But the doodle isn’t exactly what you’d expect to see in a museum. Still, it wound up in one nevertheless—the Brooklyn Museum, that is, where the comedian co-organized, with staff curators Catherine Morris and Lisa Small, the instantly infamous “It’s Pablo-matic: Picasso According to Hannah Gadsby.” The chunk of wall hangs beneath a gigantic Cecily Brown painting and among several Picasso pieces, with masterworks by feminist artists like Howardena Pindell, Dara Birnbaum, and Ana Mendieta sprinkled throughout.

It would be easy to write off “Pablo-matic” as a joke—it’s organized by a comedian and titled with a pun, after all. But doing so has proved polarizing: the backlash to the backlash casts the show’s critics as protectors of a dying canon. Brooklyn Museum director Anne Pasternak rebutted the controversy in an interview with Curbed NY by saying, “if you talk to young art historians, they are like, ‘I don’t care if I ever see another Picasso.’ ‘I don’t care if I ever see another Degas.’” She seemed to side with these unspecified youths, adding that she wanted her museum to be a part of “the conversations that people are having today.”

“Pablo-matic” is the splashiest in a number of museum exhibitions on view in New York right now that urge us to rewrite art history, given all the progress we’ve made when it comes to gender and racial equality, and start the story anew. Fair enough. Most of us who have endured an art history survey—or have even seen a major museum’s collection—know how many white men populate the canon. This fact is underscored by one “Pablo-matic” artist, Kaleta Doolin, who made A Woman on Every Page (2018) by slicing out a vaginal void from every page of H.W. Janson’s landmark textbook History of Art, first published in 1962 and still updated and taught today. The book is shown open to a page bearing the image of Picasso’s Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907).

But rewriting is one matter, and recklessly argued hot takes, entirely another. “It’s Pablo-matic” falls into the latter category, offering works that allegedly contend with Picasso’s legacy in some way, but in fact have other references. There’s a Faith Ringgold painting that refers directly to an Henri Matisse canvas, for example, and a Nina Chanel Abney work that pays homage to a Manet. Picasso, who physically and emotionally abused women in his orbit while also using them as his muses, is deserving of criticism, but shoehorning in tangentially related works such as these is a weird way to do that.

There were brave women who exposed Picasso’s bad behavior during his lifetime, among them painter Françoise Gilot, who, after a decade-long relationship with him, wrote a revealing book about it. But the curators don’t even include any of her work, an omission that became all the more glaring when she died just days after the show opened.

“It’s Pablo-matic” is proof that the field of art history is changing, for better and for worse. Museums are somewhat newly self-reflexive about their role in shaping the culture and the discourse, and are working hard to stay relevant and expand the canon—and to grow their audiences. Once, museums were places to engage with meaning and beauty, to try to comprehend the human experience across time and cultures. Now, nuance is being swapped out for one-liners in an effort toward an elusive kind of “accessibility.”

“Rear View,” a cheeky meditation on artists’ obsession with plump rumps across the years at LGDR gallery in Manhattan, is also born from this tendency. This group show would have been dismissible as flimsy had the gallery not secured so many first-class artworks. There was a stunning Barkley Hendricks painting of a nude woman from behind, one arm holding the other, and a fabulous Félix Vallotton image of a female backside that doubles as a study of contrapposto. Prime examples of works by market darlings like Issy Wood and Jenna Gribbon were also on view, offering feminist perspectives.

Every so often, a sharp juxtaposition appeared: the Vallotton was cast beside the Yoko Ono film Bottoms (1966), a series of close-ups of men’s and women’s derrieres. In this context, the Ono film felt like a more equitable and less horny alternative to Vallotton’s male gaze. The works were amusing, but I didn’t come away feeling like I learned much about these artists or, for that matter, butts. I cringed at the pairing of an Anselm Kiefer photograph of the artist performing a Nazi salute—a work that once caused art historian Benjamin H.D. Buchloh to label Kiefer “a fascist who thinks he’s antifascist”—and a Carrie Mae Weems shot of the artist herself standing in the doorway of a Louisiana house where multiple white owners held enslaved people as their property. Buttocks appear in both these works, sure, but the reductive framing of keisters as their binding theme feels insensitive.

Much-needed attempts to revise the canon and offer retorts to the form it has championed are finally being made. But they’re being done hastily, and worse, as a disservice to the artists (and to nuance in general). This provokes a larger question: What do we want from art history?

The query echoes in the phenomenon that ArtReview recently termed the “blockbuster dialogue exhibition,” wherein a lesser-known figure is paired with a famous one, as if to secure the former’s spot in the canon and put them on equal footing with a bona fide “master.” Think Tate Modern’s current show about Hilma af Klint and Piet Mondrian, two pioneering abstractionists whose work has formal similarities, or the Fondation Louis Vuitton’s acclaimed Claude Monet–Joan Mitchell doubleheader.

When the pairings are successful, this formula has offered revelatory looks at beloved figures. But in New York this season, two smaller museum exhibitions following the model showed its limits, with tenuous matches for unlike artists.

At the Museum of Modern Art, “The Encounter” places Barbara Chase-Riboud’s and Alberto Giacometti’s sculptures side by side. His are spare, spindly figures; hers are blocky, metallic abstractions. Unlike af Klint and Mondrian or Monet and Mitchell, Chase-Riboud and Giacometti did meet—she visited his Paris studio in 1962. She was 39 years his junior and had just moved to the French capital after becoming the first Black woman to receive an MFA from Yale. The show features works by both artists with titles referring to female Venetians. Giacometti’s Femme de Venise (1956) boasts a slender white figure formed from white plaster; Chase-Riboud’s Standing Black Woman of Venice (1969/2020) is a towering monolith crafted from crushed black bronze.

But the exhibition also includes Chase-Riboud works that don’t have a lot to do with Giacometti’s. One example is the gorgeous 1973 sculpture Le Manteau (The Cape) or Cleopatra’s Cape in which braids of rope spill from a structure covered in copper squares. This allows her to speak on her own, avoiding the “Pablo-matic” pitfall of framing a woman’s work as a retort to the male canon. But the show might have been just as effective without showing any Giacometti works at all.

Over at the Frick Collection’s temporary Breuer space, a newly commissioned Nicolas Party installation responds to a painting by Rosalba Carriera, whose Italian Rococo pastel portraits are badly in need of a retrospective. Party hung Carriera’s circa-1730 portrait of a man in a pilgrim’s costume against a mural of his own: it shows a pastel patterned dress floating and undulating in a black void. Two similar images also appear on adjacent walls, both with Party’s own garish paintings of blue- and white-faced people hung atop them. It’s clear that Party reveres Carriera’s sfumato—his floating garments are glossy and lush, just like her surfaces—but the similarities end there. Party’s domineering visual fanfare forces Carriera’s painting into the background even as her work overlies one of his. In the end, this feels less like a meeting of minds across centuries than just another feather in Party’s cap, proving that in some “dialogue exhibitions,” one voice will still be louder than the other.

The #MeToo movement and Black Lives Matter pushed scholars and curators to look back at art history for figures who have been overshadowed, and ever since, each season has boasted a “rediscovery.” The big one this summer around was Gego, a modernist sculptor who fled Nazi Germany for Venezuela in the 1930s. The Guggenheim rotunda is filled with an array of delicate geometric sculptures that Gego formed by gently twisting steel into hanging grids and globes. The show began with sculptures of the ’50s formed from painted iron lines that intersect, creating the illusion of movement, but it is her signature sparse nets and weaves, made between 1969 and her death in 1994, that are the exhibition’s stars.

The Guggenheim version of this traveling show, curated by Pablo León de la Barra and Geaninne Gutiérrez-Guimarães, generally relies on formalist readings of Gego’s art, pointing out that her sculptures were never just flat, static things. But these abstractions are ripe for plucking from their sociopolitical context, which has been relegated to the indispensable catalogue, as has Gego’s complex life story. In that book, curator Julieta González, who organized this retrospective’s initial showing at the Museo Jumex in Mexico City, positions Gego’s grid-like arrangements as analogies for what was taking place in Caracas at the time: artists were creating networks of their own, often in opposition to the Venezuelan government’s preference for unruly modernist utopianism. It’s revelatory reading. Curiously, almost none of González’s points make it into the Guggenheim galleries.

Perhaps this is because the Guggenheim was afraid the nitty gritty of Gego’s context would be tricky to translate across time and cultures. So instead, the show positions her as an artist who “defied categorization,” a zeitgeisty phrase used to describe people and artworks that cross classifications of all kinds. This feels like a giveaway about what this show’s curators—and those of other “rediscovery” retrospectives—are really after: they want art that speaks to the present, not art that enhances or challenges our understanding of the world.

Against all this, you have a show by Darrel Ellis, an artist whose story resists traditional narratives of the heroic straight white male artist. In fact, he confronted this myth directly in his work, while also embracing more vulnerable and humble materials. His extraordinary Bronx Museum of the Arts retrospective provides a strong case for why he deserves greater recognition.

Before he died of AIDS-related causes in 1992 at age 33, Ellis frequently worked with the photography archive of his father, who was beaten to death by plainclothes police officers not long before the artist was born. Ellis rephotographed his dad’s black-and-white pictures of his family and projected them on uneven plaster surfaces. The resulting photos of those original shots against the plaster appear fractured, split, and rumpled, troubling the images of the past while also reanimating them.

It helps that Ellis himself was an art history enthusiast, and thus aware of his relationship to the canon, to which he responded directly. He grew up in the South Bronx, gravitated toward museums in Manhattan, and fell in love with Eugène Delacroix, Edvard Munch, and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. Curators Antonio Sergio Bessa and Leslie Cozzi point out that Ellis even cribbed compositions from these artists for his own paintings. Take Untitled (After Delacroix), ca. 1980–90, in which Ellis appropriates a Delacroix painting of Hamlet from 1839, with the Frenchman’s rich reds now rendered in brushy black and white. If Delacroix lavished attention on Hamlet, Ellis seems more focused on the man holding Yorick’s dug-up skull. Perhaps Ellis saw in that man a parallel for himself, an exhumer of the past, more than one of history’s protagonists.

Ellis also copied images of himself photographed by icons such as Robert Mapplethorpe, Peter Hujar, and Allen Frame, whose picture of Ellis standing in a doorway Ellis translated across papers and canvases in varying sizes, in both ink and acrylic, all hung next to each other in the Bronx Museum show. In Ellis’s hands, the edges of Frame’s photo fade into stark blankness. We’re ultimately left with a ghost—a living memory of a dead image. Ellis was keenly aware of the specters of art history, and he welcomed them, even as he also distanced himself from them. We’d all be wise to do the same.

Hardgood & Dolly (2023) is a piece of compressed landfill I extracted from Dead Horse Bay [between Brighton Beach and Fort Tilden in Brooklyn]. In the Industrial era, it was also home to fish oil factories, and garbage incinerators. In the 1950s, a series of highways decimated a number of low-income neighborhoodsin Brooklyn, and they moved all of those folks’ goods to Dead Horse Bay, then used them to extend the shoreline. The trash and their belongings were compacted, then covered with sand. Recently it’s been eroding.

Because this was the 1950s, there’s more glass than plastic. I extracted a hunk of landfill that included all these products that have been vitrified over time. It contains rubber, cement, plant matter, packaging, sand, and other miscellaneous objects. My students helped me drag this piece back, and it spawned my most recent show, “Shelf Life,” at Helena Anrather Gallery in New York.

Another piece in that show, Compost Index 3 with Volumes 2.1, 2.2, 3.1, 4.1, 4.2, 5.1 (2023), involves repurposed tiles I got from Marble Expo on Facebook Marketplace. The onyx tiles were originally extracted from Karachi, Pakistan, and brought to Marble Expo in the Bronx, which then sold them to corporations, a bank, and a Best Western. I purchased the leftovers. The multicolored onyx has all this depth, so you can really see the earth processes that happened over eons. I wanted to position them [on the floor] so that they signify earth or ground, but also a countertop at the same time. I waterjet-cut different advertisements in the tiles, borrowed from things like moisturizers that promise a healthier or more efficient body. I also sandblasted images of things that I found on the ground in my neighborhood: lottery tickets, gum, cigarettes, Modelo beer cans. I photographed them, turned them into stencils, and then sandblasted them into the tiles. Sandblasting is almost like a mechanized geologic process, but it also creates this ghostly or fossilized image of the waste.

I also remade plastic vessels in glass that you can carry around—like detergent bottles, milk jugs, or motor oil containers. I work with containers a lot. I’m interested in how they promise space cordoned off from temperature, climate, and decay, but are also everywhere in landfills. Positioning vessels on the onyx tiles, I wanted to point to deep geologic processes that have happened over years and years.  —As told to Emily Watlington

I start by mixing a palette, and as I mix, I get an idea of what the painting will be. I’ll have a general sense of the palette within a few minutes: they usually involve interactions between earth tones and bright, saturated colors. But I spend a lot of time figuring out the light and contrasts, and a palette can take a sharp turn quickly if it’s just not feeling right.

Lately I’ve been starting with the background, then working my way to the surface of my paintings. I like making the background look like it was the last thing that happened, even though it was first. I’m often building up thick paint, then wiping it away, and the wipes leave marks. But I change the process up from painting to painting—I always want to stay surprised and spontaneous.

I mostly draw imagery from everyday experiences: memories, places I’ve lived, things I see on walks. Sometimes, I’ll see something I liked in one painting, and then I’ll try it again in the next one.

For Convergence (2023), I started off building up layers of dark acrylic dye washes. But I couldn’t figure out the space at all: it was too abstract and looked almost underwater. Eventually, I flipped the canvas over and started painting on the back. You see the stains from the reverse side at the top, and at the bottom, I painted over them in oil. The harsh horizon line helps both parts feel like they’re in the same space, even though, material-wise, they’re very different.

I keep paint skins in my studio, made from paint I took off old paintings. I’m often holding them up to canvases to see what needs them. Sometimes I’ll throw in paint from another palette. I almost want it to feel like you could just peel it off.

Usually, I’m working on four or five paintings at a time. It’s helpful to bounce between works. I can finish a painting in one day, and usually I find those to be the most successful—it means I got the full idea out and I don’t have to go back in and fix it, which sometimes makes me feel on the verge of “designing.” For me, it’s always about spontaneity. —As told to Emily Watlington

Related Articles

Five Hundred Years after Leonardo da Vinci’s Death, His Work Offers New Environmental Insights

Titian Made Visual Poetry of Eroticism and Power

Prior to this exhibition, Pareja (1608–1670) may have been known to many not as an artist, but as the subject of a stunning painting by Diego Velázquez, which was acquired by the Met in 1971. Velázquez was not only Pareja’s portraitist but also his artistic master and erstwhile enslaver. This bond is mentioned in early biographies, which also inform us of how the old master brought Pareja with him to Rome in 1650 when he was sent to purchase artworks on behalf of the Spanish king. The Met’s Portrait of Juan de Pareja was executed during this journey and, if we are to believe his biographer, Velázquez had Pareja carry his own likeness through the streets so spectators could marvel at his master’s artistic skills.

At the end of their Italian tour, Velázquez granted Pareja his freedom. In fact, one of the most moving objects in the exhibition is neither a painting nor a sculpture but the manumission document, first discovered quite by accident in a Roman archive in 1983 by Jennifer Montagu. The circumstances of Pareja’s original enslavement remain unknown, but one thing we learn from an essay by Luis Méndez Rodríguez in the exhibition catalogue is just how common such uneven relationships were in the 17th century: Caravaggio and Murillo are implicated in such exploitative practices, as are numerous lesser-known painters, sculptors, tile makers, glaziers, and other artisans who similarly kept enslaved people in their workshops and households.

The exhibition takes care to contextualize Pareja’s art. The first of four sections is devoted to a précis of the scholarly activities of the Black Puerto Rican intellectual and polymath Arturo Alfonso Schomburg (1874–1938) whose essays “The Negro Digs Up His Past” (1925) and “In Search of Juan de Pareja” (1927) were among the first to explore the painter’s background. The second locates Pareja in the multiracial communities of enslaved and freed Africans in early modern Seville. At one end, the section is haunted by three lavish silver vessels from the Met’s collection that were produced by enslaved artisans; at the other end are three near-identical paintings by Velázquez of an African kitchen maid, indicating an interest in such images. With this generous introduction in place, Velázquez’s portrait of Pareja and a portrait attributed to Pareja appear in the third section alongside his “donation of freedom,” while the final section assembles a grouping of large-scale religious paintings by Pareja and his Spanish contemporaries.

The artist’s 18th-century biographer Antonio Palomino described how Pareja fashioned himself “a new self and another second nature” after he was freed, and the curators take care to underline that his liberation from Velázquez had both personal and stylistic consequences. Three of Pareja’s large-scale religious works—The Flight into Egypt (1658), The Calling of Saint Matthew (1661),and The Baptism of Christ (1667)—as well as a portrait of the architect José Ratés Dalmau (ca. 1660s), make evident just how far he went beyond his master’s house. Gone is the lugubrious chiaroscuro of Velázquez’s late style, replaced now with clear lighting and a jubilant chromatic palette inspired by artists such Claudio Coello, whose shimmering Saint Catherine of Alexandria Dominating the Emperor Maxentius (ca. 1664) hangs on the opposite wall. At the left edge of The Calling of Saint Matthew, Pareja inserts an image himself holding a cartellino that bears his name and the date. The elegant subject looks out from the composition, waiting for the spectator of the future to come and acknowledge him.

If his relationship with Velázquez marks one end of a historical timeline in Pareja’s life, the other end connects him to Schomburg, the political activist, engaged essayist, radical bibliophile, Black Freemason, expert archivist, institution builder, and world traveler whose dedicated research helped recover Pareja’s identity as an Afro-Hispanic painter. Told as a child by a teacher that the “Negro had no history,” Schomburg devoted his life to proving otherwise. In the process he amassed two great collections of books, documents, and other artifacts attesting to the presence of Black excellence throughout history. The show includes personal photographs Schomburg took during a journey throughout Europe, including Spain, where he went in search of Pareja’s Calling of Saint Matthew. He wrote of his emotional encounter with the painting in the back rooms of the Prado Museum: “I had journeyed thousands of miles to look upon the work of this colored slave who had succeeded by courageous persistence in the face of every discouragement.” While Velázquez’s Portrait of Juan de Pareja holds pride of place at the physical center of this exhibition, it is ultimately Schomburg’s portrait of Pareja that shines as the true heart of the story told here.

In the new year, Bispo entered the Colônia Juliano Moreira, an asylum just outside the city, where he spent the better part of 50 years. He soon oriented his life around answering auditory hallucinations that compelled him to create compulsively. He worked with every material available to him: he’d unravel hospital uniforms, then use the thread to embroider bedsheets, or gather scrap wood and other detritus for small constructions. He even made wagons to transport the refuse he collected, and the new creations he made from it. Bispo received what he believed to be a second divine mandate in 1967, while in solitary confinement. He began furiously preparing to represent the world on Judgment Day. By the time of his death in 1989, Bispo had filled 11 rooms with hundreds of garments, banners, miniatures, constructions, and other uncategorizable things, none of which he dated or signed. He lived and died on the margins of society.

Not long after, in the 1990s, Bispo was reborn at the center of the Brazilian art world. His posthumous debut at Rio’s Museum of Modern Art (MAM) in 1993 broke attendance records, and two years later, his work represented Brazil at the Venice Biennale. “Bispo do Rosario: All Existing Materials on Earth,” on view at the Americas Society in New York through May 20, marks his first solo exhibition in the United States. The show sidesteps old debates over the ethics of framing his output as contemporary art, which Bispo himself resisted during his lifetime. That debate, as art historian Kaira Cabañas addressed in her 2018 book, is inflected by a history unique to Brazil, where key ideas about modern art emerged through deep engagement with the creativity of psychiatric patients. In New York, the curatorial texts treat Bispo’s status as an artist and his life’s work as artwork as a fait accompli. This move participates in broader art world efforts to deconstruct the category of “outsider art,” towards a more inclusive art history. However, it also overrides the way Bispo understood himself and his own work.    

The show opens with Bispo’s most important possession: his Annunciation Garment, an ornate cloak he intended to wear on Judgment Day, and in which he intended to be buried. On the cloak’s exterior, Bispo embroidered small pictographs of the world’s contents as well as reference numbers corresponding to the system he devised to keep track of his production. On the inside, he embroidered the names of women who would accompany his ascension in neat concentric rows. Festooned with tasseled cords and epaulets, this and other garments on view are influenced by carnival regalia and Bispo’s stint as a signalman in the Brazilian navy. It makes sense that the Annunciation Garment is hismost richly decorated: it is a synthesis of his life’s project.

Bispo’s fifteen estandartes, or banners, line the walls of the second gallery, hanging vertically from wooden poles. They are made from yellowed asylum linens and embroidered with pictures, diagrams, words, maps, national and semaphore flags—a variety of sign systems that work as shortcuts in his quest to represent totality. Certain biographical details surface through needlepoint text: on Untitled [I need these words written] Bispo narrates his 1938 vision. On Untitled [Dictionary of Names that Begin with the Letter A], he listed the names of people he knew personally and of people he learned of in the media.

The third gallery contains Bispo’s objects, including groups of like items mounted on rectangular boards; one gathers tin cups, another flip flops, and so on. Charming miniatures— fantastic reconstructions of a carousel and a ship—share a table at the center of the gallery with an assortment of small items wrapped in the faded blue thread of unraveled hospital uniforms. Though these mummified objects remain identifiable, Bispo labeled and numbered them in contrasting thread to secure against misrecognition.

Despite his repeated efforts at absolute clarity, certain objects still tempt multiple interpretations. Wheel of Fortune, a working miniature carnival game, is constructed out of a bicycle wheel affixed to an upturned crate. Many commentators have remarked on the object’s resemblance to Duchamp’s Bicycle Wheel (1913), as though this confirms the work’s rightful place in a gallery. Frederico Morais, the Brazilian critic and curator who organized his posthumous museum debut, and who “invented Bispo the artist,” as he puts it, was first to recognize this. While it was clear to Morais that any relationship between Bicycle Wheel and Wheel of Fortune is coincidental, as Bispo was not familiar with Duchamp’s readymades, the curator was enthusiastic about the dialogue it generated. In fact, Morais’s influence permeates the Americas Society exhibition. Works are distributed across the three galleries according to the taxonomies Morais helped establish, and the texts use nomenclature his team developed while inventorying Bispo’s estate.

Other curatorial choices prevent a visitor from forgetting the specific, brutal context in which Bispo lived and created. The walls are half white cube, half painted in the same purplish hue of the hospital uniforms he repurposed. A miniature wall is isolated to poignant effect in the sill of a barred window overlooking East 68th Street. The aspirational tense of its graphite inscription—“How I Shall Build a Wall in the Back of my House”—alludes to the privacy Bispo was denied, both in his life and, arguably, by the posthumous exhibition of his output. Bispo has the last word, too: the show concludes with an extended video interview he gave around 1982, while dressed in his Annunciation Garment. When someone off-camera compliments his creative capacity, Bispo set the record straight, insisting, “I do it because I am obliged.”