Matthew Wong might be one of them. He received this same treatment following his death by suicide at age 35 in 2019, and I’ll admit that as a result, I erected a mental wall against his lush landscapes, viewing them as part of an easy narrative rather than significant works in their own right. But Wong’s current Museum of Fine Arts, Boston retrospective, which has traveled from the Dallas Museum of Art, proved to me that I hadn’t judged him fairly.

This show, tightly curated by the DMA’s Vivian Li, does a smart job of cutting through the noise surrounding Wong’s legacy. It presents him not as a prodigy but as a talented artist who had only just begun to find his footing and as a Canadian of the Asian diaspora who had started to discover his place within the world. With a checklist numbering 40 works, it is an understated sampler that makes much-needed edits to Wong’s story, which has been told over and over in the past four years, often in ways too grandiose for work that’s so humble.

Wong has been frequently labeled a self-taught painter, the suggestion being that he discovered his Fauvism-inflected palette of royal blues and hot reds virtually overnight, that he had almost no help in devising his curlicuing paths and speckled trees. The label is not quite true, as this exhibition deftly proves.

In fact, Wong had attended art school in Hong Kong and even received an MFA—not in painting but photography. He’d initially hit the streets of Hong Kong, shooting on-the-fly pictures of unaware passersby in the tradition of Daido Moriyama. These aren’t included in the exhibition itself, but they’re printed in the catalogue. “Photography’s distanced relationship with its subject left [Wong] dissatisfied,” Li writes. He found his solution in ink on paper, a medium with a long history in Hong Kong.

These ink works are mixed in quality. Heaven and Earth (2015), a Pollock-like mess of black gashes, offers a visual feast, but an untitled 2014 work formed of a blotchy grid feels safe. They’re the work of an artist still too shy to jump into the void.

Even once he did make the leap to oil on canvas around the same time, dragging around thick smears of burnt umber and beige to evoke twines of trees, he couldn’t quite get it right. The results feel too familiar, like twice translated riffs on German Expressionism.

The platonic ideal of a retrospective includes no unremarkable works, but there’s a certain pleasure to be had in seeing masterpieces brush up against duds. Failures can illuminate just as much about an artist as successes, and in this case, Li’s inclusion of these misfires disturbs the notion that greatness struck Wong like lightning. The reality was hardly that at all.

It took another couple years before Wong found a steadier position with painting, producing a showstopper called The Kingdom (2017), in which a crowned ruler sits enthroned amid an isle of gray set in a forest whose surface is filled with dashes of saffron orange and mint green. The clustering of unlike colors and the smatterings of parallel strokes evoke a laundry list of art-historical giants, from Henri Matisse to Gustav Klimt, whose 1903 painting of a birch forest Li offers as the main referent here.

Europeans like these are typically suggested by critics as the primary inspirations for Wong, but Li also asserts that he was also looking at 20th-century Chinese artists like Wu Guanzhong, whose brushy paintings merged avant-garde modernism with traditional calligraphic techniques. This much is even obvious in The Kingdom, in which the trees, their gnarls represented only by dots, could be said to evince a Wu-like minimalism. One of the many reasons this retrospective is valuable is that it views Wong not just as a modernism aficionado but as a curious art lover whose inquiry transcended the Western canon.

The self-aggrandizing inclusion of a monarch in The Kingdom, sketched out by way of a few jabs of a brush gobbed with white paint, and the canvas’ scale, at six feet wide, imply that Wong had gained a confidence that was missing in past efforts. Yet Wong seemed uncomfortable with the idea that he was a master. His king appears minuscule and expressionless—hardly very regal at all.

Likewise for the searching figures who populate contemporaneous works such as The Bright Winding Path (2017), in which a person in a blue shirt ambles along a zigzagging white walkway, nearly fading away into its thick web of pink dots. That figure has only one way to go, but because of the painting’s crowded composition, he seems lost.

It’s difficult not to see a parallel for Wong’s career here. He’d been included by curator Matthew Higgs in a group show at the Amagansett space of Karma, the New York market juggernaut with an eye for cutting-edge painting. This initiated a following for Wong, a painter by then based in Edmonton, Canada, who few in New York had even heard of before that.

Wong’s social connections emerged organically—this was no nepo baby. Yet it’s worth considering how much knowing the right people helped Wong. The MFA Boston show includes loans from blue-chip artists like KAWS, Rashid Johnson, Jennifer Guidi, and Jonas Wood; the reason the Dallas Museum of Art ended up with a Wong at all was because of the Dallas Art Fair, where the curators acquired his painting from Karma’s booth. This much is hinted in the wall text, but rarely ever is it laid bare. The fullest possible examination of Wong’s career, one that accounts for how his career and his legacy have enjoyed some level of market-oriented privilege through these ties, has yet to emerge.

Li does better when it comes to Wong’s mental illnesses. She does not skip over his diagnoses of Tourette Syndrome and autism, which Wong himself embraced during his lifetime at the urging of his mother Monita. But more crucially, she does not view his paintings as metaphors.

It could be tempting, for example, to read a work like the terrific Blue Rain (2018), a painting of a solitary blue house behind chunky whitish slashes, as an allegory for Wong’s internal state. After all, such an argument is often made about Picasso’s Blue Period paintings, van Gogh’s Arles works, and a whole lot more. Li doesn’t fall into that trap, writing in the wall text that this spare abode is “a symbol of both shelter and loneliness” and leaving it at that.

How much one really can avoid that interpretation is admittedly tested by pieces like See You on the Other Side (2019), a painting made the year during Wong’s final year. It features a single figure sitting on a cliff, with a house far in the distance set off by a vast gulf of white. This painting appears toward the MFA show’s end, but it is not the last thing viewers see. That would be something that is not an artwork at all: a set of brochures that offer resources for those having suicidal thoughts.

By avoiding any heavy-handed proclamations about Wong’s mental state, Li allows him to be complex and not entirely knowable. Wong himself even welcomed that ambiguity with paintings like Tracks in the Blue Forest (2018), in which footsteps in snow trail off into the distance before disappearing altogether. Where is their maker, and what has happened to that person? The image leaves all that a mystery without a solution.

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It’s here, in the early 2000s, where, “The Culture: Hip Hop and Contemporary Art in the 21st Century,” a comprehensive new exhibition at the Baltimore Museum of Art, examines the hip-hop canon, going beyond the music to look at how this global billion-dollar genre has indelibly transformed contemporary art, culture, technology, fashion, and daily life. Yet, Black American women’s lyrical, cultural, sartorial, and aesthetic innovations in hip-hop, from MC Lyte to Missy Elliott to Megan Thee Stallion, are the blueprint.

An institutional collaboration between the BMA and the Saint Louis Art Museum, organized by four women co-curators—Asma Naeem, Gamynne Guillotte, Hannah Klemm, and Andréa Purnell—“The Culture” immerses viewers into the world of hip-hop with close to a hundred works spanning painting, drawing, photography, sculpture, video, and installations. Divided into six sections (Language, Brand, Adornment, Tribute, Ascension, and Pose), the resulting show is an expansive and multi-sensory experience. A hypnotizing soundscape created by Baltimore-based musicians Abdu Ali and Wendel Patrick sonically welcomes visitors, featuring rap royalty like Public Enemy and Ms. Lauryn Hill.

“The Culture” venerates the hip-hop zeitgeist of the past 50 years, and how the genre shattered white establishment cultural norms. “For many visual artists, hip-hop has enabled a radical interrogation of such previously stable and homogeneously white aspects of art history and culture as strategies of representation, genius, and who is the beholder,” Naeem, the BMA’s recently appointed director, told ARTnews.

Nearly 90 artists are included in the exhibition, but it’s acclaimed Black women artists including Carrie Mae Weems, Tschabalala Self, Lauren Halsey, Jordan Casteel, and Nina Chanel Abney, who exalt Black femininity, beauty rituals, style, sexuality, and of course, queendom, in their works, and provide the exhibition’s most Black feminist moments.

Both Self and Weems depict Black girlhood and womanhood within a hip-hop context. Self’s captivating, collaged painting Setta’s Room 1996 (2022) features a Black teen girl (inspired by the artist’s sister Princetta) in a hyper-feminine polka dot outfit, holding a landline phone receiver with fancy yellow nails. A poster of Lil’ Kim’s explosive 1996 debut album Hard Core hangs on a pink wall. Self, who investigates the Black female figure and its complicated meanings in society, illustrates the over-sexualized tropes Black women face, and its expectation on Black girls’ innocence.

In the Adornment section, Weems crowns Mary J. Blige, The Queen of Hip-Hop Soul, in Anointed (2017), where Blige seems both victorious and vulnerable. Originally the photograph appeared in a collaboration between the two icons for W magazine’s Art issue six years ago, recreating Weems’s “The Kitchen Table Series”and “Slow Fade to Black” series. Weems places Blige, seen in profile as she is being crowned against a deep red tint, in the pantheon of Black women icons alongside Eartha Kitt and Nina Simone. The red pigment signifies power, but also blood, in a way, as Blige has, in a way, shed blood and candidly sung about grown woman heartbreak, divorce, and empowerment in her music.

Similarly, in the Tribute section, Blige’s albums My Life and Share My World (in CD form) along with other hip-hop artifacts are consecrated in Texas Isaiah’s altar-like installation Untitled (2023), and his collaborative portrait, Pelada: Chapter II (2021), with Black Latina trans rapper Ms. Boogie, who offers an intimate gaze, reaffirms and makes space for Black trans folks who also contribute to hip-hop.

The Adornment section continues with Halsey’s sculptural piece auntie fawn on tha 6 (2021), featuring rows of rainbow-hued bundles of synthetic hair. Halsey draws upon the intimate relationship between Black women and our hair, and beauty supply stores as a communal Black women’s space (despite frequent surveillance and hostility from East Asian business owners). Lil’ Kim famously started the bright wig trend in the mid ’90s, revisited by Nicki Minaj, Cardi B, and other rap girls in the 2010s. Dionne Alexander, the inventive hairstylist behind Lil’ Kim’s custom wigs from that era, has recreated a few technicolor wigs for the exhibit, which featured stenciled luxury brand logos.

Including Alexander’s visionary hairstyling in “The Culture” is imperative because glam squads (mainly Black creatives and primarily Black women) were foundational to the image-making of Lil’ Kim, Foxy Brown, Eve, and other rap queens, as the internet exploded in the early 2000s. Lil’ Kim’s make-up artist, NZINGHA, created Lil’ Kim’s vibrant makeup looks and introduced her famous client to surrealist photographer David LaChapelle, whose images of Lil’ Kim would later be used for the album art for The Notorious K.I.M. and a 1999 Interview magazine cover of a nude Lil’ Kim covered in Louis Vuitton logos.

Black women fashion designers and stylists were the architects behind legendary looks worn by hip-hop queens in the ’90s and 2000s that now appear on brands’ mood boards and Pinterest pages decades later. Revered stylist June Ambrose innovated Missy Elliott’s (very Afro-Futurist) black vinyl balloon suit for her very first music video “The Rain.” Misa Hylton, a renowned stylist and fashion designer who has collaborated heavily with Lil’ Kim, Blige, and countless greats, designed Lil’ Kim’s lavender jumpsuit pasty moment that she wore to the 1999 MTV VMAs.

“They call it hip-hop fashion but for me it’s always been my fashion and what I love and what I gravitate to and what I celebrate,” Hylton said in an interview in the exhibition’s extensive catalogue, which includes contributions from over 50 other creatives, artists, and scholars who interpreted the universe of hip-hop.

Kimora Lee Simmons founded Baby Phat in 1999, an essential 2000s womenswear brand that mixed sex, streetwear, and sophistication. In the Adornment section, a white cotton Baby Phat tracksuit (ca. 2000) is displayed alongside tracksuits by Wales Bonner, Willy Chavarria, Telfar, and Dapper Dan for Gucci. It’s important to note that as the hip-hop economy grew exponentially in the late ’90s, Black women magazine editors including Danyel Smith (at Vibe) and Kierna Mayo and Joicelyn Dingle (at Honey) editorialized Black women rappers and their cultural impact.

Several Baltimorean (born or based) Black women and Black LGBTQ+ artists bring regional authenticity to “The Culture” and reveal what hip-hop personally means to them. In the Language section, Baltimore-born artist Shinique Smith’s textile sculpture, Shortysugarhoneybabydon’tbedistracted (2002), features abstract gestures in acrylic on vinyl, a nostalgic ode to her graffiti-writing days as a youth in Baltimore during the ’80s and ’90s. (Smith is also working on a BMA-commissioned public mural at Lexington Market for local engagement that will extend the show’s life beyond its closing this month.)

In the Pose section, Baltimorean non-binary artist Amani Lewis captures the pulse of West Baltimore rapper Butch Dawson’s live performance in a mixed-media portrait titled Swamp Boy (2019), named after the rapper’s 2018 debut EP. Lewis connects with elements of Baltimore’s underground rap scene, and their canvas almost throbs from the raw energy of the crowd depicted.

Baltimore-based artists Murjoni Merriweather and Megan Lewis give Black women their flowers in their stunning works. Merriweather deifies Black American girl aesthetics—braids and gold bamboo hoops—in her 2022 ceramic sculpture Z E L L A, which is completely covered in synthetic hair hand-braided by artist.

Regarding her contribution to the show, Fresh Squeezed Lemonade (2022), Lewis stated in an interview, “Black women continuously turn lemons into lemonade.” In the oil-and-acrylic painting, a young Black woman in a ’90s updo, fresh nails, and heavy gold jewelry, with lemons serving as the backdrop, represents Black American girl-invented beauty and cultural trends, and an incessantly appropriated template in mainstream pop culture. Monica Ikegwu’s oil-on-canvas diptych Open/Closed (2021) shows the Baltimore-born artist in a monochromatic brick red look in expressive moods. Ikegwu often paints contemporary Black youth grounded in realism, and in a range of emotions with saturated color compositions.

Hip-hop is infinite, it shapeshifts, and continues to be defined by Black women, especially as next-gen rap girls, like Doja Cat, Coi Leray, Rico Nasty, Glorilla, Flo Milli, and Lola Brooke, are leading us into another golden age of women in hip-hop. An electrifying representation of this new era of rap girl reign comes in the form of Caitlin Cherry’s oil painting, Bruja Cybernetica (2022), which depicts the City Girls, Bia, and even avatars from The Sims 4.

Black women entertainers are in a constant state of performance to the world, even offstage, and under intense social media scrutiny, and in Cherry’s own words, “I consider how the history of painting has simultaneously neglected and warped images of Black femmes and how technology can stand to do the same or redeem or liberate our self-image.”

Out of the 90 artists in “The Culture,” fewer than a third are Black women artists, which is a head-scratcher given the greater amount of Black women artists working today and visible online. What is highly evident in “The Culture” is the close and intimate relationship Black women visual artists have with Black women artists in hip-hop, from Weems’ coronation of Blige to Self’s teen adoration of Lil’ Kim, as well as Halsey’s, Merriweather’s, and Lewis’ playful yet sanctified interpretations of fashion and beauty staples originated by Black American women in hip-hop. Black women artists in “The Culture” have clearly forged a love letter to Black women in hip-hop, revering them as the blueprint. 

“The Culture” is on view through July 16, 2023 at the Baltimore Museum of Art and will travel to the Saint Louis Museum of Art (SLAM) from August 19, 2023 to January 1, 2024; the Schirn Kunstalle Frankfurt in Germany (February 22–May 26, 2024); the Cincinnati Art Museum in Ohio (June 28–September 29, 2024); and the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto (fall 2024).

In a press conference just before the VIP opening of the fair, Magnus Renfrew described this moment as “the beginning of a new chapter for the art scene in Japan,” and he reiterated previous talking points that the inaugural edition of the fair is “the first step on a longer journey,” adding that the group’s “aspiration is that over the coming years we can really build this into a fair of global importance. It’s really time now for the Japanese art scene to step into the spotlight.”

Similarly, Katsunori Takahashi, the head of the private banking division for SMBC, the fair’s lead sponsor, said that though modern and contemporary art has, in recent years, become popular in Japan like elsewhere around the world, Japanese financial institutions “have only been making limited contributions” to the art scene when compared to their counterparts in North America and Europe. With SMBC as principal sponsor, “I think it is a very small step that I would like to make into a very big opportunity … to make further contributions” to Japan’s art market.

Below, a look at the best booths at the 2023 edition of Tokyo Gendai, which runs until Sunday, July 9.  

Occupying MAAM’s expansive central space is the sculptural sound installation 40 Part Part (2022), which was originally commissioned by the Front Triennial in Ohio and the New York Philharmonic. Comprised of 40 identical speakers on wood stands that form a circle, 40 Part Part invites visitors into the circle’s interior where a wooden plinth with three different acoustic connections—an aux cord, lightning connector, and Bluetooth—stands. Anyone can hook up their devices (as many as three at a time) and play any sound file they have—voice notes, recordings, videos, music. The work is generous, accommodating, patient. It waits in silence for us to connect.

During my visit to the exhibition, I plugged in my phone and played Diana Ross’s “Love Hangover.” Another visitor played birdsong simultaneously via Bluetooth. The input audio merged and swirled around us, becoming architectural as it emanated from 40 speakers. 40 Part Part does not simply play back the track; Clayton has written an algorithm that transforms the sound into an uncanny remix. Through his custom software, the audio is warped and repeated. Notes can be duplicated, isolated, their durations abbreviated or extended. The algorithm also picks up on sub-modulations, frequencies underneath the ones we usually hear, excavating the spaces between these sounds. Activating the installation is a joyfully disorienting experience, encouraging us to renegotiate our relationship with our sensorial environment.

For over an hour, I watched visitors interacting with the artwork, with emotions ranging from wonder to discomfort. Most people were gleefully surprised to perceive familiar sounds in new and unexpected ways, but some seemed almost embarrassed when their audio choices would virtually glitch out over the speakers. There is vulnerability in the act of selecting sounds for all to hear. From phone messages and home recordings to popular songs I knew and obscure instrumentals I didn’t, 40 Part Part serves as an adaptable auditory self-portrait perpetually in the making. It is open for us to project pieces of ourselves—crystallizing something fundamental about our existence in this moment, and how we define it.

We often collaborate with technologies we don’t control. They tell us which movies to watch, which routes to take, which shoes to buy. Algorithms are omnipresent in our lives, and “[t]hey’re already making life-changing choices on our behalf at every turn,” as mathematician Hannah Fry writes in her award-winning book Hello World: How to be Human in the Age of the Machine (2019). Silent and invisible, they go largely unquestioned and unnoticed, but in 40 Part Part, the algorithm refuses obscurity. It’s confrontational, rebellious even. By making itself known through the ruptures it generates, Clayton’s algorithm re-sensitizes us to sound, as well as the memories and associations we tacitly ascribe to it.

Maybe, for some, this is where the discomfort emerges: when something you thought you knew becomes unfamiliar to you, its complexities and nuances reveal themselves. Memories may seem fixed, but they prove themselves to be malleable and unreliable. When technology defies our expectations of how it should work, we are reminded that the systems we rely on can unravel at any time.

But this is also where we can build new worlds. Dynamic, multisensorial world-making is heightened in Ceremony of the Steps (2023), a series of live performances commissioned by the museum in which Clayton explores how to come together and amplify our voices in celebration and protest. For each unique performance, Clayton collaborates with local choirs, selecting two songs from their repertoire, and composing a third in conversation with them.

For the inaugural iteration, presented in March with the Northeastern University Madrigal Singers, the audience gathered inside 40 Part Part’s circle, while the choir stood at one side and Clayton stood before the plinth with his equipment. Surrounded by 12 microphones, the choir began to sing, their voices like a tidal force that suddenly submerged the space. Then, toward the end of the third song, there was a shift. A nearly imperceptible whisper started to emanate from the speakers, at first nothing more than gentle friction against the vocal diminuendo. The concert transitioned from human to machine. As the choir dispersed around the circle’s perimeter, Clayton was live-sculpting sound in real time, molding its fluid waveforms and syncopated tonalities into a continuum of deep listening.  In this space of experimentation, he unlocked dimensions that had always been there, but were somehow not available to us before. We were listening to what we had previously heard, but also what the software interpreted. Guided by Clayton’s dexterous hands, the performance gestured toward other, nonhuman forms of knowing—different kinds of improvisation and exchange.

Ceremony of the Steps seemed to invoke a meditation of acclaimed composer and artist Pauline Oliveros: “As you listen, the particles of sound—phonons—decide to be heard. Listening affects what is sounding. The relationship is symbiotic. As you listen, the environment is enlivened.” Allowing the trajectories and tendencies of this sensitive technology to creatively unfold, Clayton conjures the power of sound as a portal to new subjectivities, where past, present, and future converge.

This is the first time the National Portrait Gallery has undergone a top-to-bottom refurbishment since it moved to its current location in 1896. Overseen by both Jamie Fobert Architects (the firm behind Pace Gallery’s Hanover Square space and Tate St Ives) and Purcell Architects (Tai Kwun Centre in Hong Kong, Durham Cathedral, and Manchester Museum), the redevelopment project, which lasted three years and cost £41.3 million (about $53 million) foregrounded the restoration of various secret turns and corners in this Grade I–listed building, including the previously hidden terrazzo on the ground floor of the east wing.Many openings have been pierced to bring in natural light and connect the National Portrait Gallery to its time and its city. With a new rooftop restaurant, this remodel has increased the institution’s public space by about 20 percent.

The NPG’s transformation, of course, would not have been complete without a major rehang. The exhibition galleries have also been redesigned—this time by Nissen Richards Studio, whose credits include the exhibition spaces for the Courtauld Gallery and Sheep Field Barn Gallery—in close collaboration with the NPG’s curatorial team. The NPG holds the largest collection of portraits in the world, with over 1,100 works, spanning from the Middle Ages to today. Though the works on view have increased by about a third, the display remains in great part chronological, and visitors are advised to start on the fourth floor (third in the British system) and work their way down.

Even if this is the recommended approach, meandering through the museum’s multiple galleries is also a solid choice; the institution’s greatest hits will catch the wanderer’s attention anyway. The iconic portrait of William Shakespeare (ca. 1600–10), attributed to John Taylor and the Gallery’s very first acquisition in 1856, is a case in point. It does not hang in the middle of a room or on a wall painted a different color, and it would be easy to miss if there weren’t still magnetic more than 400 years after its creation.

Just past the ticket office, located in the newly uncovered Victorian terrazzo, is a gallery dedicated to “History Makers Now,” a presentation of new additions to the National Portrait Gallery’s collection. Among them is a Michael Armitage tapestry commissioned by the South Bank Centre as part of the “Everyday Heroes” project to celebrate “key workers, the unsung heroes of the COVID-19 pandemic” and Jann Haworth and Liberty Blake’s gigantic group portrait of influential British women, including novelist Virginia Woolf, comedian Dawn French, fashion model Kate Moss, Oscar-winning actor Olivia Colman, and cellist Jacqueline du Pré, that was commissioned by the NGP’s trustees, with the support of the Chanel Culture Fund.

With works like these or Colin Davidson’s introspective portrait of musician Ed Sheeran or Jamie Coreth’s official joint portrait of the new Prince and Princess of Wales, this new section provides an engaging way to connect with the collection by updating it with portraits that today’s visitors will likely be more familiar with.   

Throughout the reconfigured NPG, visitors will come across a new display that subtly points to the changes made to the institution over the past three years. In the lobby is a grouping of busts and studies for life-size sculptures, including Nelson Mandela, poet Felicia Dorothea Hemans, and Thomas J. Price’s bronze sculpture of a fictional Black woman scrolling on a smartphone, titled Reaching Out (2021). The work is on loan courtesy the artist’s gallery Hauser & Wirth, a way to fill in holes in the museum’s permanent collection and a harbinger of other loans to be found across the institution’s four floors, including Lady Margaret Beaufort, the only known full-length portrait of the countess, dating to the second half of the 15th century, which opens the Tudors section and is on loan from Cambridge’s St John’s College, or Ada Lovelace (1836) by Margaret Sarah Carpenter, lent by the Government Art Collection.

But the National Portrait Gallery has also made its own efforts to fill in those gaps. In the rehang, about 48 percent of the portraits in the 20th- and the 21st-century galleries are by women (up from 35 percent three years ago). Acquisitions since 2020 of works like Evelyn Nicodemus’ 1982 self-portrait, the first painted by a Black female artist to enter the collection, or a ca. 1820 self-portrait miniature by Sarah Biffin, a painter born without arms or legs who taught herself to sew, write, and paint using her mouth, are evidence of this. 

“We wanted to shed a different light on our collection, be more inclusive to expand our audiences,” said Catharine MacLeod, the gallery’s curator of 17th-century art.

The juxtaposition of 18th century works with contemporary ones foreshadows the cross-period commingling seen throughout this new display. The room devoted to silhouettes, an inexpensive way of having one’s portrait taken before the rise of photography, is one such illustration. Tracing the constant reinvention of this art form, beginning in 1770 and lasting to today, this section brings together etchings, paintings, papercuts, and photographs from different times, as well as an assemblage of taxidermy animals by Tim Noble and Sue Webster. When lit accordingly, the installation projects a shadow of fashion stylist Isabella Blow onto the wall. The overall effect is quite spectacular.

Another major change is that works on paper were not typically on view before the remodel. In the rehang, they have been instrumental in giving a fuller picture of the works in its collection, as does the updated explanatory information, with new audiovisual content, like videos explaining the labor-intensive process of making a miniature Tudor panel painting or touchscreens that allow you to identify each of the sitters in Sir George Hayter’s The House of Commons (1833), including the artist in the foreground.  

Overall, with luminous displays and spacious hangs, the new National Portrait Gallery has struck the right balance between chronological and thematic groupings of works. It is a pleasure experience that feels updated for a 2023 audience.  

The book’s protagonist, Stéphane Breitwieser, was hooked on visiting regional museums in his native France and in Switzerland. His souvenirs weren’t trinkets from the gift shop but artworks themselves, plucked from Plexiglas cases, walls, and curated displays. His loot ranged from a centuries-old tapestry to a Jan Brueghel the Elder painting; he stole most of it in plain sight.

One of his many heists took place in 1996, when, with his girlfriend Anne-Catherine Kleinklaus, he visited the Alexis Forel Museum in Morges, Switzerland, where he stole a 300-year-old platter by Charles-François Hannong. Breitwieser was deft at undoing the gadgetry of display cases. Using a Swiss Army Knife, he reached what Finkel calls his “screw apotheosis,” undoing 30 of them.

Finkel describes this theft and countless others in present tense. You are there, experiencing the thrill of the chase alongside Breitwieser. “Twenty-six, twenty-seven, twenty-eight, twenty-nine. And, mercy, thirty,” Finkel writes of the screws. One can almost hear the case popping open, so vivid is the description. Much of The Art Thief unfolds in this way.

Not many pages later, again with Anne-Catherine, Breitwieser is described visiting the Museum of Fine Arts in Angers the year after. He came across the copper painting attributed to Brueghel, Allegory of Autumn, in which a muscular man plucks fruit from a tree while buxom women and a child surround him, and decided he had to have it.

“Anne-Catherine positions herself at the stairwell,” Finkel writes, adhering to Breitwieser’s preferred “blend of one last name and one first” for himself and Kleinklauss. “She’ll cough if the guard takes his eyes off the cashier. Breitwieser climbs a chair, gloves on, and retrieves the work. He slides the frame under a display, and Anne-Catherine returns to wipe down the chair with her handkerchief, eliminating shoe prints too.” As they left, they bid goodbye to guard and a cashier sharing a kiss.

Spoiler alert: Breitwieser did eventually get caught for theft of these and 200-plus other art objects, and then he got caught again and again for other thefts afterward.

After serving two prison sentences (one for the thefts of the ’90s, the other for ones committed in the mid-2000s following his initial discharge), Breitwieser returned to his passion upon his second release. Between 2015 and 2016, he stole Roman coins from an archaeological museum in Strasbourg and paperweights from another nearby institution, and then traveled to Germany, where the plundering continued. “None of these,” Finkel reports, “are pieces he loves.” He was arrested once more in 2019.

How do we get from clandestine thief to sad-sack stealer? The Art Thief charts Breitwieser’s rise and fall in an attempt to account for his obsession. It’s mostly rise, very little fall, which is probably by design, since Finkel seems enamored of Breitwieser.

“I never found any art thieves who really compare to Breitwieser and Anne-Catherine,” Finkel writes of his research in the afterword, the only section penned in the past tense. “Nearly everybody else did it for money, or stole a single work of art. The couple is an anomaly among art stealers, but there does exist a group of criminals for whom long-term looting in service of aesthetic desire is common.”

Finkel locates the source of Breitwieser’s aesthetic desire in a childhood trip to the very Strasbourg museum from which he pilfered the Roman coins. “His finger snagged on a loose bit of metal attached to a Roman coffin,” Finkel says. “A coin-sized piece of lead broke off in his palm. He stuffed it reflexively into his pocket.”

This sounds like an awful tidy bit of myth-making, especially since it’s not easily verified, but Finkel presents it as truth. Even if it is apocryphal, that the narrative was put forward at all by Breitwieser is telling.

Breitwieser’s magnetism lay in his ability to make people believe he was a normal person doing sensible things—that he was just an average unemployed joe with a fondness for museums. This was a ruse. He reportedly even corrected a curator on the date of a 17th-century sword that he stole during one of his trials; he said he knew this because he’d read up on similar weapons in the library of the Kunstmuseum Basel.

At the very least, Breitwieser had a discerning eye. A typical person may not march into Sotheby’s and decide she must have a small Lucas Cranach the Younger painting. Yet Breitwieser did just this and, to mark his 24th birthday, managed to pick up a Plexiglas dome that held this work, sandwich the small painting between the pages of a catalogue, and secret it out of the auction house during public viewing hours. That painting wound up in the attic of Breitwieser’s mother’s house, where he slept amid all the other works he stole.

The jig was up on November 20, 2001, when, at the Wagner Museum in Lucerne, Switzerland, Breitwieser stowed a 400-year-old bugle beneath his Hugo Boss trench coat. He was arrested, instrument still in tow. It wasn’t the first time the Swiss police had detained him in connection with an art heist, but the last time, he got away with it. This time, he wasn’t so lucky. He was ultimately sentenced to three years in prison.

Finkel seems to believe Breitwieser every step of the way, even when a healthy bit of skepticism is needed. He doesn’t appear to feel quite the same way about Anne-Catherine, who has alleged that Breitwieser abused her, both emotionally and physically, and that he “tormented” her into aiding in his thefts. Finkel does recount one time that Breitwieser hit Anne-Catherine, but by the time she is on the stand, claiming in 2004 that she “didn’t even know he stole art,” Finkel remarks that “Anne-Catherine had stretched the truth, seemingly past snapping, by issuing blanket denials.”

Facts are elusive in The Art Thief, and not only in the places you’d expect. This romanticized account of Breitwieser’s thefts glides over particulars such as the value of the works stolen. Authorities have claimed that Breitwieser obtained well over $1 billion in art, a figure that mysteriously balloons to $2 billion at points in The Art Thief. This is tough to believe because Finkel generally doesn’t provide valuations for individual works. If only Finkel lavished as much attention on these specifics as he did on the screws that bound the cases for each work Breitwieser accessed.

There are also more basic errors, like one in which Finkel states that Pablo Picasso was detained by the French police in connection with the 1911 theft of the Mona Lisa. Actually, it was the poet Guillaume Apollinaire who was detained and later cleared. That Finkel was reportedly fired from the New York Times in 2002 for creating a composite profile subject out of multiple interviews doesn’t help his credibility.

But The Art Thief is really meant more as tasteful pulp than it is as deeply researched non-fiction. At just over 200 pages, it does succeed as a refined beach read that even will engender some of the same questions that good mysteries do.

Why, for example, did Breitwieser do it? It’s true that unlike most art thieves, Breitwieser made few attempts to sell the artworks, which he mostly saved for himself. It’s also true that he did little damage as he took them, except to the works themselves. Some were tossed out windows by Breitwieser, others may have been later destroyed by Breitwieser’s mother, who also received prison time. A number were never recovered.

Because Breitwieser isn’t like most other art thieves, he presents an interesting case. Across the years, analysts have been called in to psychologize both him and Anne-Catherine. (Finkel fails to mention that she did end up receiving a six-month prison sentence for handling stolen goods, instead reporting that she spent “exactly one night in jail” and that the conviction was expunged, “as if nothing had happened during her decade with Breitwieser.”) Breitwieser was determined by one to be “impulsive”; Anne-Catherine lacked “the strength to say no,” according to another. Yet Breitwieser, as one psychotherapist suggests, can’t really be helped because “there’s no criminal psychosis to treat or to cure.”

Whatever the case may be, Breitwieser did make some attempts to absolve himself for the sins he wrought upon museums across France, Germany, and Switzerland. He apologized to curators at trial, and in the book’s final pages, left with little money to his name, he seems to finally express some remorse. “I was a master of the universe,” Breitwieser remarks toward the book’s end. “Now I’m nothing.”

As you may have heard, galleries won’t stop opening in Los Angeles. Fueled by the boom in e-commerce that erupted during lockdown, the commercial art world is now in its Manifest Destiny era, marked by a mantra of endless expansion and countless galleries launching first, second, and third locations in LA. But I have to say, the mood is very fast fashion, with a seemingly endless supply of poor-quality paintings that read better online than they do in real life. This is the art market’s equivalent to shopping at Shein: Everything feels disposable.

Time, however, is an excellent filter. Lately the artists I’ve found worth talking about are all either passed or decades into their career; their works have both outlived the fleeting momentum of novelty and hype and predate the speculative asset market around contemporary art by emerging artists. Before we start, I’d like to share painter Claire Tabouret’s secret to longevity, a piece of advice for other artists she told me on a recent studio visit: “You have to keep an extremely high standard for yourself because the art world won’t have high standards; it’s just this big monster that wants more paintings.” Eventually, however, in the absence of quality, “They get bored and move on.”

Rather than kicking things off with a blockbuster, the museum is counting on its treasure-filled holdings to lure visitors. Those holdings are rich in modern and postwar art, and have now been filled in with contemporary jewels too. The permanent collection accounts for almost all the 400-plus works currently on view at the museum, which has doubled in size, thanks to a new building for art of the past seven or so decades.

The AKG has almost always exhibited a select few works from its holdings, among them Pablo Picasso’s La Toilette (1906), a painting featuring a nude woman before a mirror held by a clothed servant. (The museum’s board ejected its first director, A. Conger Goodyear, for acquiring the work in 1926; Goodyear went on to help found the Museum of Modern Art a few years later.) But, for the most part, while special exhibitions went on display, the AKG’s masterpieces languished in storage, despite a number of them occupying outsize art-historical importance.

Now, it is the opposite. Joan Mitchell’s George Went Swimming at Barnes Hole, but It Got Too Cold (1956), a gem of Abstract Expressionism that she described painting in a famed Irving Sandler essay, rubs shoulders with key works by Jackson Pollock and the like. A splendid Frida Kahlo self-portrait is here too, as are well-known pieces by Paul Gauguin, Giacomo Balla, and Georges Seurat. A whole floor of the museum’s expansion is devoted to all 33 Clyfford Still paintings in the collection, many of which look better than ever here.

OMA partner Shohei Shigematsu was put in charge of the project, the latest in a series of architectural developments across the AKG’s 161-year history. The museum retains its Neoclassical facade from 1905, courtesy Edward Broadhead Green, and its modernist addition from the ’60s, courtesy Gordon Bunshaft. The 1905 building has been given new life. Its original staircase out front, removed during the Bunshaft project, is now back—a gesture that renews the building’s majesty—and the galleries have been given fresh wood floors.

To all this, Shigematsu has also added another three-story structure, bringing the total exhibition space to 50,000 square feet—the same area on offer at the Whitney Museum in New York. This new building is glassy and boxy, a sharp clash with the Green building that’s fascinating to admire from the outside. But, as of press time, it was far from finished on the inside.

The Shigematsu structure, formally named the Jeffrey E. Gundlach Building after a local collector and donor, was still under construction when it was revealed to the press last week. In remarks to journalists, AKG director Janne Sirén claimed the building was 90 percent done, but the true number seemed far less than that.

A gorgeous, spiraling staircase that hugs the building’s exterior before closing in on a central column was peopled mainly by workers who were busily adding rails. A gallery devoted to Nordic art—the first of its kind in a North American museum, according to AKG leaders—held no art to speak of. A Lap-See Lam moving-image work debuting in a black-box space set aside for media art didn’t make it on view either. Dust covered many surfaces outside the galleries, the bathrooms weren’t open, and seating hadn’t been installed.

The good news is that the Lam work is expected to open in mid-July, along with the rest of the 30,000-square-foot Gundlach Building, which will welcome the public briefly this month before closing again until its official inauguration. The bad news is that the delay has caused some unwanted interruptions within the galleries.

There is now, for example, a sleek bridge winding around some trees that connects the Gundlach Building to the main building. But journalists weren’t allowed to walk across it, and in an otherwise elegant gallery filled with standout works by postwar giants, there was a wooden protrusion that closed off one side of the bridge. A sign promised that the overpass was coming soon.

It’s difficult, then, to fully assess Shigematsu’s Gundlach Building in its current, still incomplete state. What can be said, however, is that its galleries, which appear to be mostly done, look great. They’re big, airy, and luminous, the kind of grand spaces that make abstractions like the Still paintings pop. They’re flattering too, for less sizable works.

The Shigematsu structure’s glass exterior finds its parallel inside the main building, where there’s now a permanent Olafur Eliasson and Sebastian Behmann installation called Common Sky. The work features a flurry of mirrored triangles that form a canopy. They’re assembled in such a way that they appear to be getting sucked into, or to be emanating from, a hole in the floor—a neat allusion to the spot where a tree once stood in a courtyard from Bunshaft’s addition. Eliasson and Behmann’s gleaming triangles offer plenty for contemplators and selfie-takers alike.

So too, does a Lucas Samaras mirrored cube from the permanent collection that sits toward the entrance. You can enter it, perambulate around a glass table and chair, and see your image double and redouble. It’s in a dedicated space that charges no admission fees. A word to the wise: if the queues outside David Zwirner’s Yayoi Kusama show are a preview, expect lengthy lines to form for the Samaras piece upon the AKG’s reopening.

Inside the galleries, the first work viewers see is one of the first pieces that the AKG ever acquired: an 1859 Albert Bierstadt painting showing sailors manning boats on the choppy waters of Capri. Pre-modern art has long been a sore point for the AKG, which in 2007 faced a mass outcry for selling off its valuable Renaissance art. Much of the hang is still modern and contemporary art, but a good deal of space is given to art from the 18th and 19th centuries too, suggesting that in its newest iteration, the AKG is trying harder to strike the right balance with its collection. For the most part, it succeeds.

There’s much to admire by William Hogarth, Jacques-Louis David, Honoré Daumier, and many other 18th- and 19th century artists of note. I’ll admit I’m partial to an ominous Gustave Courbet, Le Source de la Loue (ca. 1864), that depicts a gaping black hole opening onto the sea, the surf rendered in thick white paint applied with a palette knife. But it’s also worth lingering over some lesser-known oddities from the era, like the bizarre Jehan Georges Vibert painting The Marvelous Sauce (ca. 1890), a send-up of the Catholic Church’s corruption set entirely in a kitchen.

This is a conservative hang, in that it follows the commonly understood art-historical progression of European avant-gardes: Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, Cubism, Suprematism, Surrealism, and so on, with a few offshoots in between. That lineage is what museums like MoMA were built on, but the AKG curators wisely don’t make too much of it. There’s no wall text elucidating the -isms and few explanatory captions about most works altogether. If you know, you know. If you don’t, there’s still plenty to enjoy.

Curatorially, this hang is not hugely revisionary, although if you look carefully, there are some small tweaks—a mention, for example, that Gauguin was “a much older white man in a position to take advantage of his subject” in a painting of a nude Tahitian 13-year-old girl. The more obvious change is the welcome inclusion of women artists from the modern and postwar eras.

Alongside an experiment in abstraction by Francis Picabia, there’s a Sonia Delaunay work, made in collaboration with the poet Blaise Cendrars, that features a long, folded piece of paper, one side of it lined with curlicuing shapes. Magda Cordell McHale, a Hungarian-born artist associated with the British Pop movement, is here represented by a discomfiting painting of a red-brown form recalling a bloodied carcass; her painting neatly recalls a Chaim Soutine painting showing a cut of beef that’s also on view here.

Verena Loewensberg, a Swedish painter new to me, outshines all the other male Op artists on view with a white canvas accompanied by sharply colored frames that intersect, causing the work to appear to twist before your eyes. Marisol—the AKG owns hundreds of works by her, and is now readying a retrospective—is literally placed at the center of the Pop gallery, where works by Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein seem to orbit around her sculpture of a stubby figure, along with a chair that mysteriously has a sculpted hand atop it.

Things get more interesting in the Gundlach Building, where the hang will change more frequently. It’s here that the museum has put its more recent acquisitions, including a standout painting by the Niagara Falls–based Jay Carrier, The Hand of the Devil Was Warm in the Night (1985), which features part of that text scrawled above a person in the skin of a fox. This image bewitches as it melts into abstraction, and it rhymes nicely with works by more well-known names from the era, like Martin Wong, Louise Bourgeois, and Felix Gonzalez-Torres. There are also world-class rarities here, like a Simone Forti hologram that shows the artist dancing across a warped plane.

The third floor, which is largely free of any walls at all, is where the AKG is showing off some of its shiniest new works, including a giant tire ensconced in chains by Arthur Jafa, and a Simone Leigh sculpture depicting an armless Black female figure whose skirt is formed from raffia. This is a telling of recent art history formed by artists who cross cultural borders, an effect driven home by Tiffany Chung’s reconstructing an exodus history: flight routes from camps and of ODP cases (2017), an embroidered map of the world in which lines of string connect the United States to Asia.

But it is the awe-inducing Still show on the first floor, curated by Cathleen Chaffee, that shows the Shigematsu building’s full promise. Across these 33 paintings, one can trace Still’s evolution from an able maker of chunky abstractions to a master of Abstract Expressionism. 1951-E, one of the works from his career’s apex, is a field of mustard yellow interrupted by a thin red slit, like an incision in jaundiced flesh. It occupies a full to wall to itself, a luxury Still paintings are rarely afforded.

The galleries here are cathedral-like, with tons of unobstructed floor from which to contemplate these gigantic paintings from afar. When sun pours in from the outside, these spaces live up to their promise of offering something akin to a spiritual experience. Few will regret making the pilgrimage.

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How to Altar the World: Amalia Mesa-Bains’s Art Shifts the Way We See Art History

Defiantly at Home: Latinx Artists in the Borderlands

Generations of artists, scholars, curators, and writers that have followed are forever indebted to women of color like Mesa-Bains, whose outstanding retrospective, “Archaeology of Memory,” on view until August 13 at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA), is the fruit of all her labors, no matter how delayed. It is not to be missed.

This is the 79-year-old artist’s first museum retrospective, and one of only a dozen or so solo exhibitions she’s ever had. It is the rare opportunity to see well-known works together, like the stunning Transparent Migrations (2001), which reflects on the perilous journeys of migrations that many in the Latinx community know all too well. An armoire made of mirrors sits in a field of shattered glass straddled by two sculptures of agave plants. Inside, the artist’s wedding mantilla hangs above an array of carefully placed objects.

That work finds its analog in a lesser-known piece by Mesa-Bains, Queen of the Waters, Mother of the Land of the Dead: Homenaje a Tonantzin/Guadalupe (1992), made of a three-tiered mirrored altar to the Virgen de Guadalupe that is flanked by six bejeweled clocks with an image of the Virgen on their faces. Above hangs a sky-blue cascade of fabric; affixed to the wall are dozens of crystal jewels; and on the floor is a pool of potpourri.  

Mesa-Bains’s artistic and scholarly practices center around holding space for those whom the mainstream would prefer to ignore. This dates all the way back to the late ’70s, when, as a PhD candidate in clinical psychology, she interviewed 10 Chicana artists of her generation about their lived experiences, what led them to art-making, and how their culture influenced the formation of their identities. In the ensuing decades, Mesa-Bains would continue this work, curating exhibitions of and penning essays on Chicanx and Latinx artists—often writing some of the earliest scholarship on these artists.

Her 1995 essay “Domesticana: The Sensibility of Chicana Rasquachismo” looked at Chicano art aesthetics from a women’s point of view. It broke new ground, honoring the generations of Mexican and Mexican American women who had made art in their homes, even when it was not seen as art proper. Read today, the essay foreshadows a remark Mesa-Bains, who won the MacArthur “genius” fellowship in 1992, makes in the BAMPFA catalogue: “The construction of space is ongoing as a social, spiritual, political, and economic practice.”

That is embodied in her installation-based altars, which are sometimes composed of hundreds of objects. Mesa-Bains began engaging altars around 1973, when she first made ofrendas for the Día de los Muertos celebrations at San Francisco’s Galeria de la Raza. Her endlessly innovative takes on the format are mesmerizing to experience in person.

Several of these early altar installations are no longer extant, as Mesa-Bains always envisioned them as ephemeral works. But the diagnosis of a major cardiopulmonary disease in 1991—her “come to Guadalupe” moment—made her reconsider this approach. Her iconic An Ofrenda for Dolores del Rio (1983/1991), which closes the show, has been presented as seven different iterations since its 1983 debut at the Mexican Museum in San Francisco for Día de los Muertos. One version never returned from a traveling exhibition in Europe, while the current version, now owned by the Smithsonian American Art Museum, was re-created for the seminal 1990 traveling exhibition “Chicano Art: Resistance and Affirmation (CARA).”  

With this evolution, that space that she had been holding for two decades now became lasting, a record of her artistic talent and by extension, of the community, la cultura. In making the ephemeral permanent, Mesa-Bains boldly cemented what she had long been saying: there is value and worth in this community—it has been there all along.

The BAMPFA show, curated by María Esther Fernández and Laura E. Pérez, opens with Mesa-Bains’s first intentionally permanent works, the first three chapters of her “Venus Envy” series, a pun on the Freudian theory that women suffer from “penis envy.” The series represents a significant departure from the true altar form into installations that reflect on the place of women in society—how they have been historically subjugated and the ways in which they have resisted that oppression.

Conceptualized during the 1990s, with the fourth and final chapter created in 2008, these works have never before been shown together until now. You could blame that on the fact that US museums generally refuse to showcase art about the Chicanx experience, but Mesa-Bains’s approach is also a reason. She never thought a retrospective would be possible because some of her works reuse the same objects (around 60 in total), a gesture that harkens back to the roots of the care involved in maintaining a home altar or creating an ofrenda for Día de los Muertos.

Instead of replicating objects for each of these works, BAMPFA has made the intriguing choice of parceling them out across the show. This is a way to breathe new and renewed life into the works, which can be seen as Mesa-Bains’s own Gesamtkunstwerk.

Similarly, given spatial concerns, several of the works have been adjusted for their presentation here. These installations now have room to breathe in BAMPFA’s spacious galleries, in part because of how Mesa-Bains demarcates space. Instead of opting to use stanchions or taped-down lines, she uses rose petals, lavender, and other floral debris in her installations to suggest how closely visitors can approach the works. She’s reorienting how visitors are allowed to interact with the art on view in a museum, and doing it in ways both alluring and pleasurable.

As you traverse the first half of the exhibition, you encounter various moments from throughout “Venus Envy” that serve as a journey through Mesa-Bains’s life. The first of these, Venus Envy Chapter I: First Holy Communion, Moments Before the End (1993/2022), reflects on the impact of the artist’s First Holy Communion. Recently acquired by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the work’s focal point is a white vanity table, its mirror spectrally superimposed with an image of the Aztec deity Coatlicue. Behind the vanity are swaths of draped white satin and in front stands an angled chair with a bouquet of white flowers resting atop. Photographs of family, figurines, beads, a miniature bottle of Patròn tequila, and much more adorn the vanity. Nearby are three vitrines, one holding her Communion dress, another a statue of a faceless Virgin Mary, and the third, dozens of photographs and other religious paraphernalia including a Virgen candle.

As the “Venus Envy” series progressed, Mesa-Bains expanded her focus, delving into expansive conversations concerning women’s experiences across the centuries. The second chapter is subtitled The Harem and Other Enclosures, and it includes the ever-powerful Library of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, which imagines the library and desk of the proto-feminist nun whose 1691 treatise Respuesta a Sor Filotea de la Cruz (Reply to Sister Filotea of the Cross) advocating for women’s right to education ultimately led to her silencing by the Catholic Church. This work is rich in protean imagination with a sundry of objects—globes, spices, a rosary, a Bible, hourglass, skull, candles, shells, and The Autopsy Chair, a gray armchair that the artist has cut into, painted red, and then sutured; Mesa-Bains has updated the work with statistics that range from Covid deaths for the Latinx population in 2022 to the prison population of Latino men relative to the white population.

Further along are the other sections of the chapter: come an all-green armoire titled The Virgin’s Garden and a version of The Harem, a large-scale print of an archival image of the work’s original installation at Williams College, to which she has installed mirrors with colored scarfs draped over them. Later comes Venus Envy Chapter IV: The Road to Paris and Its Aftermath, The Curandera’s Botanica (2008/2023), comprising a healer’s cabinet and a large metal table upon which dozens of objects are arranged. The final chapter was created after a near-fatal car accident in Paris that prevented Mesa-Bains from producing work for five years while she underwent multiple surgeries.

What struck me most was the pairing of two installations that hold space for women: Venus Envy Chapter III: Cihuatlampa, the Place of the Giant Women (1997) and Circle of Ancestors (1995). At the center of the first is Cihuateotl with Mirror, in which a woman-goddess figure covered in mounds of differently hued moss stares at a mirror onto which a Black Madonna image has been superimposed, its back baroquely decorated with shells and beads. Nearby hang the artist’s imaginings of couture fit for a goddess: larger-than-life heels, a copper-wire vestment, and an elaborate feather cloak.

In the Aztec afterlife, Cihuatlampa, which translates from Nahuatl to “toward the west,” is the place where women who died in childbirth, transformed into deities by their sacrifice, live. But Mesa-Bains is not an artist who would simply accept this patriarchal notion. Instead, as Mesa-Bains tells curator Lowery Stokes Sims in the catalogue, the work becomes “the story of women who could have been warriors in another time. Instead, they just got punished for being outspoken, for being loud, for laughing too much, for being too smart.”

In Circle of Ancestors, seven chairs face each other in a circle, each individually decorated for Sor Juana, artist Judith F. Baca, the Aztec goddess Coyolaxauhiqui, the artist’s grandmothers and mother, and the artist at the age of her First Holy Communion. You can only imagine what sharing of ancestral knowledge, wisdom, insights, and chisme would come from this gathering of strong, powerful, larger-than-life women. You can almost feel them in communion, holding space for each other.

What would Mesa-Bains have achieved, had she had the financial and institutional support to realize her most ambitious ideas? It’s hard to know, and it’s a question one could ask for many women artists of color. But, as the BAMPFA exhibition shows, her work doesn’t suffer from the limitations of her lived experience. It thrives, and a new generation is likely to take note because of this retrospective. When she turns 80 next month, we may just enter the Age of Amalia.

The shift owes something to feminists like Linda Nochlin, who, in a well-known 1971 ARTnews essay, asked if Picasso would have been called a genius if he were born a girl. But most people don’t know Nochlin. They know Hannah Gadsby, a comedian who took up Picasso in their 2018 Netflix special Nanette, going so far as to say he “just put a kaleidoscope filter” on his penis when he helped think up Cubism, a movement that prized a multiplicity of perspectives.

Gadsby is even more unsparing than that in the audio guide for their new Brooklyn Museum show, “It’s Pablo-matic: Picasso According to Hannah Gadsby,” which opens to the public on Friday.

Gadsby notes that Picasso was a “monumentally misogynistic and abusive domestic authoritarian dictator,” and that he “takes up too much space.” To further underscore the point, perhaps in homage to Hughes, Gadsby lends Picasso the nickname “PP.” You can do the work figuring out that very unsubtle pun.

“Picasso is not my muse of choice,” Gadsby later says of organizing the show. “I regret this.” They should.

Organized with Brooklyn Museum curators Catherine Morris and Lisa Small, “It’s Pablo-matic” aspires toward a new kind of Picasso scholarship that better accounts for his misogyny, his bad behavior, and his colonialist impulses. Gadsby and the curators intend to accomplish this by weaving in more recent works by pillars of feminist art, a noble gesture meant to “unearth and champion voices and perspectives that are missing from our collective understanding of ourselves,” per Gadsby.

The show’s problem—Pablo-m, if you will—is not its revisionary mindset, which justly sets it apart from all the other celebratory Picasso shows being staged this year to mark the 50th anniversary of his death. That is the appropriate lens for discussing much of Picasso’s oeuvre in 2023. It is, instead, the show’s disregard for art history, the discipline that Gadsby studied, practiced, and abandoned after becoming frustrated with its patriarchal roots.

The Pablo-ms begin before you even enter the first gallery. Above the show’s loud red signage on the museum’s ground floor, there’s a 26-foot-long painting by Cecily Brown, Triumph of the Vanities II (2018), featuring an orgy of brushy forms set against a fiery background. The painting looks back to the bacchanalia of Rococo painting and the intensity of Eugène Delacroix’s hues. It has little to say about Picasso, an artist whom Brown has spoken of admiringly.

Inside the show, there’s Jo Baker’s Birthday (1995), a Faith Ringgold print featuring a reclining Josephine Baker beside a bowl of ripe peaches. This is a direct allusion to paintings by Henri Matisse like Odalisque couchée aux magnolias (1923), not to Picasso. (A better Ringgold selection would’ve been her 1991 quilt Picasso’s Studio, which takes on the artist more directly.) Likewise, there’s Nina Chanel Abney’s Forbidden Fruit (2009), in which a group of picnickers are seated around and atop watermelons. It’s a composition that specifically recalls Édouard Manet’s Déjeuner sur l’herbe (1862–63), not any particular Picasso painting.

There’s no question that Ringgold and Abney are highlighting the limits of modernism—they replace white figures with Black ones, whom they suture into European images. But this exhibition is not about the modernist canon as a whole, which is itself an extension of a male-dominated Western art history that spans centuries. It’s specifically about one man, per the show’s title: Picasso, whom “It’s Pablo-matic” flatly offers as the only modernist worth critiquing. He isn’t.

Ironically, one of the few Picasso-focused works comes courtesy of Gadsby themselves. It’s a ca. 1995 copy of Picasso’s Large Bather with a Book (1937), depicting a blocky, boulder-like figure crumpled over an open volume. Gadsby painted their reproduction on the wall of their parents’ basement. Looking back on it, they now call it “shitty.”

“Picasso once said it took him four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child,” Gadsby writes in the wall text. “Well, I don’t want to call myself a genius … But it did only take me four years to be as funny as Raphael.”

“Funny” is debatable, but comedy is used as a curatorial device throughout the show. Gadsby’s quotes, which are printed above more serious art historical musings, are larded with the language of Twitter. “Weird flex,” reads one appended to a Picasso print of a nude woman caressing a sculpture of a naked, chiseled man. “Don’t you hate it when you look like you belong in a Dickens novel but end up in a mosh pit at Burning Man? #MeToo,” reads another that goes with a print showing a minotaur barging into a crowded, darkened space.

Most of the works in this show are by Picasso, strangely enough. This in itself constitutes an issue—you can’t re-center art history if you’re still centering Picasso.

But if the curators must, they have at least brought some impressive works to the US for the exhibition. There are several paintings on loan from the Musée National Picasso in Paris, some of which are enlisted in savvy ways.

One of them, Corrida: la mort de la femme torero (Bullfighting: Death of the Female Bullfighter), from 1933, shows a woman tumbling across two colliding bulls. Upon impact, her breasts spill out, lending the scene an unseemly erotic quality that courses through so many of the Picasso works in this show. It’s all the more disturbing to learn that this female toreador was based on Marie-Thérèse Walter, who was romantically involved with Picasso at the time. I agree with the curators’ assessment that this painting emblematizes Picasso’s brutal tendencies. I only wish it wasn’t paired with this quote from Gadsby: “If PETA can’t cancel Picasso … no one can.”

It’s key that the show repeatedly references Gilot and Walter, as well as other women from Picasso’s love life, like the artist Dora Maar and the dancer Olga Khokhlova. These women were previously written off as Picasso’s “muses,” and “It’s Pablo-matic” suggests that historians still have trouble talking about them. While the show is frank about the negative aspects of these women’s relationships with the artist, they are always discussed within the context of Picasso, who continues to exert a strong gravitational pull.

I detected a disingenuous sentiment amid it all. Gilot and Maar both produced art of note. Where was that in this show? It would’ve been instructive to see their work placed on equal footing with Picasso’s. Or, for that matter, pretty much any female modernists. The only ones who make the cut are Kathe Köllwitz and Maria Martins, both of whom are represented by unremarkable examples of their remarkable oeuvres.

These women didn’t make it into history books for a long time, and that’s the subtext of Kaleta Doolin’s Improved Janson: A Woman on Every Page #2 (2017), a piece included in this show. The work takes the form of a famed art history textbook that has, in every one of its pages, a vaginal oval cut out of it. An image of Picasso’s Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907) was sliced by Doolin during the work’s making, its lower left-hand corner now lopped off.

Doolin’s work is about removal: she leaves parts of Janson’s book absent to make clear that women artists, for so many centuries, were kept out of the picture. This was a painful, violent elision, and Doolin makes steps toward rectifying the carnage by acknowledging all that contributed to it. If only Gadsby had done the same.

Why does this show contort art history so? There are numerous Picasso works here that portray threesomes, rapes, and bestiality. The wall text doesn’t hide the sources of these images: Ovid’s poetry, Greek mythology. When Picasso represented a minotaur kneeling over a nude, sleeping woman who can’t consent, he was glorifying sexual assault, using classical art as a limp justification. He was hardly the first male artist to do that, however: Bernini, Titian, Correggio, Poussin, and many more did it too. Yet this exhibition directs its aim only at Picasso.

Many of the women in this exhibition are responding to centuries of misogyny, not just Picasso’s. Betty Tompkins has a grand, grisaille painting showing an erect penis entering a vagina in close-up—an image that recalls a certain Gustave Courbet work—while Joan Semmel takes a lighter approach, with a painting of a post-coital couple shown from the woman’s point of view. Ghada Amer is showing a terrific embroidered work in which pools of red thread reveal pairs of splayed-open women’s legs, and Rachel Kneebone has a porcelain piece that looks like a fountain of limbs. There’s no specific reference point in these works, because the male gaze is omnipotent. It wasn’t found only in Picasso’s studio.

The final gallery, the sole one without any Picasso works in it, brings “It’s Pablo-matic” into even squishier territory. There are some great works here—Dara Birnbaum’s classic video skewering Wonder Woman, an Ana Mendieta photograph of an abstracted female form sculpted into the ground, Dindga McCannon’s painting of a multihued revolutionary with real bullets fixed to the canvas—but they have almost nothing in common, beside the fact that they are all owned by the Brooklyn Museum.

The supplement to this exhibition, available on the Bloomberg Connects app, includes an interview with one artist in this gallery, Harmony Hammond. Asked about her feelings on Picasso, she says, “Truth be told, I don’t think about Picasso and his work.”

It would’ve been nice to have more artists who were thinking about Picasso, or whose work, at least, has something to do with him. But this seems like too much to ask from the curators, especially Gadsby, who greets that line of thinking with a big, fat raspberry. “Humans are not doing great,” they say on the audio guide. “We are unsettled. I blame Picasso. That’s a little joke. Or is it? I don’t know.”