The reason this 1882 painting has become a hit on the social media app X has nothing to do with Manet’s radically cold touch, or even the fact that the work is famous at all. Instead, it has to do with similarities between its disaffected bartender and a sad-looking Oompa Loompa from a catastrophically bad Willy Wonka chocolate factory experience that was recently staged in Glasgow.

That experience was put on by House of Illuminati, and has become the subject of much gawking on social media because of its AI-generated scripts, the paltry amount of sugary treats on offer for kids who attended, and the generally bizarre characters who appeared in it, among them a masked figure known as the Unknown.

But it is the female Oompa Loompa that appears to have made the greatest mark on onlookers. Vulture described the viral picture of her as portraying “the Shein equivalent of an Oompa Loompa costume and looking slightly dead in the eyes as she stands in a smoky room behind a table covered in so much scientific equipment that countless people online compared it to a ‘meth lab.'”

Perhaps not so surprisingly, some saw parallels in Manet’s barmaid, who stares blankly at the viewer, her hands on a table lined with champagne and oranges. In the mirror behind, we can see a lot of drunken revelers who are clearly having more fun than she is. Also in that mirror is the reflection of a male customer seeking a drink.

A Bar at the Folies-Bergère, which is now owned by the Courtauld Institute in London, is a disturbing painting, not because of what it represents, but because Manet parts ways with traditional means of depicting space. The mirror is slightly tilted, so that the barmaid’s back is shown not right behind her but to her right. This awkward doubling of her image distances viewers from the picture. No surprise, then, that viewers at the 1882 Paris Salon were bothered by it, since it so clearly departed from what was expected of painting at the time.

But the reason the painting has gone viral, with one such post gaining more than 100,000 likes, is less because of its formal qualities than its subject matter: an alienated woman at work. In the Manet painting’s case, the barmaid, based on a real person named Suzon, is so striking because she seems totally nonplussed, despite the fact that she is in a venue intended to provide a good time for its patrons. Manet reminds us that this is labor for her, not play.

The Oompa Loompa, in the same way, is merely doing a gig—something that the actress playing her, Kirsty Paterson, even described to Vulture, saying, “They were offering £500 for two days of work, so I decided to go.”

Some paid tribute to Paterson in a much more generous way, portraying her as the Mona Lisa, while others seemed to push her perceived sense of detachment even further, comparing the picture to Jeanne Dielman, 23 Commerce Quay, 1080 Bruxelles, the Chantal Akerman film recently voted the best movie of all time by critics. In that 200-minute 1975 film, now regarded as a landmark of feminist cinema, a housewife goes about her daily duties, and does little else. Perhaps Akerman would not have been proud of the comparison, but other X users appear to have been: multiple Jeanne Dielman tweets about the Oompa Loompa have gained thousands of likes.

Which is not to say that grand blockbusters didn’t happen. There was a Vermeer retrospective that had been awaited for years, and Édouard Manet’s Olympia visited the US for the first time ever as part of a Manet-Degas double-header. That both kinds of exhibitions could coexist, sometimes even within the walls of the same institution, demonstrated just how much the remit of major museums has changed in the past few years.

Below, a look at the 25 exhibitions which defined 2023.

Manet (1832–1883) was born well-off in Paris to a mother of royal blood and a father who was a respected jurist. From childhood he harbored artistic ambitions, encouraged by an uncle who frequently took to him to the Louvre. By 13, Manet was taking drawing classes, though his father had other ideas for his son’s career, forcing him at one point into an abortive attempt to join the French Navy.

Manet père subsequently became resigned to his son’s aspirations, and Manet began formal training under the history painter Thomas Couture. He also traveled around Europe imbibing Titian, Caravaggio, Vermeer, Rembrandt, and Velázquez, who was an especially important influence along with another Spanish painter, Goya.

Following in the steps of Gustave Courbet, Manet began as a realist, but his loose brushwork, compositional simplicity, and abrupt tonal transitions drew the ire of critics and the French Academy which mounted the annual Salons. When he started to subvert art-historical conventions to the point of near parody, his trajectory as Modernism’s first great apostate was set in motion. Here are five essential paintings tracking his evolution, along with where you can find them.

The titular sitter of the painting was the French-born artist of Spanish heritage who is herself shown putting a brush to canvas to render a still life of a vase filled with flowers. In Manet’s portrait of her, art mirrors life, and life mirrors art. Although the vase Gonzalès is painting is positioned somewhere outside the frame of his canvas, similar white flowers lie at Gonzalès’s feet. Other flowers reminiscent of ones seen in her canvas appear in the form of a design on the carpet beneath her feet.

A new analysis by the National Gallery has also revealed that there was once one more meta element too: a pot of brushes once lay on the floor, though Manet painted that over “in alignment with [his] striving for simplification and clarity of design,” the museum said. An X-radiograph also showed that Manet had redone the curls, and further examination also lent evidence that the artist had changed the way the chair and Gonzales’s dress were rendered.

“This provides insight into on Manet’s famously laborious process, in which scraping back and repainting was usual, but always disguised with spontaneous gesture and bravura handling,” the National Gallery said in its announcement.

Like many other women artists of the era, Gonzalès is generally not as famous as men of her era such as Manet, despite the fact that she was very much a part of his circle. She was Manet’s only pupil (and a rival of Berthe Morisot because of it), and she drew praise from critics at the time for works such as Box at the Théâtre des Italiens (ca. 1874), which features a man and a woman in a box seat at a theatre. That work, which is now owned by the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, synthesizes older styles culled from Spanish art history and newer ones drawn from French Impressionists. Gonzalès’s career was cut short in 1883, when she died in childbirth at age 34.

Portrait de Monsieur Jules Dejouy (1879) depicts Manet’s bespectacled older cousin, who wielded an outsize influence on the artist as his legal counselor and longtime confidant. The oil painting was acquired by the museum in 2019 after being held privately for nearly a century. Following its restoration, the painting will be exhibited at the museum for the first time.

Jules Dejouy was a prominent lawyer in Paris. After the death of Manet’s father in 1862, Dejouy was appointed chief counsellor and guide to the painter and his brothers. Manet appears to have relied on Dejouy for legal advice and general guidance. At one point, the painter even sent his valuables to Dejouy for safekeeping during the siege of Paris in 1870.

Dejouy was later appointed the executor of Manet’s estate, and he played an active role in the perpetuation of the artist’s legacy. Following Manet’s death, Dejouy collaborated with other significant figures in the artist’s life, such as the critic Emile Zola and dealers Durand-Ruel and Georges Petit, for a memorial exhibition at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris in 1884. The exhibition featured 179 works, including the one set to be restored.

The portrait remained in Dejouy’s collection until he died in 1894, when it was bequeathed to a fellow Parisian lawyer, who owned the painting until at least 1913. Sometime between then and 1926, it was acquired by German textile entrepreneur and art collector Erich Goeritz, who at the time also owned Manet’s masterpiece A Bar at the Folies-Bergère. The portrait was held in the Goeritz collection for 90 years until two members of the family gave it to the National Museum Wales as part of a British tax law that allows inheritance tax debts to be written off in exchange for the acquisition art and heritage objects.

According to the Art Newspaper, the Goeritz family settled about £5.3 million in taxes as part of the deal. A spokesperson for the National Museum Wales said that the true value of the portrait will be “significantly higher.”

The portrait is “currently under a veil of surface dirt and discolored varnish,” according to Adam Webster, chief conservator of art at the museum. “Removing these will likely recover the  subtlety in the painting and also re-saturate the image to recover a sense of depth.”

The project will include a technical examination making use of infrared reflectography and x-radiography. Funding from the grant will also support historical research into the painting, to better understand how it relates to three other Manet works in the museum’s collection: Effect of Snow at Petit Montrouge (1870-71), Argenteuil, Boat (1874), and The Rabbit (1881).

“The TEFAF Museum Restoration Fund is honored to help preserve this important, and up until now, little-known picture by a cherished artist for generations to come.” National Museum Wales director David Anderson said, adding that Manet’s portrait of Dejouy “will be very much at home here.”

The Headlines

IT IS A GOOD DAY FOR ÉDOUARD MANET FANS—AND DOG FANS. A painting by Manet that has never been shown publicly is set to hit the auction block in Paris at Drouot Estimations in February, the Guardian reports. Carrying a low estimate of about $341,000, it is a brushy, endearing depiction of the dog of Marguerite Lathuille. It has apparently been in the family since 1879, the year that Manet gave it to Marguerite as a present. If her name rings a bell, it may be because Manet frequented her father’s resto in the French capital, the Père Lathuille, and depicted it in one of his most memorable scenes, Chez le Père Lathuille (1879), which resides in the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Tournai in Belgium. The artist also painted a portrait of Marguerite  around 1878 that belongs to the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon in France. Perhaps one of those institutions would like to bid for the family pet?

THE BERNIE SANDERS ART MEME STORY JUST KEEP GIVING. Yesterday in ARTnews, Alex Greenberger rounded up all the famous artworks that the Vermont senator was pasted into after being caught in a memorable photograph at Wednesday’s Inauguration in Washington, D.C. Now it turns out there’s a design angle, as well. The impressively patterned mittens he was sporting were the work of Jen Ellis, a second-grade teacher from Essex Junction, Vermont, who made them by sewing discarded wool sweaters, Slate reports. Those hoping to acquire a pair are out of luck, though. “I don’t have much of a mitten business anymore because it really wasn’t worth it,” Ellis said. “Independent crafters get really taken for a ride by the federal government.” For his part, Senator Sanders told late-night host Seth Meyers, “I was just sitting there, trying to keep warm, trying to pay attention to what was going on.” The senator’s views on Joseph Kosuth remain a mystery.

The Digest

The Art Fund charity in the United Kingdom said that arts institutions are in dire straits amid the pandemic. “Smaller museums in particular, which are so vital to their communities, simply do not have the reserves to see them through this winter,” it said. [BBC News]

Miguel Falomir, the director of the Prado, said that the Madrid institution will work to make its permanent collection displays “far more inclusive.” [The Guardian]

German arts organizations are undertaking a study of their carbon emissions. The results are due in the spring. [Artnet News]

Artist Gertrud Parker, who founded the San Francisco Museum of Craft and Folk Art, has died at 96. The museum ran from 1982 to 2012. [San Francisco Chronicle]

Paul Phillips, a beloved guard at the Cameron Art Museum in Wilmington, North Carolina, died at 93. He was a veteran of World War II and the Korean and Vietnam wars. [Wilmington Star-News]

Painter Peter Doig has been tapped by Dior’s artistic director of menswear, Kim Jones, to collaborate on his Fall/Winter 2021 collection. [L’Officiel]

Riverside, California, will allocate $1 million a year to help operate the forthcoming Cheech Marin Center for Chicano Art and Culture. Its namesake actor, an ARTnews Top 200 Collector, has said he will donate some 500 works from his collection to the institution. [ABC 7]

Flashback: Take a tour of Marin’s art-rich home. His holdings include pieces by Carlos Almaraz, Patssi Valdez, and Chaz Bojórquez, as Maximilíano Durón reported. [ARTnews]

Pioneering photographer Gordon Parks is currently the subject of an exhibition that spans both of Jack Shainman’s Manhattan galleries. [The Guardian]

The Kicker

A former Houston police officer told the FBI that he went to Washington, D.C. to attend the rally at the U.S. Capitol on January 6 in order to “see history” and has denied being a member of far-right social-media groups, according to an affidavit filed by an FBI agent. The former officer, Tam Dinh Pham allegedly denied being in the Capitol at first, but then agents found images of him in the rotunda “in the deleted photos section of his phone,” Duncan Agnew reports. The affidavit claims that Pham told the agents that “he looked at the historical art on the walls and took photographs and videos inside.” (Who can resist the grandeur of the Apotheosis of Washington?) Pham resigned from the force amid the investigation. Charges have been filed against him for allegedly “entering a restricted government building and engaging in disruptive and disorderly conduct,” according to Agnew. [The Texas Tribune]

Thank you for reading. We’ll see you on Monday.

Manet was born into an upper-class family that envisioned for him a life of military service or law—his father was an official in the French Ministry of Justice, his mother, the goddaughter of the Swedish crown prince. To their disappointment, Manet failed the training entrance exam twice as a teenager, and was finally allowed to enroll in art school in Paris. There, he sketched artworks in the Louvre (where he met Edgar Degas), finding inspiration in Gustave Courbet’s rejection of Romanticism and Diego Velázquez’s baroque colors.

Unfortunately it took most of his life for his own paintings to achieve critical or financial success; he died on April 30, 1883, one year after his painting A Bar at the Folies-Bergère debuted to mixed reviews at the Salon. “They are raining insults on me. Someone must be wrong,” the artist once wrote in a letter to his friend, French poet Charles Pierre Baudelaire who, with writer Émile Zola, was among Manet’s most ardent champions. Manet would be heartened to know that today his paintings sell upward of $65 million. Below, a guide to some of the most famous works by one of the fathers of European modernism.

Édouard Manet, The Luncheon on the Grass, 1863.

The Luncheon on the Grass, 1863

Manet’s Luncheon on the Grass debuted at the Salon des Refusés, an exhibition of works that had been rejected from the official Paris Salon by the conservative panel of judges. A scandal ensued, inspiring outrage and laughter from the crowds who flooded the Palais des Champs-Elyées to see the painting. It wasn’t the nudity of the model that was subversive—Manet had drawn heavily on Titian’s beloved The Pastoral Concert, from 1509—but her placement in a mundane setting beside clothed men. The composition was interpreted as a reference to the widespread but little acknowledged sex work that took place in French parks. Modern audiences can only assume Manet meant to be subversive, as he wrote in a letter to writer Antonin Proust in 1862, “So, they’d prefer me to do a nude, would they? Fine I’ll do them a nude…. Then I suppose they’ll really tear me to pieces.”

Édouard Manet, Olympia, 1863.

Olympia, 1863

Manet’s Olympia was accepted by the Salon of 1865, where it provoked harsh criticism. The painting features a nude woman (the same model as Luncheon, Victorine Meurent) splayed across a bed while a servant attends to her. Using Titian’s Venus of Urbino as a reference, Manet painted a number of details which signified the woman as a sex worker: the decorative slippers, the orchid tucked behind her ear, her bracelet and pearls, and the proffered bouquet, which can be interpreted as a gift from her patron. A black cat slinks along the bed’s edge. Manet again eschews the Renaissance tradition of smooth blending in favor of quick brushstrokes and harsh lighting, which further humanizes the subject. The painting was deemed offensive on its debut, though his friend Monet eventually convinced curators to display it at the Musée du Luxembourg. (It is now owned by the Musée d’Orsay in Paris.) More recently, curators such as Denise Murrell have relied on the painting to consider how race was represented by 19th-century European artists.

Édouard Manet, Bullfight, 1865–1866.

Bullfight, 1865–1866

Manet visited Spain in 1865, and though the trip last only a bit longer than a week, it left a profound impression on the painter, who had long been impressed by 17th-century Spanish art. Lively scenes of Spanish life began to appear in his paintings, including a series about bullfighting, which he described to his friend Baudelaire as “one of the finest, most curious and most terrifying sights to be seen.” In Bullfight he depicts the taut moment before the action, as the bull and torero face off. Beside them, a gored horse lies prostrate. When matched with the bold strokes that comprise the hungry crowd, Manet creates a palpable tension—the stillness preceding the frenzy.

Édouard Manet, The Balcony, 1868-69.

The Balcony, 1869

It was fashionable to paint scenes of bourgeois life, but The Balcony defied conventions with its enigmatic narrative and unusual perspective. Berthe Morisot, a fellow Impressionist and close friend of Manet, is seated in the foreground. Behind her is the painter Jean Baptiste Antoine Guillemet, while on the right is violinist Fanny Claus. Semi-shrouded in the background is another, unidentified male figure. The Balcony was not well received upon showing at the 1869 Salon, as the picture was considered formally off-putting. A critic wrote, “Manet has lowered himself to the point of being in competition with the painters of the building trade,” while another remarked, “Close the shutters!” Manet refused to sell the painting during his lifetime. After his death in 1883, it was bought by the Impressionist painter Gustave Caillebotte, who bequeathed the painting to the French government in 1894.

Édouard Manet, Portrait of Émile Zola, 1868.

Portrait of Émile Zola, 1868

Émile Zola, renowned French critic and novelist, was an early fan of the Impressionists and Manet, who he considered especially unheralded (“The future is his,” Zola wrote after seeing The Luncheon on the Grass). In 1866, he wrote a flattering review of Manet, and again defended him the following year at an independent exhibition Manet organized outside the Exposition Universelle. In thanks, Manet offered to paint Zola. The portrait is populated with objects representative of Zola’s profession and personality, such as a journals, an inkwell, and quills. Manet even painted a small version of Olympia, which the writer regarded as Manet’s masterwork, on the wall behind Zola. Also hanging on Zola’s wall is an engraving from Velázquez, who Manet considered “the greatest painter there ever was.”

Édouard Manet, Berthe Morisot with a Bouquet of Violets, 1872.

Berthe Morisot with a Bouquet of Violets, 1872

Manet began to widen his color palette after being influenced by the Impressionists’ pastel landscapes, but he never totally abandoned his affinity for black, illustrated here in his portrait of his close friend, the Impressionist Berthe Morisot. In a way unlike that of his other paintings, which are largely painted in uniform light, Manet chose to illuminate only half of Morisot’s face here, creating a dramatic interplay of light and shadow. She holds a bouquet of violets that blend into the dark fold of her dress. Manet’s circle considered the work a masterpiece, and French writer Paul Valéry wrote in his foreword to the catalogue of Manet’s 1932 retrospective at Musée de l’Orangerie, “I do not rank anything in Manet’s work higher than a certain portrait of Berthe Morisot dated 1872.”

Édouard Manet, A Bar at the Folies-Bergèr, 1882.

A Bar at the Folies-Bergère, 1882

This large-scale painting was the last major work Manet completed before his death in 1883, and it debuted at the 1882 Paris Salon. Viewers have attempted ever since to solve the puzzle of its composition, as the barmaid stares before a mirrored wall that does not reflect her viewer—as reality would demand—but the boisterous crowds. And against all logic, the reflection of the barmaid and a gentleman she confers with are displaced to the right. The Folies-Bergère was a well-known venue in Paris, drawing acts that would then be considered indecent, such as circus performers and ballerinas. Modern scholars have also supposed that its barmaids doubled as sex workers. Of his paintings, A Bar at the Folies-Bergère is perhaps most representative of Manet’s innovations, relying on commonplace imagery to offer complicated formal experiments.

Édouard Manet “Stormy Sea” (1873)

COURTESY OF KUNSTMUSEUM BERN

Édouard Manet’s Ships at Sea in Stormy Weather (1873) will soon be crossing international waters. The Bern Museum of Fine Art in Switzerland has agreed to sell the painting to Tokyo’s National Museum of Western Art for $4 million, the Art Newspaper reports. 

Stormy Sea was among the 1,500 works bequeathed to the museum by the late German recluse Cornelius Gurlitt on his death in 2014; some are believe to come from the holdings of his father, Nazi art dealer Hildebrand Gurlitt.

Nina Zimmer, the director of the Bern museum, cited the high costs of managing the massive Gurlitt collection as reasoning for the sale—a responsibility that far exceeds staging exhibitions.

The Gurlitt collection has been under intense scrutiny since it was seized in Cornelius Gurlitt’s Munich apartment in 2013. Many of the works in the collection, which includes pieces by Henri Matisse, Edvard Munch, Otto Dix, and Paul Cézanne, are believed to be the spoils of Nazi looting in occupied Paris: Gurlitt’s father had been involved in obtained work for Adolf Hitler’s unrealized Führermuseum.

The Bern museum has since been absorbed with legal disputes, processing claims, and joint provenance research with the German government. So far, nine pieces have been declared as Nazi-looted and six have been restituted to the heirs of their original owners.

Stormy Sea was actually discovered in 2014, a year after the initial seizure, in Gurlitt’s Salzburg home, wrapped in newspaper and hidden behind a bookshelf. Researchers have since cleared the painting of any suspicion that it was looted. Its original owner was traced to the Japanese industrialist Kôjirô Matsukata, who had amassed a collection of art in the early 20th century with the foiled intention of establishing a museum in Japan. According to Zimmer, the Manet was considered “not critical for the collection,” given the significant number of Manet works already owned by Bern.

“We knew that the National Museum of Western Art has been trying to buy back the works from the Matsukata collection that were lost,” Zimmer said. “This seemed like the best solution for this difficult and sensitive task.”

Édouard Manet, Olympia, 1863.

MUSEE D’ORSAY

Why does late-19th-century Paris continue to hold such an allure?

In 1848, the debris of the revolution soiled the city’s streets, leaving its growing population in squalor and stench. Napoleon III responded by assigning the urban planner Baron Haussmann the task of redesigning and modernizing Paris, to make it the crown jewel of Europe. Over 17 years, the capital was ripped and gutted to make an interconnected network of long avenues, wide boulevards, and new bridges, clearing space for landmarks, like the Palais Garnier opera house. Public life now took place along tree-lined streets and parks decorated with street furniture, in cafés and theaters, and atop atmospheric roofs. The mandate was to see and be seen. Grand fashion houses were established, and magazines around the world presented haute couture. Born wealthy and male in Paris in 1832, Édouard Manet was the ideal flâneur for this new world—a man with time and liberty to observe it all with cool detachment, and to capture it in paintings of the everyday lives of people, social events, and public scenes.

There are now 49 artworks by Manet in the permanent collection of the Musée d’Orsay in Paris. Yet when the artist died in 1883, only 51 years old, he left behind a studio full of paintings for which his widow Suzanne struggled to find buyers. His Olympia (1863), now his most famous work, heralded by many as the start of modern art, remained unsold. Though the Impressionists admired his work, he received little support from the art establishment. When Olympia (1863) was submitted to the Salon in 1865, it was immediately met with intense criticism and repulsion. The painting was hung extremely high to protect it from physical attacks. From that height, the direct, even confrontational, glare of the slender white woman at its center, a courtesan, is momentarily broken. She is reclining nude on her chaise lounge laying atop a floral shawl, wearing nothing more than a few accessories: a black ribbon necklace, pearl earrings, a wide gold bracelet, a single pink orchid in her hair, and Louis XV slippers on her crossed feet. At the time, it was no doubt even harder to make out two parts of the painting that have been routinely overlooked in the work: the shrieking black cat at the foot of the bed and the Black maid standing behind the nude woman, giving her an elaborate bouquet of flowers.

The cover of Denise Murrell’s Posing Modernity (2018).

COURTESY YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS

When dusk set in Paris, Haussmann’s gas lamps were lit and the “absinthe hour” of the boulevards began, working women and their suitors circulating among 200 legalized brothels and closed houses. The scene in Olympia (1863) was bracingly contemporary and uniquely Parisian, and therein was the offense: it affronted the conservative values of the bourgeoisie, making the private public. The picture had its proponents, though. Ardent defenders of Manet later organized a posthumous public subscription, raising 20,000 francs from almost 100 patrons so that Olympia (1863) would be acquired by the state. In November of 1890, it was accepted by the Musée du Luxembourg.

In the years since, countless art historians have closely examined the work, and some feminist scholars have celebrated it for its acknowledgement of the power of Olympia’s shameless participation in sex work. Her identity is known: Victorine Meurent, a friend and painter in her own right, modeled for the picture. However, the Black model, Laure, has remained essentially nameless—apparently unworthy of subjecthood in art history—for the last 150 years.

That changed a few years ago, when the Columbia University doctoral candidate, Denise Murrell, published a dissertation titled “Seeing Laure: Race and Modernity from Manet’s Olympia to Matisse, Bearden and Beyond” (Columbia University, 2013). Her work broke the silence around the French Caribbean woman named Laure and grew into an ambitious curatorial examination of Black models in Western art, from the 19th century up through the present. The first iteration of her doctoral research opened at the Wallach Art Gallery at Columbia University in New York in 2018 as “Posing Modernity,” and earlier this year the exhibition was extended significantly at the Musée d’Orsay to include archival materials, personal correspondence, and films under the name “Black Models” (through July 21). It was an essential and overdue exhibition speaking to the visible invisibility of Black models in French art over two centuries, from the French Revolution through the two World Wars.

Marie-Guillemine Benoist, Portrait of Madeleine, 1800.

COURTESY MUSEE DU LOUVRE

Murrell’s new interpretations and in-depth research of key periods in social and art history resulted in the writing of dignified new biographies for previously unknown Black sitters and muses, and the proposal of new titles for artworks by Géricault, Matisse, Gauguin, Picasso, and Cézanne where those depicted had previously been reduced to “negro,” “mulatto,” or “câpresse.” For Marie-Guillemine Benoist’s Portrait of a Black Woman (1800), for instance, Murrell offered Portrait of Madeline. Benoist’s portrayal of Madeline is a half-view of a slim Black woman in the tone of mahogany—secondary to her deep shade, you notice her bare right breast and stoic stare. Her white Empire-style gown is accentuated by a blue shawl and red ribbon tied around her waist, an obvious reference to the French Tricolore. When shown at the 1800 Salon, just six years after the first abolition of slavery in France, Benoist hid the name of the recently emancipated young Guadeloupean woman who traveled to France as her brother-in-law’s domestic servant, likely for fear of rebuttal for daring to depict this Black woman as an emblem of French liberty. One critic, Charles Thévenin, lamented Benoist’s portrait as “a sublime blurred tache” [stain], demoting Madeline to an unclean inconvenience, non-human. Even the relative freedom that Madeline and her fellow Black Antilleans had won would be short-lived—in 1802, Napoleon would reinstate slavery in the French colonies.

The exhibition also highlighted the growing communities of Black men and women in 19th-century France. Black women, at the time, were often employed as wet nurses by high-society families convinced by the stereotype that they produced high-quality breast milk and had good child-rearing skills. And the second and final abolition of slavery in the French colonies in 1848 saw an expanded Black presence in Paris, primarily in the northern Ninth and Seventeenth arrondissements, home to Manet and the Impressionists in the 1860s. A notebook belonging to Manet confirmed that Laure herself lives at 11 rue Vintimille, just 10 minutes from Manet’s studio.

Édouard Manet, Children in the Tuileries Gardens, ca. 1861–62.

COURTESY RISD MUSEUM

Manet is known to have made two more pictures of Laure over the space of 12 months, beyond the notorious Olympia. In Children in the Tuileries Gardens (1861–62) we see a Black nursemaid in the rightmost side of the painting amongst her employer’s family, an everyday scene for anyone strolling through the Tuileries potentially on their way to the Louvre. Four elaborately dressed children meander around the park whilst the smallest of them sits in front of Laure, who is relaxed, under the shade of a tree. And in La négresse (Portrait of Laure), 1863, broad brushstrokes of deep-brown makeup around her round face and neck sit against a deep olive background, while the rest of her body is shrouded in a plain off-the-shoulder dress. Her natural hair is covered by a bright headwrap. Laure’s portrait reads as a study rather than a finished painting, but despite its blurred lines, the focal point is unmistakable: the smile on her face. Dated late 1862, a note in a book belonging to Manet describes a model as “Laure, trés belle négresse” (Laure, very beautiful Black woman).

Manet’s brief but pointed fixation on Laure involved him depicting her not as the exotic other but an individualized member of the French working-class in a small, visible, but marginalized Black French community. We will never know enough of Laure’s complete story, but she has now, at least, secured a concrete place in art history, and been rendered as an autonomous person, by Murell. As the curator put it in a recent interview, “I wanted to make clear that Laure wasn’t an imagined figure. She’s a representation of the racial reality of 1860s Paris. I wanted to show that she is occupying one of several social roles that free black Parisians occupied at this particular moment.”

Steffani Jemison, Sensus Plenior, 2017, HD video. Whitney Biennial.

COURTESY THE ARTIST

This spring is shaping up to be a busy season one on the art calendar, with both the Whitney Biennial and the Venice Biennale opening within weeks of each other in May, and notable exhibitions taking place all over in the coming months, from a trailblazing survey of art after the Stonewall Rebellion to retrospectives for Lino Bo Bardi, Huma Bhabha, Luchita Hurtado, and El Anatsui, to biennials in Havana and Honolulu. And this is not even including gallery shows and—one hesitates to even say it—art fairs. Below, a look at the winter’s most promising museum shows and biennials.

NATIONAL

March

Harmony Hammond, Chicken Lady, 1989, quilt, canvas, acrylic and oil paint, corrugated roofing tin, three panels.

ERIC SWANSON/©2018 HARMONY HAMMOND, LICENSED BY VAGA AT ARTISTS RIGHTS SOCIETY (ARS), NY/COURTESY THE ARTIST AND ALEXANDER GRAY ASSOCIATES, NEW YORK

“Harmony Hammond: Material Witness, Five Decades of Art”
The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, Connecticut
March 3–September 15

In the early 1970s, Harmony Hammond became a key figure in the feminist art movement for her bejeweled and braided canvases, which she has said offer a female perspective on her medium. Some of her early experiments feature in her first museum survey, with sculptures, paintings, and multimedia pieces created between 1971 and 2018. Among the works are Chicken Lady (1989), a mixed-media painting made with bits of quilt and recycled roofing tin that can be seen as signals of gender and class. —Claire Selvin

Honolulu Biennial
Various venues, Honolulu, Hawaii
March 8–May 5

Curated by Nina Tonga, the 2019 Honolulu Biennial will showcase work 47 artists and collectives exploring issues related to identity in the Pacific region. Titled “To Make Wrong / Right / Now,” in reference to a poem written by participating artist ‘Imaikalani Kalahele, the biennial includes sculptures by Abraham Cruzvillegas and an installation of Hawaiian flag tents by Bernice Akamine. Also planned for the biennial are over 90 free public programs, including workshops, open studios, and talks. —C.S.

DAKOgamay, gilubong ang akong pusod sa dagat/My Navel is Buried in the Sea (still), 2011, video installation, HD video. Honolulu Biennial.

COURTESY THE ARTIST

“Charlotte Posenenske: A Work in Progress”
Dia:Beacon, New York
March 8–September 9

Following its acquisition of 155 works by Charlotte Posenenske, a figure who helps expand too-tidy notions of the Minimalist canon, the Dia Art Foundation has mounted a tribute to the late German artist at its postindustrial sanctuary in Upstate New York. Before she turned from art to study sociology in the late 1960s, Posenenske made works ranging from drawings to sculptural arrangements of prefab metal products that resemble surreal transfigurations of heating ducts in buildings that would otherwise rarely warrant a glance. Works of the kind are presented here in site-specific constructions, in the first North American retrospective of the artist, who died in 1985. —Andy Battaglia

David Hammons, America the Beautiful, 1968, lithograph and body print. “Artists Respond.”

©DAVID HAMMON/OAKLAND MUSEUM OF CALIFORNIA

“Artists Respond: American Art and the Vietnam War, 1965–1975”
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.
March 15–August 18

In 1970 artist Robert Morris made the Whitney Museum in New York close his own exhibition, partly as a response to the Vietnam War and the racism he said was involved. That was just one of the many radical ways that American artists at the time reacted to U.S. involvement in conflict abroad. Curated by Melissa Ho, this show surveys 58 American artists’ works dealing with the Vietnam War, and includes such pieces as Yoko Ono’s protest posters, David Hammons’s body prints, and Nancy Spero’s paintings of sexualized warcraft. Though the war ended in 1975, the Smithsonian will probe its lingering effects, and to complement the show, the museum is also exhibiting new works by Tiffany Chung about the war. —Alex Greenberger

“The World Between Empires: Art and Identity in the Ancient Middle East”
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
March 18–June 23

Some 300 hundred years of art and artifacts traded between the Roman and Parthian empires and ancient Middle Eastern peoples will be surveyed at this exhibition, which includes 190 wall paintings, sculptures, pieces of jewelry, and other objects. The show traces the histories of incense and silk routes that connected empires to form a global trading system and looks at how such exchanges influenced artistic styles. What could seem like an apolitical show has recently acquired a new context: some pieces come from archaeological sites in places that have been damaged or completely destroyed through destruction by ISIS or looting. —Annie Armstrong

Huma Bhahba, Unnatural Histories, 2012, wood, wire, clay, wire mesh, Styrofoam, acrylic paint, oil stick, burlap, metal, lucite, feathers, paper, laces, rubber, plastic, and horn.

©HUMA BHABHA/COURTESY THE ARTIST AND SALON 94, NEW YORK

“Huma Bhabha: They Live”
Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston
March 23–May 27

The sci-fi spirit of Huma Bhabha’s sculpture project on the roof of the Metropolitan Museum of Art last summer—an alien visitation by an extraterrestrial standing 12 feet tall with a veiled figure bowing before it—courses through much of the artist’s photography, drawings, and sculpture. Included here in her largest show to date are works that meditate on what Bhabha has designated as “eternal concerns”—war, colonialism, and otherness. —Shirley Nwangwa

“The Body Electric”
Walker Art Center, Minneapolis
March 30–July 21

“Technology has become the body’s new membrane of existence,” artist Nam June Paik once said. Working with this spirit in mind, curators Pavel PyŚ and Jadine Collingwood conceived this survey of artists who ponder the relation between people and the technology that surrounds them. The show includes members of an older generation—Charlotte Moorman and Shigeko Kubota among them—and juxtaposes their work with that of promising young artists including Paul Mpagi Sepuya, Candice Lin & Patrick Staff, and Andrea Crespo. —A.G.

Aneta Grzeszykowska, Selfie #17, 2014, pigment ink on cotton paper. “The Body Electric.”

COURTESY RASTER GALLERY, WARSAW

“Simone Fattal: Works and Days”
MoMA PS1, New York
March 31–September 2

Touted as the first U.S. solo museum show for Simone Fattal, who started painting in 1969, this career-spanning survey features more than 100 sculptures, canvases, and collages by the artist born in Syria, raised in Lebanon, and based in Paris. Often taking the form of lumpy sculptures and squat ceramics, her work can resemble artifacts from historically distant people dug up in the present day—an effect that Fattal has said reflects the displacement she has felt as a foreign-born artist living in Europe. —S.N.

April

Peter Paul Rubens, Daniel in the Lions’ Den, ca. 1614/1616, oil on canvas.

COURTESY THE FINE ARTS MUSEUMS OF SAN FRANCISCO/NATIONAL GALLERY OF ART, WASHINGTON D.C.

“Early Rubens”
Legion of Honor, San Francisco
April 6–September 8

This blockbuster aims to offer an origin story of sorts for Peter Paul Rubens through 30 paintings and 20 prints he made between 1608 and 1621. Organized in collaboration with Canada’s Art Gallery of Ontario, the show traces the early part of Rubens’s career, which saw the painter studying in Italy and reinterpreting the outré compositions of Mannerist painting for Dutch and Flemish patrons. Some of the finest paintings by Rubens held by museums are traveling for the show; one such work is the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.’s Daniel in the Lions’ Den (1614/16). —A.G.

Guillermo Bert, The Visionary, 2012, yarn, natural dyes, and wood. “Mundos Alternos.”

COURTESY THE ARTIST/NEVADA MUSEUM OF ART

“Mundos Alternos: Art and Science Fiction in the Americas”
Queens Museum, New York
April 7–August 18

Bringing together artists from throughout the Caribbean, continental Latin America, and the United States, “Mundos Alternos” looks at the ways in which artists from these regions use science fiction to imagine and create alternate realities and spaces, utopian and dystopian alike. While an iteration of the exhibition first debuted UCR Arts in Riverside, California, as part of the Getty Foundation–funded Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA exhibition initiative in 2017, the 50-work version presented in New York’s largest borough will seek to connect more specifically with the city’s immigrant populations and Latinx arts scene, as well as connecting with partner institutions throughout the city that will show sections of the exhibition. Beatriz Cortez, Clarissa Tossin, and Glexis Novoa will present new work, while a series of performances, screenings, and workshops is rounded out by the likes of Coco Fusco, Guillermo Gómez-Peña, and Carmelita Tropicana. —Maximilíano Durón

“Jonathas de Andrade: One to One”
Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago
April 13–August 25

The subjects of Jonathas de Andrade’s work are “urgencies and discomforts,” as the artist has put it—issues related to identity, labor, and colonialism, specifically as they impact Brazil, where the artist is based. A frequent subject in his work is intimacy: his 2016 video O Peixe (The Fish) appears at first to be an ethnographic film about the fishing industry in Brazil, then slowly reveals itself to be a tender allegorical work about the relationship between workers and what they produce. Having been featured in recent editions of the Bienal de São Paulo and Performa, the artist’s work will be surveyed in this show. —A.G.

“The American Pre-Raphaelites: Radical Realists”
National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
April 14–July 21

Some 90 paintings, watercolors, and drawings from the Victorian era are to be included in this exhibit, held to commemorate the 200th anniversary of John Ruskin’s birth. The critic was known for calling on artists to reject traditional academic art practices, once writing, “Remember that the most beautiful things in the world are the most useless; peacocks and lilies for instance.” But that’s no reason to dismiss these rapturous pieces—by artists such as Thomas Charles Farrer and Charles Herbert Moore—as being merely beautiful. Keep an eye out for coded references to Civil War–era political happenings. —A.A.

Suzanne Lacy, Anatomy Lesson #4 Swimming (detail), 1977, four color photographs.

ROB BLALACK/©SUZANNE LACY

“Suzanne Lacy: We Are Here”
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts
April 20–August 4

In her socially engaged projects, beginning in the 1970s, Suzanne Lacy has taken on issues such as labor rights and misogynistic violence. Now she receives her first retrospective after a career’s worth of influential performances, videos, photographs, and immersive installations. In tribute to her experimental style—which is often geared around conversations and interactions—this two-venue retrospective will feature live activations of Lacy’s work from the past. —A.A.

“Art After Stonewall, 1969–1989”
Grey Art Gallery and Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art, New York
April 24–July 20

While much has been written on the enduring legacy of the Stonewall Rebellion, the 50th anniversary of which falls in June, this exhibition will look at the still underrecognized impact that night’s activism had on the art world, both in New York and beyond. Organized by the Columbus Museum of Art in Ohio and debuting at these two venues in New York, the survey aims to break new ground in queer-art scholarship. It brings together over 200 works by numerous openly queer-identified artists, including heavyweights like Vaginal Davis, Lyle Ashton Harris, Catherine Opie, Thomas Lanigan-Schmidt, Greer Lankton, Harmony Hammond, and Robert Mapplethorpe, who are paired alongside artists who have sidelined by history. The exhibition will track the two decades in its scope focusing on poignant themes, including “Coming Out,” “Sexual Outlaws,” “Gender and Body,” and “AIDS and Activism.” —M.D.

Peter Hujar, Daniel Ware (Cockette), 1971, gelatin silver print. “Art After Stonewall, 1969–1989.”

©1987 THE PETER HUJAR ARCHIVE LLC/COURTESY PACE/MACGILL GALLERY, NEW YORK, AND FRAENKEL GALLERY, SAN FRANCISCO

“Deborah Anzinger: An Unlikely Birth”
Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia
April 26–August 11

The Jamaican artist Deborah Anzinger makes use of a range of materials, both natural and synthetic, in work that looks at ecology and geography from a black feminist perspective. Curated by Daniella Rose King, the artist’s first solo museum exhibition in America will consist of painting, sculpture, video, and installation, with previous works shown alongside new commissions of varying scale. Using acrylic, mirror, and synthetic hair on canvas, An Unlikely Birth (2018), the show’s titular painting, is one example of how the artist wields abstraction and unconventional materials to underscore a larger socio-political concern—in this case, the plantation’s role in the development of capitalism. —J.C.

“Sondra Perry: A Terrible Thing”
Museum of Contemporary Art, Cleveland
April 27–August 11

Gelatinous fluids and glitchy avatars frequently figure in video installations by Sondra Perry, who was named the first winner of moCa Cleveland’s Toby’s Prize last year. To make the work, Perry researched the process of blacksmithing and the chemical processes that occur when human flesh touches metal. Included will be a new video and installation that draw on “the precarious interplay between people and place,” according to a release. —A.G.

May

Jack Goldstein, The Jump (still), 1978, 16mm film, silent projection, and two black light tubes. “Disappearing California.”

©THE ESTATE OF JACK GOLDSTEIN

“Camp: Notes on Fashion”
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
May 9–September 8

For its annual spring exhibition, the Met’s Costume Institute will ponder the idea of camp, which was made famous by writer Susan Sontag’s landmark 1964 essay “Notes on ‘Camp.’ ” Camp was—and continues to be—a sensibility, aesthetic, and language that is distinctly queer—a private form of communication that deals in excess and parody. In some 200 objects, the exhibition will chart various modes of camp from 17th-century Versailles to queer subcultures of late 19th- and early 20th-century Europe and America to today. Surveyed designers include Elsa Schiaparelli, Yves Saint Laurent, Cristóbal Balenciaga, Christian Dior, Bob Mackie, Vivienne Westwood, Jean Paul Gaultier, John Galliano, and the late Karl Lagerfeld. –M.D.

“Disappearing—California, c. 1971: Bas Jan Ader, Chris Burden, Jack Goldstein”
Modern Art Museum, Fort Worth, Texas
May 10–August 11

All three of these artists were active in Southern California in the 1970s, and all held a shared interest in creators going missing. That was particularly the case in Burden’s 1971 work Disappearing, for which he disappeared for three days and never told anyone were he went; Ader likewise vanished somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean during the making of this final piece in 1975. Curated by Philipp Kaiser, the exhibition will survey the overlapping themes within each artist’s practice, as well as their contributions to California conceptualism. Kaiser will relate their work to the Vietnam War, California’s military infrastructure, and the rise of the feminist art movement. –M.D.

Paulo Nazareth, CA – genocide products- Planeta Criolo, 2018.

COURTESY THE ARTIST AND MENDES WOOD DM, SÃO PAULO

Paulo Nazareth
Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami
May 16–October 6

Nazareth’s work in various mediums—video, sculpture, drawing, installation—often looks at histories of various communities, in particularly indigenous, black, and Afro-Latinx ones, throughout the Americas, and shows how they’ve intersected with colonialism, genocide, and civil-rights activism. For his first solo exhibition at an American institution, the Brazilian artist will present recent work, including a project where he visited various sites of the Underground Railroad, alongside new drawings that look at segregation in the United States. —M.D.

“Whitney Biennial 2019”
Whitney Museum, New York
May 17–September 22

The last Whitney Biennial, in 2017, garnered rave reviews, bitter protests, and still-resonating debates about works on view. The follow-up, curated by the Whitney’s own Rujeko Hockley and Jane Panetta, will aim once again to survey American art through work by 75 artists, among them Nicole Eisenman, Christine Sun Kim, Janiva Ellis, James Luna, and many more. Already anticipation has been tempered by controversy, with the activist group W.A.G.E. urging participants in the exhibition to consider withholding their work over reports that the Whitney’s vice chair, Warren B. Kanders, owns a company that manufactures law enforcement and security products—including tear gas canisters and smoke grenades—used against asylum seekers along the U.S.-Mexico border. —A.G.

Laura Ortman, My Soul Remainer, 2017, HD video.

COURTESY THE ARTIST

Paul Mpagi Sepuya
Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis
May 17–August 18

Cut-up, rearranged, reshot, and edited images of bodies—many of them belonging to queer black men—are the subject of Paul Mpagi Sepuya’s photography, which, following appearances at various notable venues, including the Museum of Modern Art’s 2018 “New Photography” show, has made him one of the most closely watched young American artists. On the same day his pictures appear at the Whitney Biennial, CAM St. Louis will open a survey of the Los Angeles–based artist’s work. Included will be examples of one of his most recent series, which makes use of mirrors in an inquiry into the power dynamics of taking pictures. —A.G.

“Cauleen Smith: We Already Have What We Need”
MASS MoCA, North Adams, Massachusetts
Opens May 25

Upon entering the 2017 Whitney Biennial, visitors immediately saw a series of banners by Cauleen Smith. Adorned with phrases written in cursive such as “I’m so black that I blind you” and “Rage looms within me,” they acted as protest signs and assertions of Smith’s presence as a black woman within a traditionally white space. Some of these works are to be featured in this show, which is being billed as Smith’s most comprehensive exhibition to date. Spanning MASS MoCA’s entire first floor, the show also includes a series of drawings about literature related to “black fugitivity” and a new video installation about the relationship between viewers and the natural world. —A.G.

Cauleen Smith, Remote Viewing (still), 2009, HD video.

COURTESY THE ARTIST; KATE WERBLE, NEW YORK; AND CORBETT VS. DEMPSEY, CHICAGO

“Manet and Modern Beauty”
Art Institute of Chicago
May 26–September 8

Several decades into his career, after years of scandal, Manet had received critical acclaim for painting provocative pictures of modern French life and all its changing sexual mores. Having achieved considerable attention for his shock tactics, he embarked on a more experimental phase during the 1870s—a period surveyed in this blockbuster show, which focuses on the end of Édouard Manet’s career. On view will be portraits of the artist’s friends, muses, and his wife, as well as late-career masterpieces like Boating (1874), a placid scene showing a couple in a Parisian suburb rendered through brushy strokes. —A.A.

INTERNATIONAL

March

Birgit Jürgenssen, Schuhroulade / Shoe Roulade, 1977, black-and-white photograph.

©2019 ESTATE BIRGIT JÜRGENSSEN, SIAE/COURTESY GALERIE HUBERT WINTER, VIENNA/PRIVATE COLLECTION, VIENNA

“Birgit Jürgenssen: Io Sono”
Galleria d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Bergamo, Italy
March 7–May 19

The first Italian institutional exhibition devoted to the late Austrian feminist artist Birgit Jürgenssen is a blowout: it will take over every room of the museum and include in excess of 150 works, among them drawings, collages, sculptures, photographs, and more. Jürgenssen is perhaps best known for work that challenged her day’s dominant modes of feminine expression. As the artist’s career developed, so did her interests: her later work expanded to address the role of nature and culture in the broader concepts of identity. —J.C.

“Civilization: The Way We Live Now”
Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing
March 9–May 19

Taking its name from a book by Niall Ferguson, “Civilization” surveys more than two decades of recent photo-based work focused on the seemingly endless possibilities—and the utter sameness—of a world where anything and everything is available, thanks to our phones, Amazon, and social media. The more than 250 works on view touch on a spread of subject matter, including wealth disparities, community, and symbolic capital. An-My Lê, Penelope Umbrico, Amalia Ulman, Mishka Henner, and Thomas Struth are just a few of the artists included in the star-studded show. —A.G.

Léuli Eshrāghi, tagatanuʻu, 2017, performance view, Open Space, Victoria, Canada. Sharjah Biennial.

CLAYTON WINDATT/COURTESY THE ARTIST

Sharjah Biennial
Various venues, Sharjah, United Arab Emirates
March 7–June 10

Titled “Leaving the Echo Chamber,” the 14th Sharjah Biennial aims to address a wide range of topics including the flow of ideas and governmental control of information. Its heady ideas figure in three mini-shows curated by Zoe Butt, Omar Kholeif, and Claire Tancons, who commissioned artists Tuan Andrew Nguyen, Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Candice Breitz, and many others to produce new works for the exhibition. —C.S.

“El Anatsui: Triumphant Scale”
Haus der Kunst, Munich
March 8–July 28

For the largest show of El Anatsui’s work to date—curated by Okwui Enwezor and Chika Okeke-Agulu—the Haus der Kunst commissioned new sculptures for its monumental facade and selected other works including ceramics, wood sculptures, paintings, prints, and books by the artist born in Ghana in 1944. Anatsui’s signature Klimt-like curtains of bottle caps woven together appear in the show, in what the artist has said are allusions to commercial trade and postcolonial exchanges across cultures. So, too, do vividly colored works that link child’s play and modernist design, the local and the global, dumpster detritus and high-end conceptions. —Barbara A. MacAdam

Takako Saito, Hutschachspiel, 1990.

K. VAN GELDER/©2019 TAKAKO SAITO AND ADAGP, PARIS/COURTESY GALERIE VAN GELDER AMSTERDAM

Takako Saito
CAPC Musée d’Art Contemporain, Bordeaux, France
March 8–September 22

Coinciding with the artist’s 90th birthday, this retrospective brings together more than 400 pieces—including sculptures, paintings, sound works, and books—created by Takako Saito throughout the course of her career. Objects on view will range from Saito’s early works inspired by board games to her new clothing designs. Saito, who was a member of the avant-garde collective Fluxus during the 1960s, will give three performances as part of the exhibition. —C.S.

Nil Yalter, Untitled (Black Veil), 2018, photographs on Alu Dibond and polyester fabric.

REHA ARCAN/©NIL YALTER/COURTESY THE ARTIST AND GALERIST, ISTANBUL

“Nil Yalter: Exile Is a Hard Job”
Museum Ludwig, Cologne
March 9–June 2

The 81-year-old Turkish artist Nil Yalter has appeared recently in the Gwangju Biennale and the Istanbul Biennial, and now counts as the subject of this survey of her feminist work dating back to the 1960s and ’70s. Among the paintings, collages, and videos on view is the video The Headless Woman and the Belly Dance (1974), in which Yalter inscribes a poem on her body as a reflection of the male gaze. —J.C.

“Thomas Houseago: Almost Human”
Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris
March 15–July 14

Thomas Houseago’s first retrospective in France features works made over the past three decades. Houseago is best known for his monumental sculptures of contorted human figures made from a variety of materials, including wood, plaster, iron, and bronze. Each of these sculptures is imbued with an air of foreboding, mystery, and disquiet. Striding Figure II (Ghost), 2012, will be displayed on the esplanade of the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville. Other highlights include Cast Studio (stage – chairs – bed – mound – cave – bath – grave), an installation created specially for this presentation, and the artist’s “Black Paintings” series (2015–16). —C.S.

“And Berlin Will Always Need You: Art, Craft and Concept Made in Berlin”
Gropius Bau, Berlin
March 22–June 16

This show takes its name from a song once sung by the artist Dorothy Iannone to a friend, and uses the phrase to ponder “interpretation, authorship, labor, sovereignty, and power structures” in Berlin’s contemporary art world, according to the museum. The wide-ranging survey of craft and handmade objects in German art, which itself is situated in a former decorative arts museum, includes abstract works spun from natural fibers by Olaf Holzapfel, a screen composed of found carpets by Nevin Aladağ, and a video installation by Theo Eshetu. —A.A.

Simon Wachsmuth, Qing, 2016, two-channel video projection, showcases with archive materials: family photos, archive pictures, and textiles. “And Berlin Will Always Need You.”

©2019 SIMON WACHSMUTH AND VG BILD-KUNST, BONN/COURTESY THE ARTIST AND GALERIE ZILBERMAN, BERLIN AND ISTANBUL

“A World of Their Own: Modern Argentine Photography 1927–1962”
Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires
March 22–June 9

Photography has been part of Argentina’s national identity since around the time of its independence. In the mid-19th century, photographers documented the customs of people in the country in daguerreotypes, for example. Taking 1927 as a demarcation of a significant shift, this exhibition will examine the development of a photographic avant-garde in Argentina, looking at the ways some 25 artists sought to move the form past the documentary impulses of the camera toward a new mode of expression. The show will survey some 200 works by some of the best-known photographers from the period, including Horacio Coppola, Grete Stern, and Annemarie Heinrich, with lesser-known ones. —M.D.

“The National: New Australian Art 2019”
Various venues, Sydney
Opens March 29; closing dates vary

The second installment of a three-part, six-year initiative is a survey of contemporary Australian art featuring work by 48 artists in three venues in Sydney: the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Carriageworks, and the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia. Established artists mingle with up-and-comers in the collective exhibition organized by curators from the respective institutions. Among the artists showing are Abdul-Rahman Abdullah, Agatha Gothe-Snape, and Amala Groom. —J.C.

Eugenia Lim, The Australian Ugliness (still), 2018, multichannel HD video installation. “The National.”

TOM ROSS/©EUGENIA LIM/COURTESY THE ARTIST

“Ernesto Neto: Sopro [Blow]”
Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo
March 30–July 15

For Ernesto Neto’s 1989 sculpture Copulônia, fabric structures weighted with lead are strewn around and hung from the ceiling, their forms becoming strangely organic-looking in the process. The work will play a central role in Neto’s Pinacoteca retrospective, where the piece will be enacted by performers eight times over the show’s run. Curated by Jochen Volz and Valeria Piccoli, it will include some 60 other works alongside it, among them Neto’s recent collaborations with indigenous peoples across Brazil that examine the role of ritual in the contemporary world. —A.G.

April

Sheela Gowda, And… (detail), 2007.

VEGARD KLEVEN, OCA/COURTESY THE ARTIST AND OFFICE FOR CONTEMPORARY ART NORWAY (OCA), OSLO

“Sheela Gowda: Remains”
Pirelli HangarBiccoca, Milan
April 4–September 15

One of the most celebrated names in Indian contemporary art, Sheela Gowda connects formal tenets of European modernism with traditions from her local culture, the result being a fusion of influences that alludes to ritual and the art-historical canon in equal measure. For her first exhibition in Italy, Gowda presents a new work alongside art made over the past couple decades. The show includes watercolors, prints, and site-specific installations that comprise an eclectic list of materials, including hair, cow dung, incense, and natural pigments. —J.C.

“Lina Bo Bardi: Habitat”
Museu de Arte de São Paulo
April 5–July 28

One could say this exhibition was encoded in its site’s DNA, since Lina Bo Bardi—an Italian-born architect who translated European modernist styles for Brazilian audiences—designed the Museu de Arte de São Paulo and fashioned its signature open-floor plan and heavy concrete beams. Alongside her work focused on building and design, MASP will showcase Bo Bardi’s role in Habitat, a magazine that became a fixture of the São Paulo art scene, thanks to its incisive criticism on art and architecture. —A.G.

“Maria Lassnig — Ways of Being”
Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam
April 6–August 11

Maria Lassnig, the unfathomably brave, inventive Austrian painter who died in 2014, aged 94, will get a retrospective for the first time in the Netherlands. Her bright-hued portraits and self-portraits celebrate the body as absurd, surprisingly strong, and uncannily beautiful, even (or especially) when it is quite gross. Always, strange psychological states seem to be bursting through skin. It’s reasonable to assume that in some future age her paintings will be used to illustrate our manic times. For now, they provide a measure of comfort to us. The facts: 200-plus works (a bounty) plus the final piece she ever made depicting herself. —Andrew Russeth

Maria Lassnig, Krankenhaus, 2005.

COURTESY HAUSER & WIRTH COLLECTION SERVICES/PRIVATE COLLECTION

“Tetsuya Ishida: Self-Portrait of Other”
Reina Sofia, Madrid
April 11–September 6

Though only active for around ten years, the late Japanese artist Tetsuya Ishida created a robust collection of work exploring the hardships the everyday Japanese person faced during his lifetime. But to address real-world issues, Ishida, who died at age 31 in 2005, frequently relied on surreal imagery, representing his fellow citizens as human-machine hybrids. This exhibition will include highlights from the artist’s short but far-reaching career. —J.C.

Fernanda Gomes, Untitled, 2018.

COURTESY THE ARTIST AND GALERIA LUISA STRINA, SÃO PAULO

Fernanda Gomes
Secession, Vienna
April 12–June 16

Fernanda Gomes channels the constructivist sense of form and play prominent in her Brazilian homeland but with a haunted sense of loss or at least uncertainty that can be hard to shake. Wood from old furniture along with commonplace materials like glass, paper, hair, cigarette butts, and many more come to seem monumental in works that like play like paintings and sculptures or, often, both. To defer to a few of Gomes’s own words as cited by a show description: “Painting, sculpture, architecture. Tradition of ruptures. Thought is plastic. Reflection dimensions, with multiple meanings. So many questions at the core of this investigation, light!” —A.B.

Havana Biennial
Various venues, Havana, Cuba
April 12–May 12

In the wake of the recent passing of Decree 349, a law signed in Cuba last April that stipulates who qualifies as an artist and where they can exhibit as determined by the country’s government, the official biennial, which carries the theme “The construction of the possible,” is already being contested by the artist-activist community—in February, a group of Cuban artists called on participants to stand against the decree. But the show will go on amid this controversy, and it will feature over 80 artists from some 60 countries. Several artist projects will be on view outside Havana as part of the biennial as well. —M.D.

May

Hermann Nitsch, Kreuzwegstation (Stations of the Cross, 1991, from the series “The Black Cycle,” oil on white-primed jute.

ALBERTINA, WIEN. SAMMLUNG ESSL

Venice Biennale 2019
Various venues, Venice, Italy
May 11–November 24

“May You Live in Interesting Times,” the title for the group exhibition at this year’s Venice Biennale, is meant to encompass a lot. As conceived by Ralph Rugoff, the show’s curator (and director of the Hayward Gallery in London), it addresses colonialism via an allusion to a mistranslated Chinese curse, as well as the preponderance of fake news and uncertainty in the world today. If all that is not fully fleshed out in Rugoff’s show, it may well be in the Biennale’s many national pavilions. Highlights for this edition include Martin Puryear representing the United States, Natascha Süder Happelmann showing for Germany, and Charlotte Prodger repping Scotland. —A.G.

Hermann Nitsch
Albertina, Vienna
May 17–August 11

Hermann Nitsch may be best known for his performances related to the Viennese Actionism movement from the 1960s, many of which gesture at graphic violence and strange sexual desires, but this exhibition aims to offer an in-depth look at a lighter side of his work: his poured paintings. Made by letting large quantities of paint drip down and across his canvases, these works, too, allude to carnage, albeit in a more abstract way. On view in the show will be several decades’ worth of work done in that format. —A.G.

Caroline Achaintre, Herbert, 2018, hand-tufted wool.

CLAIRE DORN/COURTESY ART: CONCEPT, PARIS

“Caroline Achaintre: Permanent Wave”
Belvedere 21, Vienna
May 17–September 15

Caroline Achaintre’s latest outing explores the European customs of carnival and Mardi Gras. Citing horror and science fiction as influences, the artist uses traditional techniques such as tapestry and ceramic to craft foreboding-looking sculptures that resemble winged monsters and dripping carcasses. The resulting pieces: tapestries dripping with dyed wool, crumpled, figurative sculptures, and Rorschach-esque watercolors, many of which will be included here. —A.A.

“Appearance Stripped Bare: Desire and the Object in the Work of Marcel Duchamp and Jeff Koons, Even”
Museo Jumex, Mexico City
May 19–September 29

For this show, which promises to be a blockbuster, Museo Jumex brought in big talent: New Museum artistic director Massimiliano Gioni, who is serving as its curator. Marcel Duchamp and Jeff Koons may be separated by more than half a century, but according to Gioni, their work evidences “enigmas of invisibility and exposure, secrecy, and revelation.” Work by both also deals with commodification and materialism—themes likely to appear throughout the show in the form of Duchamp’s readymades and Koons’s sleek revisions of the same concept. —A.A.

Luchita Hurtado, Untitled, 1969, oil on canvas.

JEFF MCLANE/COURTESY THE ARTIST

Luchita Hurtado
Serpentine Galleries, London
May 23–September 8

At 98, Hurtado is finally having her moment. Best known for her canvases that offer disorienting and dizzying perspectives on the female body (which in many cases is Hurtado’s own), she was one of the breakout stars from the 2018 Made in L.A. biennial at the Hammer Museum. This exhibition will be the artist’s first solo exhibition at an arts institution, and it will connect her historic work with recent pieces. Hurtado was born in Caracas, Venezuela, moved to New York as a child, and befriended leading members of the international avant-garde circles of the late 1930s and ’40s, including Man Ray, Isamu Noguchi, and Wifredo Lam. She later moved to Mexico City, San Francisco, and Taos, New Mexico, before settling in Los Angeles in 1951. Her practice has long been interested in the ways humans relate to the nature that is all around us and the cosmos, a through-line that intensified after seeing early images of planet Earth from space in 1946. —M.D.

Dora Budor
Kunsthalle Basel, Switzerland
May 24–August 11

In 2017 Dora Budor let loose a group of Leonardo DiCaprio impersonators at the Frieze New York art fair. It was a typical piece for the young New York–based artist, whose work often brings big-budget movies into the real world, by remaking and revising elements of classics, like an oversized head based on a plot element in Scanners and the famous falling frogs from the ending of Magnolia. Her latest show moves her work in a new direction: A release from the Kunsthalle Basel says that this show is informed by a “score” crafted from sound, dust, and data, and will involve the artist turning the exhibition space into “a reactive biotope.” —A.G.

Dora Budor, Year Without A Summer (Panton’s Diversion), 2017, installation view at Louisiana Museum of Modern Art.

COURTESY THE ARTIST AND KUNSTHALLE BASEL

“Stephen Willats: Language of Dissent”
Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Zurich
May 25–August 18

How does the world work? How are we connected? How do ideas travel, morph, and enter public consciousness? (Or not.) These are just a few of the grand questions that Stephen Willats, the pioneering British conceptualist, addresses in his art with verve, wry humor, and a gimlet eye. To put it simply: flow charts, photo murals, graphs, and the like have never looked so disarmingly smart, and Willats should be taught in business schools across the land. Migros’s director, Heike Munder, is helming this expansive survey, and the catalogue features John Kelsey, among others. What more could one ask for? —A.R.

Gianni Colombo, After Structures, 1966–67, installation view at Galleria l’Obelisco, Rome, 1966.

ARCHIVIO GIANNI COLOMBO, MILANO

“Vertigo: Op Art and a History of Deception 1520–1970”
Museum Moderner Stiftung Ludwig Wien, Vienna
May 25–October 27

Eyes have been deceived for as long as they have scanned the world around them, and this show surveys some 450 years of artists working with the phenomenon to playful and perception-shifting effects. Of the 1960s-era vogue for Op art and kinetic art, an exhibition description states, “Often they were depreciatingly seen as too spectacular and thus superficial. Wrongly so, since Op art and kinetic art sharpen our awareness of the ambiguous nature of reality.” The artist list, conceived by curators Eva Badura-Triska and Markus Wörgötter, features contemporary artists that one might expect (Julio Le Parc, Bridget Riley, Victor Vasarely) along with older names that could be a surprise (Giuseppe Galli-Bibiena, Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Abbott Henderson Thayer). —A.B.

Oslo Biennial
Various venues, Oslo, Norway
Opens May 25

As it turns out, this year Venice isn’t the only major European city that will have stage a biennial in May. For the first time, the Norwegian capital will play home to the Oslo Biennial, which is being overseen by Eva González-Sancho, the former director of the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León in Spain, and Per Gunnar Eeg-Tverbakk, the former director of the Kunsthall Oslo. Already, the biennial, which has yet to announce its artist list, has had a profound impact on the Norwegian art scene—it has opened 60 new studios for artists based in Oslo. —C.S.

Lee Krasner, Abstract No. 2, 1947.

©THE POLLOCK-KRASNER FOUNDATION/IVAM CENTRE, SPAIN

“Lee Krasner: Living Colour”
Barbican Centre, London
May 30–September 1

In the first European retrospective in more than 50 years for Lee Krasner, some 100 works spanning her full career—from early self-portraits to grand, vibrantly hued Abstract Expressionist paintings—will be on view in an arrangement curated by Eleanor Nairne. The show’s checklist also includes charcoal drawings, photographs, and designs for window displays and film—all in service of paying tribute to an artist historically known as the widow of Jackson Pollock but now revered in her own right. —B.A.M.

Frank Bowling
Tate Britain, London
May 31–August 26

Following a survey that traveled to Ireland, Germany, and the United Arab Emirates, Frank Bowling’s first major retrospective will take up residence in England.
Over his five decades as a painter, Bowling has worked to synthesize globalist politics and formal experimentation in the form of Abstract Expressionist–like maps that place Africa and South America at the center of the world. This retrospective will include some of those works as well as early figurative paintings and more recent works that feature pours of exuberantly colored paint flowing down canvases. —A.G.