The work, titled Declaration, has become an iconic part of the Venice Beach landscape. Weighing in at 25 tons, it is composed of I-beams that are delicately balanced against one another in V-shaped arrangements.

Declaration was initially installed more than 20 years ago, in 2001, as a loan made in tandem with a Venice Family Clinic benefit, so it was never intended to be permanently sited where it is today. But because it has been located for so long near the boardwalk, between a skate park and a police station, it has been integrated into the Venice Beach landscape.

Word that the sculpture may leave Venice Beach was first heard in 2019, when di Suvero and his gallery L.A. Louver failed multiple times to get the City of Los Angeles to acquire the piece. The two were charged with raising the funds needed to keep the work there.

Local outlets in Venice Beach reported this week that Declaration was officially slated for removal, an exact date for which has not yet been determined. The sculpture, now worth $7 million, according to L.A. Louver director Kimberly Davis, is set to be returned to di Suvero himself.

“I am honored that this sculpture has been embraced by the community of Venice for more than two decades,” di Suvero said in a statement to ARTnews. “I’m grateful that it was on view for so long—longer than ever intended—and that it contributed to the identity of this special place.”

The funding for the sculpture has routinely been a sticking point. L.A. Louver paid for it to be installed in the first place, but according to a Los Angeles City Council member quoted by the New York Times in 2019, the gallery had offered the work to the city, but the terms for the donation would’ve required as much as $4 million to be spent in the process. Even after private donors were sought, the city could not afford the work.

Per Yo! Venice!, L.A. Louver had raised less than $2 million in pledges—which is less than half of the work’s value, according to Davis. Now, the work will be disassembled and sent back in pieces to di Suvero’s studio in Petaluma, California.

Peter Goulds, founding director of L.A. Louver, said in a statement, “Even though permanent status could not be achieved in its present location, we are honored to have championed this iconic work, a Los Angeles cultural landmark and the focal point of Venice Beach and its Boardwalk. Everywhere Mark goes, he builds community, and his sculptures do the same. We are immensely proud of our long association with Mark, who is one of the greatest American sculptors of our time, and our support for this key work from his career.”

St. Félix, a staff writer at the New Yorker, and Giovanni, an acclaimed poet, were set to appear at the museum following a screening of Going to Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project, a recent documentary about that writer that won an award when it debuted last year at the Sundance Film Festival. The event is co-hosted by PEN America, an advocacy organization that aims to support freedom of expression in the US and elsewhere.

In their statement, posted to Instagram on Friday, St. Félix and Giovanni said they had “withdrawn from the program in response to the refusal of both PEN America and Brooklyn Museum to stand in solidarity with people of Palestine and against genocide.”

A spokesperson for the Brooklyn Museum did not respond to requests for comment.

“We very much regret that the event with the Brooklyn Museum was cancelled,” PEN America said in a statement to ARTnews. “As a free expression organization of course we respect every individual’s right to voice their own perspective on the conflict and to respond as their conscience dictates. We mourn the immense loss of Palestinian lives, and the destruction of museums, libraries, and mosques that contribute to a vibrant cultural community.  We have also voiced our shared anguish for the Israelis whose families were killed or taken hostage.”

Both the Brooklyn Museum and PEN America have been criticized for a perceived lack of response to the conflict in Gaza, where Israeli airstrikes have killed more than 30,000 people since the October 7 Hamas attack, according to the Gazan health ministry.

When the Brooklyn Museum was protested by pro-Palestine activists last December, a spokesperson said, “we support any group’s right to peacefully assemble.”

PEN America has been denounced by many prominent writers for its position on the conflict in Gaza. On February 3, more than 500 signed an open letter that accused PEN America of being “silent” on the issue, calling on the organization to “wake up from its own silent, tepid, neither-here-nor-there, self-congratulatory middle of the road and take an actual stand against an actual genocide.”

On February 7, PEN America issued a statement that called for a “mutually agreed upon ceasefire” in Gaza while also noting the October 7 attack by Hamas, which killed more than 200 Israelis and took more than 1,200 hostages. Of the attack, the organization wrote that it was “devastated by and mourn these grave and ongoing losses.”

The Brooklyn Museum talk is the latest example of an arts event in the US that has been impacted by Israel’s war in Gaza. An Indiana University exhibition by Palestinian artist Samia Halaby was canceled earlier this year, and several artists exhibiting at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco altered their work in support of Palestine, leading the museum to close certain galleries.

It starts with a blow job. Schnabel, playing a repairperson named Rick, comes to Capote’s place to fix a garbage disposal. A dejected Capote, feeling as though he has aged out of relevancy in New York, strikes up a conversation, finding himself fascinated by this younger, less wealthy man from Illinois who rides a Harley-Davidson to work.

“I wonder if you’d be at all interested in having your cock sucked,” Capote suggests. Rick, who typically goes for women, accepts the offer, and later admits that it was the best fellatio he received. The two embark on a month-long relationship that eventually comes to an end when Rick admits he is engaged to a woman.

Schnabel has acted before, but only rarely, and never in such a mainstream role as this one. He’s better known for his self-titled gallery, which has spaces in New York and St. Moritz, Switzerland, and represents trendy artists such as Trey Abdella and Robert Nava. His gallery has also shown paintings by Gus Van Sant, the director of famed films such as Good Will Hunting and Milk. Van Sant helmed the majority of Feud: Capote vs. the Swans, including this week’s episode.

That Schnabel had been cast in Feud had been previously reported in the tabloids, which fixated on him performing alongside Warren Beatty’s daughter, Ella Beatty, who plays a young protégée of Capote in this episode.

As this episode progresses, Rick becomes increasingly bored with Capote, who forces him to join him in venues where a repairman stands out. During a lunch at La Cote Basque, the Midtown eatery where Capote and his friends often dined, Rick talks about hacksaws and handiwork while socialites such as C. Z. Guest discuss Gore Vidal, the author who sued Capote over libel. (Capote countersued; Capote lost.) “Who’s Gore Vidal?” Rick asks, with Schnabel inflecting his voice as though he were genuinely confused.

By now, the blow jobs are beside the point. In bed together, Capote seeks one while they are watching an episode of The Love Boat, and a disaffected Rick says to wait. Maybe he’ll do it during commercial break, he explains.

Andy Warhol, who really did star in an episode The Love Boat, playing himself, flashes by on screen. (Warhol appeared on the show in 1985, a full seven years after this episode takes place.) “Look, your friend Andy’s on Love Boat,” Rick says.

“My God, it’s a horror show!” Capote responds. “They put embalming fluid in his foundation, didn’t they.”

Schnabel’s appearance on Feud is the latest art-world connection that has emerged on the series, which streams on Hulu, although the others have been set more within the world of the show rather than outside it. Babe Paley, a major art collector, is one of the show’s protagonists, and last week’s installment featured a musing on a Diego Rivera painting of a nude C. Z. Guest. Meanwhile, in this episode, the Ella Beatty character, a young version of the actress Kate Harrington, visits artist Richard Avedon’s studio, where she is photographed dancing.

In 1952, the New York–based critic Harold Rosenberg famously described a seismic shift taking place in American painting. No longer, he wrote, were artists coming to a canvas with a predetermined composition that they’d already worked out in a sketch. Now, a painter slathered on strokes and dribbled paint directly. 

A few years later, halfway around the world, two Japanese artists, Kazuo Shiraga and Akira Kanayama, took Rosenberg’s idea a step further—eliminating not just the sketch, but also the brush and the human hand. 

Shiraga and Kanayama, who are being showcased right now at New York’s Fergus McCaffrey gallery, both found canny ways to produce abstract paintings without lifting a finger during the mid-1950s. Both were associated with the avant-garde Gutai movement of the era. In their paintings, they subverted a notion that was common among the New York–based Abstract Expressionists: that gestural abstraction was deeply human, that it tapped into raw emotions via the artist’s hand. 

Kanayama’s paintings eliminate the human touch altogether. To craft his dense drizzles, the artist outfitted a toy car with cans of paint that leaked their contents, dispersing webs of black, red, green, and more across his medium-sized canvases. Kanayama steered his little vehicle around and around, left and right; overlaid swirls were the end result. Using this process, he touched the buttons on the remote control more than he did his own canvases. 

Shiraga’s approach verges on parody. Rather than pushing around paint with a brush in hand, he laid his canvases on his studio’s floor—a deliberate allusion to Jackson Pollock’s technique—and pulled around brown and maroon gobs with his feet. Set against white backgrounds, these shit-like messes of color are chunky and thick—so viscous that one can even sometimes spot the ridges formed by Shiraga’s toes. The dance-like choreography needed to make these abstractions replaces the fine motor skills associated with handiwork with more bumbling footwork—but the results don’t betray any lesser command of his materials. 

The Fergus McCaffrey show is titled “Plus Minus,” a reference to Shiraga’s assertion that his and Kanayama’s paintings were opposites. Kanayama’s paintings were “cold,” Shiraga said, while his were “hot.” And it is clear, based on this show, that Kanayama’s cold canvases went one step further past the Abstract Expressionist paradigm. Enlisting a little motorized vehicle, these paintings did away with the pretense of sublimity altogether. 

If Shiraga’s abstractions ultimately resemble those produced by some New York School artists, Kanayama’s appear totally anathema to the beefy abstractions of Willem de Kooning and Franz Kline. An untitled painting by Kanayama from 1965, included in this show, is composed of a lumpy circular form onto which a flat bed of red squiggles has been overlaid. Despite the blazing brightness of its hues, the painting does not inspire much in the way of transcendence. Instead, its strokes evince a mechanical quality. That is no accident. 

Kanayama’s paintings, as well as a few pen drawings that he also made with a remote-controlled car, look forward to questions being asked right now, during a time when AI is raising questions about our species’ role in the process of creating. Early on, Kanayama’s paintings asked these questions as almost everything was being made with the aid of a mechanized counterpart. But rather than stoking existential anxiety, automation seemed to bring the artist a kind of lightness and freedom. For him, it was a way to needle the centrality of human emotion that was so integral to modern art. Tellingly, many of his paintings bear affectless titles. Most of the ones in this show are simply called Work. 

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.

Wolf-Rehfeldt received mainstream recognition in the past decade, years after she stopped producing art after she felt she had nothing more to say. She appeared in Documenta 14, the 2017 edition of the famed art exhibition in Kassel, Germany, and won the Hannah Höch Prize in 2022. A 2023 retrospective at Berlin’s Kupferstichkabinett museum earned her acclaim.

Most of her creations were decidedly lo-fi, taking the form of pieces of paper lined with arrays of typewritten text that she mailed out to her colleagues from her East Berlin studio. She called these pieces Kunstpostbriefe (art letters) and produced them using an Erika typewriter.

These works, which she also called “typewritings,” were abstract individual words and phrases, repeating letters until they formed shapes. The letters in the word “planet,” in one 1970s piece called Divided Planet, double and expand to form an orb. In another piece from the same era, titled Concrete Shoe, Cs, Os, and Ns encase a woman’s shoe.

At the time Wolf-Rehfeldt produced her typewritings, East Berlin was a part of the Soviet Bloc and subject to a repressive regime. Yet her mail art continued to flow far beyond the borders of East Germany, reaching people in North America, Latin America, Europe, and Asia.

She was born in Wurzen in 1932, and married artist Robert Rehfeldt in 1955. Wolf-Rehfeldt was a self-taught artist who held a day job as an office manager. As critic Barbara Casavecchia pointed out in her text about Wolf-Rehfeldt for Documenta 14, the occupation of typist was one typically held by women, which lent her art a new valence.

Wolf-Rehfeldt continued to make her typewritings until the Berlin Wall fell in 1989. During the 1990s, finding that her art had effectively grown outmoded, she ceased her practice altogether.

But in the 2010s, as critic Astrid Mania wrote in Artforum, “Wolf-Rehfeldt is now being discovered by a younger, international generation of curators and gallerists.” Artists, too, began to discover Wolf-Rehfeldt. One of them was the Los Angeles–based David Horvitz, who researched in the artist’s archives, established a friendship with her, and even created an exhibition in 2022 about their bond.

In that show, Horvitz exhibited watercolors he had sent Wolf-Rehfeldt. One read: “I send you the sea and it travels through other people’s hands.”

The artist, John Bonafede, sued MoMA last month. In 2010, during a widely seen Abramović retrospective held at MoMA, Bonafede participated in a version of Imponderabilia (1977), a performance in which he and another performer stood at opposite ends of tight portal through which visitors had to squeeze to enter the next gallery.

Bonafede’s lawsuit alleged that he had been sexually assaulted seven times by five male exhibition attendees during the show’s run. During each, the lawsuit claimed, the visitor would “fondle and/or grope Plaintiff’s genitals.” He also claimed that he saw a similar assault take place against a female performer.

Bonafede described “years of emotional distress” following these assaults, and said that MoMA was aware that they were taking place. In a New York Post report published during the show’s run, a museum spokesperson said MoMA was “well aware of the challenges” of having nude performers in the galleries and said that certain visitors had been escorted out by security.

On Tuesday, MoMA denied that it was culpable for Bonafede’s allegations, “even if true,” a lawyer for the museum wrote. The motion called for the lawsuit to be dismissed.

Moreover, the lawyer wrote, MoMA did not exhibit any “gender-based animus” that would render it liable for what allegedly happened to Bonafede within the galleries.

“While incidental contact was expected, MoMA prescribed procedures for performers to report any concerns,” Tuesday’s filing reads. “MoMA hired a stage manager to serve as a liaison between the performers and MoMA curators. Performers and MoMA staff created a signal system to alert security in the event performers were inappropriately touched, the protocols for which were included in the performers’ handbook.”

The museum claimed that Bonafede had informed the stage manager for the show about the assaults, and that Bonafede was given the option to stop performing. He did not take that opportunity, MoMA said.

A lawyer for Bonafede did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Bonafede’s lawsuit came amid a flurry of legal actions filed as the window closed for New York’s Adult Survivors Act, which enabled “survivors of sexual assault that occurred when they were over the age of 18 to sue their abusers regardless of when the abuse occurred.” The window closed in November, but according to CNN, Bonafede’s case received an extension.

Abramović’s 2010 retrospective, “The Artist Is Present,” was hugely popular, and is most commonly remembered for its titular performance, in which she sat at a table in MoMA’s atrium as visitors sat facing her. Images of people crying during the performance subsequently went viral.

Imponderabilia was notably restaged for a 2023 Abramović retrospective held at the Royal Academy of Arts in London. The performance was retooled for that show, with visitors given the option of entering a separate doorway that allowed them to bypass Imponderabilia, and the performers in it were given access to a therapist.

The 2010 version at MoMA was different even from the original 1977 one, which featured an even tighter portal. The MoMA version, by contrast, was widened so that visitors in wheelchairs could pass through. “I felt the piece really suffered for that,” Abramović told the New York Times.

That letter called Israel’s presentation at the art festival a “Genocidal Pavilion,” and accused the Biennale of “platforming a genocidal apartheid state.” It also said the Biennale exhibited a “double standard” by commenting on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 but having not yet issued a statement about Gaza, where nearly 30,000 people have been killed since the October 7 Hamas attack in Israel.

Past and current Venice Biennale participants signed the open letter, as did Turner Prize winners and other acclaimed artists.

While the Biennale still has not responded, Italian culture minister Gennaro Sangiuliano seemed to suggest that the Israeli Pavilion would go on as planned.

In a tersely worded statement sent out earlier today, Sangiuliano called the letter “shameful” and claimed that those who signed it had threatened to undo a culture of freedom in Italy.

“Israel not only has the right to express its art, but it has the duty to bear witness of its people precisely at a time like this when it has been attacked in cold blood by merciless terrorists,” he wrote. “The Biennale will always be a space of freedom, encounter and dialogue, not a space of censorship and intolerance. Culture is a bridge between people and nations, not a dividing wall.”

Art Not Genocide Alliance, the group behind the open letter, said in a statement posted to social media, “Culture is not a ‘bridge between people and nations’ when one nation is involved in the elimination of another, the citizens of which are kept behind a dividing wall.”

Israel has had a pavilion at the Venice Biennale since 1950 and is one of the nations that regularly exhibits at the festival in a dedicated structure for the country. This year, artist Ruth Patir will represent Israel.

David Zwirner, which last year mounted a McIntyre solo show in New York, will represent her in collaboration with Los Angeles’s Chateau Shatto gallery and France’s Air de Paris gallery. Another McIntyre exhibition is currently being planned for the gallery’s Hong Kong location.

She is known for abstract paintings that conjure metamorphic states, partly because her method for producing the works has sometimes involved elements such as rust and chemical solutions, both of which change in appearance over time.

Dealer David Zwirner said in a statement, “Emma’s practice manages to fuse the new and the familiar in spectacular fashion. Her mark making and the pictorial intelligence of her compositions are rooted in the history of gestural abstraction, yet she manages to cover, with confidence, entirely new territory.”

As mega-galleries such as David Zwirner take on more and more artists, some have sought to play up co-representation deals as a form of inter-dealer collaboration. When David Zwirner added painter Raymond Saunders to its roster earlier this month, for example, the artist maintained his representation by Andrew Kreps, a midsize New York Gallery.

Olivia Barrett, founder of Chateau Shatto, said in a statement, “Artists make work within supportive ecosystems, and our collaboration with David Zwirner and his gallery brings enriched context and heft to the gallery environment underlying Emma McIntyre’s practice.”

Transformation was a core component of Surrealism, an avant-garde that is turning 100 this year. It is, however, not the only movement celebrating an anniversary in 2024—Impressionism, the French movement launched in 1874, is now 150 years old. Both -isms are being toasted in big shows this season.

But it is not just living artists and modernists who are being feted. An Angelica Kauffman retrospective, long in the works, is finally here, and so is a restoration of a prized Jan van Eyck painting.

Below, a look at 60 must-see museum shows and biennials to visit this spring.