicts a sprawling, lilac-colored mountain range, along with patterns derived from Ute beadwork overlaid on a river running through a valley. It’s an acknowledgment that these peaks once belonged to the Utes before American settlers shunted them to reservations.

That painting rectifies a painful history, as does Edward Curtis, Paparazzi: Chicken Hawks (2008), a painting by Jim Denomie (Lac Courte Oreilles Ojibwe, Ajijaak Clan) that shows Native Americans on horseback chasing a wagon emblazoned with the KFC logo. The triumphant moment is deflated, somewhat, by the presence of a white man on a scooter—perhaps a fantastical vision of the photographer Edward Curtis himself, as suggested by the title. He holds up a camera to record the scene, engraving this imagined showdown in the historical record while also profiteering from it.

That Smith holds these various modes in tension is itself a significant gesture in a landmark show, the first devoted to contemporary Indigenous art at the National Gallery in 70 years. It proves that Native American artists cannot be pigeonholed into one aesthetic—or even one medium—and that their output has taken up the painful remnants of colonialism via a range of subjects. Smith’s exhibition also demonstrates that the struggle for land rights continues to impact not just the objects these artists make, but their outlook on the world as well.

Curatorially, Smith alludes to just that with one wide wall on which two rows of works are hung zipper-style, with little space between each piece, creating a sense of closeness. Here, a Linda Lomahaftewa (Hopi/Choctaw) lithograph showing a Native figure communing with two birds appears below a colorful 2019 painting with a rosette at its center, Esoteric Vibration Landscape, by Mario Martinez (Pascua Yaqui Tribe of Arizona). The two hang so tightly that their corners nearly meet.

But this is more than a means of underlining collectivity. It is also a curatorial choice rooted in Native history—specifically the adoption of the 1887 Dawes Act, which grants the president the legal power to slice up Indigenous land for private ownership. Smith’s own checkerboard wall of art is not all dour, however. If anything, it is a celebration of the fact that Native artists can still come together, even in a country whose politicians have made attempts to keep them apart.

Since the show’s opening, on at least one occasion, the National Gallery of Art has been forced to contend land rights more directly. When the exhibition kicked off in September, one of the biggest objects in it was Creation with her Children (2017), a sculpture by Nicholas Galanin (Lingít/Unangax) and Merritt Johnson (who is not affiliated with a tribal nation) that features a figure wearing a pannier (or side-hoop) skirt of blue tarpaulin centered by pairs of hands tearing open the mouths of sharp-toothed creatures. Two weekends ago, the artists demanded its removal “due to US government funding of Israel’s military assault and genocide against the Palestinian people.” The museum obliged their request.

That the museum had suddenly to contend with such a dispute taking place thousands of miles away speaks to how this show, focusing on the lived experience of Native Americans, touches on something more universal, something that reverberates far beyond this country. True to its title, this exhibition suggests that the land is more than just grass, dirt, rocks, and ranges—it also carries the memories of struggles of all kinds.

What might a landscape look like that accounts for those engagements while also moving beyond them? One answer comes courtesy of the fabulous painting Orchestrating a Blooming Desert (2003) by artist Steven Yazzie (Diné/Pueblo of Laguna, New Mexico/European descent).

In it, a man with his back to the viewer, à la the contemplative figures of Romantic landscapes from the 19th century, raises his arms before cacti in a flowered field. One of his hands holds a baton; on the other rests a motionless bird. All around him, daisies and roses rain down. A host of Western artists from Caspar David Friedrich to Ansel Adams have depicted resplendent vistas like the one he faces, highlighted by cloud-capped mountains and a pink sunset. Yazzie too, in taking up the genre, affirms it as his own. After all, this land was made for him.

I thought of this remark while looking at Niki de Saint Phalle’s Pregnant Nana (1995), the work that greets viewers in the newly enlarged permanent collection galleries of this museum. The sculpture depicts a buoyant female figure, her bared nipples replaced with a heart and an asterisk. She seems to be enjoying the moment, her hands held above her head—but her tumescent belly features a multicolored target, hinting that she is also the object of someone else’s violent gaze.

“I’m not the person who can change society, except through showing some kind of vision of these happy, joyous, domineering women,” de Saint Phalle once said. “That’s all I can do.” The curators of the National Museum of Women in the Arts seem to have resigned themselves to something similar.

Across this museum’s galleries, there are reminders of the dour situation that has long faced women across history. There are stark Guerrilla Girls prints reminding viewers of how under-represented women have been in art institutions throughout history—something that also becomes a refrain in the wall text for works by Old Masters just starting to get their due, like Rachel Ruysch and Lavinia Fontana. There are pieces that allude to centuries of racism and colonialism, and plenty of artworks that deal with loss and sickness, too.

But the focus is instead mostly on freedom, with few works explicitly alluding to the danger of being a woman in the US today. Generally, the mood is celebratory and light.

Sandra Parsons Vicchio, the architect behind the $65 million renovation, has aided in creating the sense of levity by getting rid of columns that broke up space and opening up the galleries. (Crucial but slight changes, such as the addition of another ramp outside, have ensured that the museum is a lot more accessible than it used to be as well.) In the process, Vicchio has also added 4,500 square feet of space to the 36-year-old museum, enabling it to present bigger pieces than it used to.

“The Sky Is the Limit,” one of the special exhibitions on view, shows off the museum’s ability to be nimbler when it comes to oversized work. A jaw-dropper of a work by Alison Saar, the 2012 sculpture Undone, depicts a seated Black woman affixed to an area close to a gallery’s ceiling; her sheer dress tumbles around 15 feet down to the floor, concealing within an aluminum tree that extends from her crotch. Sonya Clark’s Curls (2005) features spirals formed from black plastic combs that are hung up high and allowed to pile on the floor, where they kink into the very curls these objects are meant to contain. An entire sunlit gallery is given over to works by Ursula von Rydingsvard, whose carved-wood assemblages rise high above viewers’ heads.

Yet even the modest works are given new life in the rehung permanent collection galleries on the museum’s third floor, whose walls have also been reorganized to allow for more openness. Rather than presenting things chronologically, however, the museum is exhibiting its collection thematically, crossing temporal, geographical, and racial borders in the process. Doing so creates a sense of togetherness, an idea foregrounded by one of the treasures of this museum’s collection: the vast May Stevens group portrait SoHo Women Artists (1977–78), in which critic Lucy Lippard, artist Miriam Schapiro, and local legend and bakery owner Signora d’Appolito converse, recalling the form of Neoclassical history paintings.

The themes by which these works are grouped—photography by women is one—are too vague to have a lasting impact on viewers. Yet the dialogues formed by them are unforced and frequently illuminating, even if they are rarely foregrounded.

When art-historical conversations are underlined, the results do impress. In one gallery, there is a 2007 Sharon Core photograph of a split-open cake hung above a quaint still life showing plump fruits and pointy shells by Giovanna Garzoni, a lesser-known painter active in 16th-century Italy. This pairing shows that across the years, from the Renaissance to now, women have always commandeered genres considered—at least within history books—to be male-dominated, even when few others took notice.

When Wallace and Wilhelmina Holladay founded the National Museum of Women in the Arts in 1981 as a private museum, many of the artists on view would not have been nearly so famous as they are now. Visiting the museum today, when it is now a public institution, is a reminder of just how many masterworks it has been able to show as a result—there are truly major pieces by Remedios Varo, Alma Thomas, Berthe Morisot, Rosa Bonheur, and Faith Ringgold, whose stars have risen in recent years. Yet the museum in its new form also demonstrates that it remains a font of art-historical figures in need of recognition.

One could fawn over many gems on view. There is a drop-dead gorgeous abstraction of smeary pinks and whites by Emily Kame Kngwarreye, an Anmatyerre painter whose work remains far more famous in Australia than it is here. There is a landscape by Lois Mailou Jones that out-Cézannes Cézanne, offering a view of the Pyrénées created from clustered-together cathedrals and slanted roofs. There is a remarkable black-on-black vessel by Maria and Julian Martinez, who created it by relying upon knowledge from her Pueblo ancestors that was thought by historians to be lost; the clay used to make it was sourced from near her New Mexico home.

This is a museum that has heeded the call to diversify the canon, centering many Asian, Black, Indigenous, Latinx, and Latin American artists whose work has long been set aside at its margins. When it comes to queering that canon, however, there’s still a good amount of work to be done.

There are some lesbian artists represented here. Mildred Thompson has a blazing yellow abstraction that appears to contain a bursting orb, and Harmony Hammond has a puckered painting that recalls a black seat cushion. Thompson sometimes depicted Black lesbians in her work, and Hammond literally wrote the book on lesbian art history, but you would not know any of that from the wall text, which does not mention either artist’s queerness.

More generally, there is almost no work that explicitly refers to lesbianism at all. This is a near-omission made all the more disturbing because it mirrors a lacuna in the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s rehung contemporary art galleries, located not far from this institution.

At least one nonbinary artist is on hand: the South African photographer Zanele Muholi, whose art is given pride of place, between a Frida Kahlo painting and a portrait of Wilhelmina Halladay. It is the one explicitly queer art at the museum right now, with a view of two beatific lesbians looking off into the distance, smiling despite living in a place where their community has found a lot to be rightfully angry about. But there are no trans artists to be found, resulting in a lopsided view of womanhood.

Can liberation be achieved for all when some bodies matter more than others? The question is left open by this museum—and even broached by certain works on view within it.

One such work is María Verónica San Martín’s Mujeres Buscadoras, Fragmentary Memory, Chile, from 2023. It is on view in a small survey of artists’ books in the refurbished special exhibition galleries, though that belies the fact that its text is printed on handkerchiefs. These hankies are a reference to the ones Chilean women waved to mourn the dead under the Pinochet regime, which banned such traditional displays of grief. Some lie draped around a felt container that also holds bags of sand. A small shovel awaits a user willing to dig further, exhuming those who have been kept out of view.

Collector and Fondation president Bernard Arnault states in the catalogue that this exhibition, on view until next April, is “the fulfillment of a long-standing personal wish” for one of his favorite artists, and that for him, “Every work is absolutely unique.” It is hard to disagree based on this transcendent show, curated by Suzanne Pagé and Christopher Rothko, the artist’s son.

On the museum’s ground floor, visitors are immediately thrust into Rothko’s breakthrough to color field abstraction, with a room dedicated to canvases produced during the 1950s, when the Rothko we know now emerged. Technically, this is the middle of the show, but it’s a good starting point, since it is fascinating to contrast these works with his earlier figurative paintings and initial experiments with abstraction and the works that came at end of his career, when his color palette became much deeper and richer—darker, even. These 1950s works, in contrast, exude brightness and levity.

With its intense, central red offset by a swath of rose above and bright block of white below, Light Cloud, Dark Cloud (1957), on loan from the Museum of Modern Art in New York, contains a delicate beauty. It is enhanced by the deep violet and the vibrating yellow that dominate 1954’s No. 9 (Dark over Light Earth/Violet and Yellow in Rose), on loan from the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. Similar shades of washed rose-orange bind the two works, which hang side by side. Seeing them together elucidates the subtle changes in those tones.

Another standout here is No. 15 (1958), which hasn’t made many prominent public appearances since it sold at Christie’s New York for $8.9 million in 2004. (Its owner is not named, but its presence at the Fondation Louis Vuitton suggests something about who that person might be.) Its gradations between navy and violet in the lower third are seductive, drawn out by the faded eggplant that makes up the work’s background.

But, like any good career retrospective, this exhibition is primarily an opportunity to explore the lesser-known sides of Rothko. His early works are primarily figurative in a way that will feel very un-Rothko to many. Of particular note are several untitled works from the 1930s, part of a series depicting subway stations: spindly figures pass by the narrow green columns of the platform; small sections include the patchiness that are hallmarks of his later paintings. From the outset, it was clear that Rothko had an interest in the delineation of space as evidenced by the tiers of color that define his later works.

He would build on that experiment with an untitled painting from 1941–42 that is divided into three registers composed of faces (in green), torsos (in pinkish red), and hands and feet (in black and white), with sharp lines between each section. It’s an uneasy composition, and one that, with its tripartite arrangement, hints at how he would ultimately arrive at the way he arrayed his color fields.

The progression from semi-naturalistic figuration to Surrealist-inflected paintings to unresolved abstraction is fascinating. As he was working through all these different styles, art critics were not always kind. Yet with the benefit of hindsight, I found myself rooting for Rothko, the emerging artist finding his way.

Toward the end of the 1940s, some of Rothko’s abstractions began to feature several blocks of paint. His brushstrokes began to loosen to reveal shifts in tones, and this would cause his paintings to appear to vibrate. He was on the cusp of doing something truly great—and sure enough, at this exhibition, once you arrive at the room dedicated to paintings from the 1950s, it hits you like a ton of bricks.

These subsequent galleries are dedicated to the Rothko we know—poignant, powerful, and hauntingly beautiful. To speak to that Rothko, the Fondation Louis Vuitton has obtained his famed “Seagram Murals,” on loan from Tate Britain. (The loan is an impressive one, since that museum rarely ever lets them travel, but I prefer them in London, where they traditionally stand in sharp contrast to Tate’s J.M.W. Turner paintings.) Most will want to spend time before these works, but it’s worth spending a minute with a slightly lesser-known piece that precedes them: 1958’s No. 9 (White and Black on Wine), a brighter, more jarring abstraction that pits vibrant red against deep maroon and hints at how Rothko would play with like tones in the “Seagram Murals.”

With an artist like Rothko, there is often an obsession with his iconic, quintessential masterpieces—the works that go on view in a museum’s permanent collection galleries. But, here in Paris, the true treasures are the pieces that don’t hold pride of place in the most august modern art museum and are rarely seen by the general public.

In a gallery titled “Black and Gray, Giacometti,” there are works from Rothko’s final series, “Black and Gray” (1969–70). Here, these paintings are paired with sculptures by Alberto Giacometti—UNESCO had proposed a pairing of work by the two artists for its Paris headquarters in 1969. The canvases are divided almost at a horizon line, with rich blacks topping off with grays, some of which also include undertones of ochre, brown, and other colors. These works are also significant in that Rothko used acrylic instead of oil, which often lend a canvas more a matte quality and, sometimes, a severity.

It is hard not to feel as though the Fondation Louis Vuitton retrospective, like any dedicated to the artist, cuts off abruptly—Rothko died by suicide in 1970, leaving behind an oeuvre that feels incomplete. Where might his art have gone next? It’s impossible to say, but this show does suggest that what he did manage to bring into the world remains important, innovative, and valuable. More than half a century on, his paintings remain some of the most contemplative and mediative art created in the 20th century—if not ever.

On at least three occasions, visitors are asked to lie down to experience the works. On two, they are given the opportunity to play music—including their own, made via guitars and a drum set, in one installation resembling a recording studio, minus a soundproofed wall. And, for one centrally placed artwork, visitors are even given the opportunity to perform a game of ping-pong; paddles, balls, and a table await players.

The table tennis piece, titled untitled 2021 (mañana es la cuestión), 2021, isn’t all that exciting when no one is activating it. But if you walk by at the right moment, you might hear plonks and cries of excitement emanating from the gallery that holds it. This added soundtrack, which disturbs the quietude of most museum spaces, is a reminder that Tiravanija’s art only comes alive in the presence of others.

That is one reason why curators Ruba Katrib and Yasmil Raymond have subtitled their excellent show “A LOT OF PEOPLE,” which also doubles as a reference to that phrase’s appearance in the medium lines for certain pieces by Tiravanija. “Four chairs, one table, metal shelves, stacked books, mixed media, Turkish coffee, and a lot of people” are the materials listed for a 1993 piece that functions like an artsy coffeehouse. (Not inventoried: the optional şekerli vanilla sugar that can be added to the delicious beverages upon request.) Notice the “a lot.” This is not just some people, or even a few, but many—an entire functioning community.

Tiravanija’s tendency is in the air right now. It was also on display at last year’s Documenta 15, where a network of interwoven collectives and artists’ groups, many hailing from the Global South, produced a show of work that only sometimes looked like art. A functional half-pipe for skating, a day-care center, and a Bengali kitchen garden were among the offerings there. Yet it is hard to imagine most in the West accepting all that as art were it not for Tiravanija, who effectively defined that paradigm—and a generation of art-making—when he initiated a series of performances that involved cooking pad Thai during the ’90s.

The pad Thai performances, which will be enacted at PS1 at points through early November, are simple in execution and complex in concept. They involve the cooking of noodles before a live audience, whose members are also invited to eat the resulting dishes gratis. The awkward conversations strangers might have while munching away are part of the artwork, as are all the used packaging and cookware, which sometimes later get reformulated into sculptures in their own right.

These sculptures appear in a dedicated section of the PS1 show that resembles a traditional museum retrospective. Chipped bowls, chili pastes, and dirtied woks figure in one gallery whose contents recall the remains of a forgotten feast; other adjacent spaces hold paintings, sculptures, videos, and more. This may all seem like the output of a more conventional talent.

But would an average artist stuff everything from one of his exhibitions into a crate and seal it shut? This is exactly what Tiravanija did for all that appeared in a 1991 solo show—all its cassettes featuring the sounds of New York streets and the pair of binoculars, here exhibited in a box called untitled 1991 (blind). The work’s title alludes to the fact that no one is allowed to see inside the wooden container, which, per Tiravanija’s instructions, must remain shut until he dies. Ironically, this means that its contents can only be exhumed once Tiravanija enters a coffin himself.

Yet it barely even seems possible to pin down Tiravanija, who has spent much of his life on the go. He was born in Buenos Aires in 1961 to a diplomat father and raised between Thailand, Ethiopia, and Canada; he attended college in Ottawa and Toronto. He landed in New York during the ’80s, and now spends his time between that city, Berlin, and Chiang Mai.

The PS1 exhibition portrays Tiravanija as a restless traveler. Take one 1994 piece in which Tiravanija trekked from Madrid’s airport to the Museo Reina Sofía. The ten-and-a-half-mile journey takes a little under four hours to complete by foot, but Tiravanija’s route ended up spanning multiple days. It quickly became serpentine as he interacted with locals and, naturally, cooked for them. At PS1, this walk is represented as a ramshackle assemblage composed of a felled bike, buckets, camping gear, and a video playing footage of what he witnessed along the way. “A lot of people” isn’t listed in the materials for this piece, but it might as well be.

That voyage was a short one compared to the thousands and thousands of miles traversed by Tiravanija, whose various movements are tracked in one scroll-like work occupying a sizable corner. Its imagery is a web of intersecting lines, spirals, and illegible scrawls that hardly resemble a map, however. A migrant in permanent motion, Tiravanija seems to suggest that an atlas could not possibly record all that he has seen across the years.

Ours is an art world that is still obsessed with borders. (Witness all the national pavilions at the Venice Biennale, whose relevancy is now being tested by those who argue that the model fails artists from the Global South.) As a result, it may be tempting to call Tiravanija a Thai artist—perhaps even the Thai artist, considering no other is quite as famous internationally. Yet the PS1 show, in arguing for Tiravanija as a multinational figure, persuasively destabilizes that kind of thinking, which is too limited, anyway, for an artist whose practice is so liberated.

On the one hand, as writer David Teh points out in the informative catalogue, there are aspects of Tiravanija’s art that are unmistakably Thai—his titles, for example, are left lowercase, in keeping with the grammar of his mother tongue, even though they are written in English. On the other, as Katrib and Raymond elucidate, there are many references to Western artists ranging from Robert Morris to John Cage.

More often than not, cultures mash together. In one work, Tiravanija pays homage to Constantin Brancusi’s Endless Column, a totem-like arrangement of doubled pyramids. His take on this sculpture is a stack of clear pails that contain the refuse of his used coffee cups, shredded papers, and other garbage—a winking embrace of modernist aesthetics that also treats them like trash.

Because Tiravanija splits his time on three continents, he is prone to commenting on issues pertinent to all of them. Here, a piece commenting on 2021 anti-government protests in Bangkok shares space with paintings that include New York Times pages broadcasting updates about the outcry over Trump’s election. Those paintings, with their Philip Guston–like floppy legs and brick walls, can be boiled down to easy statements about the necessity of protest and the abuse of power. So, too, can other recent works at PS1.

I much prefer Tiravanija in a scrappier mode. After all, he’s best at indulging the in-between and the unclassifiable—everything that does not conform.

It’s no surprise, then, that one of the PS1 exhibition’s finest pieces is untitled 1998 (cinéma de ville), an understated installation about the people who inhabit a connective space near the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville and the Palais de Tokyo in Paris. Tiravanija photographed skateboarders performing ollies and other tricks on this esplanade. Their images are being shown slideshow-style via a projector that is tucked away inside a camping tent.

Notably, Tiravanija’s camera never ventures indoors to show us a single artwork. That’s because untitled 1998 (cinéma de ville) is a celebration of what exists at the fringes at the museums, whose collections are often prized more highly than the people who help them run. Seeking to disrupt the way art is consumed at institutions like the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville, Tiravanija invites his viewers to change their perspective to see this piece. Go ahead, and plop down on one of the mats. It turns out the floor is a pretty comfortable place for seeing art.

To inaugurate the space, Hauser & Wirth has called on Los Angeles–based artist Henry Taylor, who spent two months in Paris over the summer to create the new works on view. Some might say Taylor is having a moment, with this exhibition and a traveling survey that landed at the Whitney Museum in New York last month, but that ignores the fact that Taylor has long been a centrifugal force within LA’s art scene, even when much of the mainstream art world didn’t notice. As ever, he is in fine form.

By and large, what has been exhibited of Taylor’s oeuvre in the past is his paintings, primarily his portraits. But his Whitney exhibition and this Hauser & Wirth show reveal that he is equally adept at creating sculptures and installations.

Both current shows have on view towering sculptures consisting of a rough tree bark. The foliage connected to these structures has been replaced with a full, black afro. Rising 15 feet in the air, the monumental piece at Hauser & Wirth is titled One tree per family (2023).

Elsewhere in the exhibition are other arboreal creations with spindly barks. Two untitled ones on the ground floor are crowned with dozens of empty laundry detergent bottles in shades of orange and blue. They appear ready to collapse.

Taylor’s use of found objects nods to Marcel Duchamp, who plucked bottle racks and urinals from the outside world and called them art. Duchamp’s In Advance of a Broken Arm (1915), featuring a suspended shovel, even seems to have informed one untitled Taylor work consisting of a shovel planted into a cylindrical concrete base. Taylor has attached this tool to a mop, whose near-black head comes close to touching the ceiling.

French art history looms large in these latest works, no doubt thanks to Taylor’s frequent trips during his two-month stay to the Musée d’Orsay to see Impressionist masterpieces. The standout in this regard is Taylor’s take on Manet’s Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe (1862–63). Manet’s painting shocked Paris with its naked woman picnicking with two clothed men. Taylor’s painting delivers its own surprise by deliberately making Manet’s provocation seem understated. He recreates the scene with Black people at leisure, along with a black sedan parked in the background. His painting’s knowing title is Forest fever ain’t nothing like, “Jungle Fever.”

Taylor collapses time and geography in a work that shows Josephine Baker, the Black dancer and civil rights activist who left the United States for Paris in the 1920s. She kneels in front of the Louvre; behind the museum is the English Channel, the British Museum, and a ship. The work’s title, got, get, gone, but don’t you think you should give it back?, is a clear reference to the ongoing debates about repatriation of looted art to the African continent.

These are but two of the stunning paintings on view, of which many more are on view. Several are hung salon-style in the upper-level gallery, and it’s worth taking a moment to muse over them.

But I’d like to draw your attention to a work that hangs near the gallery’s entrance that is easy to miss. With its black text against a white background, it looks nothing like the works for which Taylor is best known, but it does contain his sly sense of humor. Its text spells out “Ça y est!,” which is French for “That’s it!” Ironically, the piece could be the first thing you see when you walk in.