It’s an Artemisia Gentileschi Summer
Plus, the role art can actually play when it comes to fighting climate change.
Hello! This week was mainly a busy one on the work front for me, but I got a fair amount done: I read Liz Moore’s The God of the Woods for my company’ book club (unfortunately I do not recommend it), as well as the incredible A Leopard-Skin Hat by Anne Serre and the classic Ways of Seeing by John Berger. On Friday, I went to New York City Ballet, where I saw two pieces I’ve previously seen: Alexei Ratmansky’s Russia-Ukraine war-inspired “Solitude” which I found to be visually dynamic and moving (also I can’t stop listening to the third movement of Mahler’s first symphony now), and Justin Peck’s “Mystic Familiar,” which has grown on me since the last time I saw it (out of the five “elements” that make up the piece, I found “Ether,” “Water,” and “Air” to be the most compelling…Peck is at his best when he’s working through more conceptual forms and motifs). While Caili Quan’s “Beneath the Tides” featured some beautiful neoclassical moments, I found the piece as a whole to be a bit meandering and a touch disjointed. It seemed to lack a clear force to drive it forward.
I have plans to write up the book reviews I have been promising you. In the meantime, we have an extra-long letter full of all the news you can use. Enjoy!
John Singer Sarget certainly is having a moment. This weekend, I went to the Met’s Sargent and Paris exhibit for the second time (especially lingering, this round, at the sketches of Virginia Amélie Avegno Gautreau—AKA Madame X). Now, there’s another exhibit showing off the work of the late 19th/early 20th century figurative artist. Heiress: Sargent’s American Portraits runs through October 5 at London’s Kenwood House. Sargent, who was born to American parents in Italy, never actually lived in the United States, but moved from Paris to London when he was 30. There, he met a slew of society ladies—wealthy American women who married into the British aristocracy. (Very Edith Wharton).
These women hardly got the respect they deserved—seen as social-climbers in the U.K. and disdained for transferring their wealth overseas by those in the U.S.— the New York Times notes, and they were called “dollar princesses” by the society papers of the era. This new exhibit, featuring 16 women across eight oil paintings and 10 charcoal drawings, registers them as full human beings. “It goes to the heart of women as commodities,” says curator Wendy Monkhouse. “We’re trying to say: ‘Let’s just stop objectifying these people.’” Why so much interest in Sargent? Simple: 2025 marks the centennial of his death in 1925 at the age of 69.
When I went to the Frick earlier this month I did not realize that the many artificial flowers that filled the space were actually sculptures by the 74-year-old artist Vladimir Kavnesky, which sold for upwards of $500,000. I thought, simply, that a decorator had just really leaned into “spring” as a theme—but in my defense, I only had an hour to walk through the newly redesigned museum before I had to head over to Lincoln Center for the ballet. Anyway, the Wall Street Journal reports that Kanevsky’s “Porcelain Garden” exhibition, which was composed of about 30 porcelain floral sculptures, has become a sensation among art buyers.
The émigré artist has been making these flowers for the past 36 years, but for this exhibit, he drew inspiration from the floral arrangements that Helen Clay Frick commissioned for the museum’s 1935 opening; no photographs exist of them, so Kanevsky instead read letters describing them. Those flowers, at the time, fetched a handsome price, too: “almost $25,” for a rather “complicated” order.
Some exciting expansions coming up. Mexico City is getting a new Frida Kahlo museum, which will open this fall right next to the famed Casa Azul. While the latter, hyper-photogenic space focuses on Kahlo’s relationship with her husband Diego Rivera, the new space—in Casa Roja, Frida’s sister’s former residence—will center on the artist’s upbringing and family life. The Fundación Kahlo, a new nonprofit established by the Kahlo family, will oversee the museum and also introduce the Kahlo Art Prize for contemporary artists and a grant program called Las Ayudas, the New York Times reported.
Over in Manhattan, Lincoln Center is also having an expansions of sorts, reimagining Damrosch Park—the area just west of the David Koch Theater, the NYT reported. The $335 million renovation will include the construction of a 2,000-seat outdoor stage, the destruction of the wall on Amsterdam Avenue that cordons off the Center from that street, a new fountain, and plenty of greenery. Construction is expected to begin next spring and finish by the spring of 2028. The Stavros Niarchos Foundation is, so far, the largest contributor to the project, having given Lincoln Center a $75 million gift for the construction. The Foundation wrote on its website that the transformation of this space will help the Center to grapple with its legacy of displacement, as the city razed the predominantly Afro-Caribbean neighborhood of San Juan Hill to build out the performing arts complex back in the 1950s. Currently, from Amsterdam Avenue, the Center is “fortress-like” and “inaccessible.” Opening up the space—with design guidance that has been gathered through community surveys and research—could change that.
Here’s an expansion that conservationists don’t want to happen: the Mediterranean Alliance for Wetlands has launched a campaign to stop the Guggenheim Museum from expanding its Bilbao outpost, ArtNews reported. The proposed expansion, the alliance says, “risks undermining biodiversity, water quality, and the integrity of conservation frameworks.” More than 2,500 people have signed a petition thus far.
A few openings and re-openings:
London’s V&A Museum opens its public storage facility, V&A East Storehouse, on May 31. The project took a decade of planning to pull off and makes more than 250,000 objects, 35,000 books, and 1,000 archive items newly accessible; most items are on display, but visitors can also request to see any item that is in public storage (all items are catalogued online—great for research purposes), The Times reported.
Chicago’s Inuit Art Museum has reopened after a $11.5 million renovation and expansion, which tripled its space and added an educational and art-making studio, as well as a first-floor rotating gallery, the Chicago Sun Times reported. The 34-year-old museum focuses on outsider art—that is, art made by artists who are self-taught or not traditionally “trained”—and has a permanent collection of about 1,500 to 1,600 objects, most notably a recreation of artist Henry Darger’s (1892-1973) apartment and studio. Darger, who worked as a hospital custodian, achieved posthumous acclaim when his landlords discovered his drawings, watercolors, and his unpublished novels—including the 15,1450-page fantasy novel In the Realms of the Unreal shortly before his death.
Los Angeles’s Getty Villa will reopen on June 27 after it was closed during the Palisades fire in January, Elle Decor reports. Staff members and the Los Angeles Fire Department saved the institution from significant damage, though the museum’s landscape, in particular, has not fully recovered. Still, it reopens with an exciting new exhibit: The Kingdom of Pylos: Warrior-Princes of Ancient Greece, which opens the same day as the museum itself, is the first major North American exhibition that focuses on Mycenaean civilization. It will run through January 12, 2026.
There has been much discussion of the role art has to play in democracy, climate change, and all those other important—and often fraught—topics. Last week, the Art for Tomorrow conference in Milan, organized by the Democracy and Culture Foundation, brought together a number of creatives to display and discuss works that could encourage positive global progress. The artist Jeff Koons (of the giant balloon dogs) said on the closing night that the conference was a celebration of “what we can become through the arts, how we can transcend and grow,” and “how we can take that knowledge and share it with others,” the NYT reported.
The founders of the Danish art collective Superflex spoke on a panel about the power artists have to reimagine infrastructure; their idea is to “abandon a human-centric view and design habitats to benefit Earth’s entire network of life,” one such habitat may be made with Superflex’s “Superbricks,” which are curved bricks that are designed to create structures devoid of right angles—making them more hospitable to marine life in an age of rising sea levels (fish don’t like sharp angles). Superflex is also one of the groups that will be creating site-specific work for the forthcoming Climate Clock in Oulu, Finland, Europe’s 2026 Capital of Culture, the NYT reported.
Things like this can sound all well and good, but what power do they actually have to drive change? The key, ultimately, is artists’ abilities to have public-private partnerships. “When we go within the system we recognize the power we have as artists to make changes,” says Superflex co-founder Bjornstjerne Christiansen.
Also in Milan recently was a group of 17 leaders gathered by the Moleskine Foundation’s Creativity Pioneers Fund to attend a leadership seminar that could help them better understand how culture can drive economic growth. That topic was similarly covered in at the Art for Tomorrow conference through a panel discussion that covered how countries like Uzbekistan, South Korea, and cities like Milan “are using their creative industries to attract investment and foster social progress.” Basically, these places are realizing that cultural capital can drive both economic capital and function as soft power on the global stage. Panelist Tommaso Sacchi—Milan’s deputy mayor for culture—said that 10% of the city’s GDP comes from the creative sector, and 10% of its population works in that industry. As such, the city plans to spend €300 million in public funding on new libraries, museums, and multifunctional spaces, the NYT reported.
The Venice Architecture Biennale, which opened earlier this month, similarly tackles topics along the lines of climate change and futurism—but in a review for Apollo, Evan Moffitt argues that the theme of “Intelligens. Artificial. Natural. Collective.” may be a bit too sprawling. There are some smart and useful displays (flood-resistant shelters and natural materials like seagrass and hemp used for unexpected purposes, like packaging and as a concrete binder), but there, too, are more planet-pessimistic constructions, like a compound designed for a Martian crater. Not very helpful!
Stateside, Boston’s recently launched Public Art Triennial explores themes like nature, the Indigenous experience, and social justice, reports The Art Newspaper. More than a dozen site-specific installations will be on view through October.
New York City Center just announced its next season and the lineup is genuinely so good. The Center’s annual Fall for Dance program, for which tickets + fees cost $30, will include the San Francisco Ballet, Germany’s Stuttgart Ballet, and Argentina’s Social Tango Project. The Paris Opera Ballet will restage Jerome Robbins’s “Afternoon of Faun” for that festival, and it will return in October to perform a New York debut, Hofesh Shechter’s “Red Carpet.” New York City Ballet principal Tiler Peck will front a program featuring her own work, as well as a piece by William Forsythe and Alonzo King. Closing out the fall is Dutch National Ballet, starring the incredible Olga Smirnova, who we have previously discussed. In 2026, Lyon Opera Ballet, Martha Graham Dance Company, and Dance Theater of Harlem will also perform at City Center. Nothing but hits!
Meanwhile in Ohio, the Cleveland Ballet has a fun performance coming up next weekend at the Akron Art Museum. On May 31, the company will perform a program, “Impressions of Picasso” outdoors on the patio; it will feature the 2010 ballet “Guernica” (an explicitly anti-war piece) as well as excerpts from the classical ballets “Harlequinade,” “Don Quixote,” and “Paquita”—pieces that reflect Picasso’s relationship with the Ballet Russes and his first wife, the ballerina Olga Khokhlova, artistic director Timour Bourtasenkov told Akron Beacon Journal.
Misty Copeland spoke to the Cornell Class of 2025 and shared this wisdom: “Every person who’s ever done something meaningful has had to endure moments of pain, confusion, loneliness and resistance.”
While we are on the topic: this week, the ballet world lost a controversial yet greatly impactful figure. Yuri Grigorovich died at 98 and leaves behind a legacy of shaping Russia’s Bolshoi ballet company with ballets that pushed beyond the traditional drambalet style to favor more athletic, movement-oriented choreography. He is perhaps most known for the 1968 ballet Spartacus.
Elgin marbles update: George Clooney, with his wife, international lawyer Amal Clooney, says that he will not rest until they are returned to Greece! The actor has rallied for the cause for the past decade, after his film The Monument Men debuted in 2014. As we have said many times before, this issue is tricky because the British government—not just the British Museum—has power over the marbles.
Clooney made these comments to the Greek newspaper Ta Nea in New York City, where he is currently on Broadway for his show Good Night, and Good Luck. And you know who else is coming to (off) Broadway? Tom Hanks, for his show “The World of Tomorrow,” which is based on his own short story from his 2017 collection Uncommon Type. Hanks will star in the show, which will run for eight weeks at The Shed. It is about a time traveling scientist (hm..) and apparently includes a “reference to the rise in authoritarianism” because it is partially set in 1939, the New York Times reports. I guess we will see!
Where Broadway shows may not be going is to the Kennedy Center. The Washington Post reports that the Center’s upcoming season will feature six Broadway tours (a typical figure), but they will run for 15 weeks, which is nine weeks fewer than usual. This includes two non-equity tours (Mrs. Doubtfire and Chicago—two shows that do famously incorporate elements of drag), which is atypical of the Kennedy Center. This is likely a means of cost-cutting, but president Richard Grenell is, of course, claiming that this is a decision made to foster a more “diverse community”…? Okay. WaPo notes that while non-union shows have higher margins, the money made from those shows likely won’t make up for the loss in income from the drastically reduced theater season.
The performing arts group Washington Performing Arts also recently announced it would be skipping the Kennedy Center as a venue for its upcoming season, and instead present its slate—which includes Yo-Yo Ma and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra—at other local venues, Washingtonian reported.
Grenell is, meanwhile, claiming that the Center’s deferred maintenance and its deficit were “criminal” and he would be getting federal prosecutors involved. It seems no one told him these are very typical operations of nonprofit arts institutions.
One wonders if there is enough classical music in the world to transform the brainwaves of the current administration. But it’s likely too late: Classic.fm recently answered the question, “Does classical music really make babies smarter?” Tl;dr sort of! Waltzes in particular seem to have a beneficial impact on babies’ brain responses to speech patterns.
The San Francisco Symphony—which is still fighting for a fair contract—will soon bid its artistic director Esa-Pekka Salonen farewell. As it looks for its next director, it will have 23 guest conductors for its upcoming 114th season; symphony spokesperson told SF Weekly that the search could take years. The Los Angeles Philharmonic, too, will soon be conductor-less after Gustavo Dudamel leaves at the end of his contract in 2026 to take over the New York Philharmonic. Could Salonen step into that post, wonders the Los Angeles Times? I don’t surmise it will happen—the 66-year-old music director seems keen to take a break from such institutions, though he could very well step in as a guest.
Maybe it’s time to add some Erik Satie to your listening queue. We spoke recently about pianist Igor Levit and Marina Abramovic’s collaboration, for which Levit performed Satie’s “Vexations” 840 times. Since then, Jacobin published a lovely little piece on Satie’s unconventional notations, which include directions to play “Without your fingers blushing” or “on yellowing velvet.” Was Satie being funny when he wrote those notes? Many musicians are divided. Says pianist Mark Knoop: “I do take them seriously, even if that means with an inner smile.” I personally would love to hear him play “Gnossienne No. 1” with an inner smile.
You know who else has a sense of humor? The British artist Damien Hirst, who in a rare interview recently told The Times that he has created a plan to put out “posthumous paintings”—which he says his manager calls “preposterous paintings.”
“He suggested we could sell them now, which is a bit of a mind f*** . The idea is to have a certificate that says ‘Year One after Damien Dies: you’ve got the right to make this sculpture and you can trade the certificate before it isn’t made.’” Some of the drawings will be historic. “I had an idea for a sculpture of a piggy in formaldehyde back in 1991 that I never made. So, if that was in book 145 you could make that pig [145 years after his death] and date it 1991.”
I would expect nothing less from the richest living artist in the U.K.
It is, of course, very common for artists to have new releases (of sorts) after their death. That’s the case for 15th century Italian artist Artemisia Gentileschi, whose painting “Hercules and Omphale” (1635-1637) went unidentified for centuries until 2022, after it was rescued from Sursock Palace in Beirut in the wake of the city’s 2020 port explosion. The painting has since been restored by Los Angeles’s Getty Museum, which will put it on public display for the first time in potentially 300 (or more) years. It will be a part of an exhibit called Artemisia’s Strong Women: Rescuing a Masterpiece, which will run through September 14, The Art Newspaper reported. The artist’s work is also now on display at the Musée Jacquemart André Institut de France in Paris in Artemisia: Heroine of Art until August 3. And as we previously discussed, Fort Worth’s Kimbell Art Museum recently acquired her “Penitent Mary Magdalene.”
Also in Texas is the forthcoming Houston edition of Untitled Art. The fair will feature 84 exhibitors—more than the expected cap of 50, due to an “overwhelming response”—and it will run September 18 to 21, The Art Newspaper reported.
Pope Leo XIV may be an art-lover, too, as he referenced Van Gogh’s 1888 painting “The Sower at Sunset,” in his first general address. He tied it into a homily about the “Parable of the Sower,” ArtNews reported. “What strikes me,” he said, “is that, behind the sower, van Gogh painted the grain already ripe.”
The winner of the International Booker Prize has been announced, and for the first time, it’s a story collection. Banu Mushtaq’s Heart Lamp, translated by Deena Bhasthi, is a collection of stories about Indian Muslim women and their navigation through conflicts with family, patriarchal systems, and religion, The New York Times reported. The author said that the book is proof that stories “born under a banyan tree in my village can cast shadows as far as this stage tonight.” ▲