Curated with Sonia Dhami, president of the Art & Tolerance organization and a trustee of the Sikh Foundation, the exhibition, titled “I Will Meet You Yet Again: Contemporary Sikh Art,” brings together 40 works. Ranging from sculpture to photography, from painting to photographic essays, the works center Sikhism, a socio-religious group with an origin in India’s Panjab region and a diaspora that today numbers around 25 million. 

A new exhibition of Sikh art that Puliady co-organized offers what the previous have lacked: an opportunity to exceed one’s understanding of both South Asian art history.

No two works approach Sikhism from an identical historical moment or perspective; they represent the constellation of experience that forms collective memory. To bring them together, Dhami and Puliady worked with scholars, artists, and local religious practitioners for over two years.

“We wanted personal stories, not another anthropological exhibition,” Puliady said. “This was an opportunity to make room for women, ideas on climate change, political activism. We could expand past the boundaries of conventional pairings of sacred and historical narratives.”

The show is organized into themes that have shaped modern Sikh identity, starting with the 1947 Partition, during which India was violently divided to form a second nation, Pakistan, following its liberation from British colonial rule. In the process, millions of Sikhs were displaced from their ancestral lands. 

But rather than lingering on the tragedies wrought upon the Sikh community, as is common among Western narratives about Partition, Dhami and Puliady explore topics of gender, artistic production, architecture, climate change. Themes in the show, for example, include “Sikh Heritage as Artistic Inspiration” and “Sikh History in the U.S.A.” Additionally, underpinning the exhibition are three concepts—sangarsh, (struggle), basera (home), and birha (longing)—that speak to more ineffable elements of Sikh identity.

The show celebrates Sikh women, whose achievements have been woefully understudied in institutional settings. Among the standouts are two seven-foot-tall tapestries by the Singh Twins, British artists of dual Indian and English ancestry. The tapestries depict Sophia Duleep Singh, an Indian princess and high-profile suffragette in early 20th century England, and the Hungarian Indian avant-garde painter Amrita Sher-Gil. Both women—radical thinkers in their respective ways—stand amid a dense weaving of traditional Panjab symbols and allusions to the legacies of colonization.

A solemn section of the show focuses on 1984, the year the Indian government initiated a pogrom against its Sikh population. During the genocidal campaign, sacred sites and Sikh-owned business were destroyed across the country and civil rights were curtailed, and within days, some 3,000 Sikhs were murdered in in New Delhi alone.

Artist Arpana Caur has contributed Wounds of 1984 (2020), a surreal expression of the injustice inflicted upon Sikhs after the assassination of the Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi by her Sikh bodyguards, the event which triggered the pogrom. Whether ghost or physical, the figures in the painting have been transmuted by anguish, elongated, wide-eyed, and withered. But they are also the only varied bursts of color within a black night flickering with firelight. 

Elsewhere is an excerpt from 1984 notebook (2013) by Gauri Gill, one of few first-person chronicles of the anti-Sikh pogrom. Working for Tehelka magazine in 2005 and Outlook magazine in 2009, Gill conducted interviews with survivors in Trilokpuri, Tilak Vihar, and Garhi, and took their photographs. Later, she asked artist friends with a connection to Delhi to write a small paragraph to accompany the images. The entirety of the project is available for reading online, and is very worth it.

There is a severe lyricism to the pairings. On page 8 of the online edition, there is an image in which a woman named Nirpreet Kaur does not look at the camera. The caption reads that when she was 16, she joined a protest movement, and married a militant. Later, he was murdered, and her family was arrested. Beside Kaur’s stark black and white portrait are these words by the artist Monica Narula: “The insolubility of the photographic surface gives life its stupendous force to keep in contention the very will to breathe itself.”

It’s an important idea in this show, which toils over the ruthless transference of the past into the future. Kaur sought justice repeatedly in court but, like countless others, never found it. In the whole of South Asian art history, Sikh artists were pushed to the margins. Recognition—taking a photograph, weaving a tapestry, curating such an exhibition—is an expression of resistance.

“Most institutional spaces stop at the Partition or 1984,” said Dhami. “I think the reaction from the community has been so positive because this is more a collection of stories, monumentalized or memorialized through artworks. It’s the building of a home.” 

But in the hands of painter Stanley Whitney, the rules of the grid exist to be subverted. Irregular squares of Day-Glo green, neon red, dandelion yellow, cyan blue, and other hues are stacked against one another, forming off-kilter rows of varying sizes. They have always looked to me a bit like melting Neapolitan ice cream—if the dessert contained far more flavors than vanilla, chocolate, and strawberry, that is.

Look closely, and the sense of order falls apart. Some forms are thinly, messily painted, while others are pristine and perfect. Some areas drip, sending droplets across the rows, while others provide partial views of swatches of color hidden beneath the surface. Some rows, separated by bands of color, are not even necessarily rows. Really, they are odd gatherings of beautiful shapes that hum with a nervous energy.

These grids have not turned their back on nature. They’ve opened themselves to the chaos of life itself.

Whitney is now the subject of a sprawling retrospective at New York’s Buffalo AKG Art Museum, where several galleries devoted to these grids form this fabulous show’s grand finale. Yet the show, curated by Cathleen Chaffee, makes a convincing case that this 77-year-old painter is more than his grids, which have become his calling card since he began making them more than 20 years ago.

The show proves that Whitney has reworked motifs continuously, much as a composer develops a theme across movements of a symphony. His grids have their roots in a previous body of work composed of lined-up circles. Those circles, in turn, were thrown out of alignment and allowed to hang loose in a series of paintings ahead of that. And before there were circles, there were even less definable forms.

Across all these paintings, Whitney has chafed against rigid systems, exposing what happens when logic comes apart. Take Pleasure or Joy (1994), one of the circle paintings, in which balls of tangled paint strokes are set side by side, forming four sequences. As one’s eye moves down the painting, the circles become misshapen rectangles; rivulets of indigo, orange, and mint green flow toward the bottom, traversing multiple strata. Whitney has flouted the very laws which he has set down for himself, and if the title is any indication, he has found ecstasy in the process.

It’s worth remembering what was in vogue when Whitney started making his abstractions, during the ’70s. Serious New York artists were not supposed to paint—Minimalist sculpture, Conceptualist photography, and heady performance art were the preferred modes of production. And if artists did put brush to canvas, they were meant to subject their materials to mathematical systems or conceptual rubrics. Whitney, in his own sly way, seems to pushed against all that.

He did try his hand at process-based abstraction. The Buffalo show opens with an untitled 1972 work featuring several tapeworm-like forms cavorting amid a crusty green background. Done in acrylic and made by pushing the paint around with a mop (à la Ed Clark, who used a broom to make his abstractions), this rarely seen work was the first that Whitney deemed a true success. That same year, he had graduated from Yale’s MFA program, and before that, he had dodged the Vietnam War draft by attending art school, studied with Philip Guston and Robert Reed, and worked at the famed Pearl Paint store in New York. It took many false starts before he got to this point.

Among those false starts was one as a figurative painter. His representational paintings—unfortunately relegated to the catalogue, and not in the show itself—are mysterious images of people whose forms dissolve in and out of their backgrounds. They owe a debt to his French forbears, namely Paul Cézanne and Chaim Soutine, and while these are mostly failed experiments, they tick because they are so odd. Whitney’s first major foray into abstraction, by contrast, is much more calculated, much less free, and for that reason doesn’t strike me as being so successful.

But Whitney has hashed out his ideas on paper—the AKG retrospective thankfully does not discount these pieces—and his drawings of the late ’70s are the work of an artist whose practice is in transition. Dashes of ink are arrayed so that they appear to dance, forming arrangements that look like flocks of birds in permanent motion. Then, in other works, black splotches appear to cover grids altogether, as though Whitney were actively warding off Minimalism.

Just as sculptors have traditionally scaled up their maquettes to produce larger pieces, Whitney seems to have translated ideas from paper to canvas. His black splotches, for example, are colorized in paintings done at the turn of the decade. In Sixteen Songs (1984), clumps of butter yellow and black strokes are struck through with dashes of paint. Whitney, ever the dazzling formalist, creates a sense of depth without the use of shadows. Sometimes, his orbs appear to float before the horizontal strokes; other times, his dashes appear to be in front, with globules behind them. The relationship between background and foreground—one of those basic things taught in art school as being integral to painting—is profoundly unsettled.

In his paintings of ’90s, inspired by his travels in the American West and abroad, the circles are more tightly packed together. Their dense positioning evokes figures seen in ancient processional paintings in Egypt and rows of columns at temples in Rome. But it is the looser works, like By Whatever Means Necessary (1992), that burn the brightest. At its center, this work contains a blue scrawl that encroaches upon the black band separating its row. That title, importantly, is a fragment from a quote often attributed to the civil rights activist Malcolm X, who believed violence to be a necessary strategy for Black liberation.

To what extent are Whitney’s works political? The assembly of works in the Buffalo show does include some pieces that are explicit in their evocation of anti-Black racism and real-world strife. There’s one paper torn from a sketchbook that’s painted with a poignant missive: “Hey Jimmy. Ain’t you heard? RACE + ART Are far apart.” It’s a quotation from the poet Langston Hughes to the writer James Baldwin.

There are also deeply affecting recent works that bear out a prison abolitionist sentiment, something Whitney has voiced in his lesser-seen works on paper for several decades. One 2020 watercolor features a grid-like composition, with each cell filled in by a smear of paint. Should there be any doubt that this is meant to represent a penitentiary, Whitney also has also written in pencil, “I will say it again … NO to prison life.”

The “again” is telling. If grids can be considered forms of confinement, Whitney has repeatedly sought liberation from them. Even when his paintings do not broadcast their politics, they have always been engaged in that project.

Many artists have taken up similar themes, though few have privileged beauty in the process. Whitney’s paintings pop because of their Matissean colors and, in some cases, their vast scale. Nowhere is that more than case than in the show’s sole new work, a 2024 painting made up of slabs of mustard yellow, pale maroon, carrot orange, and more. The composition is both delicious and awkward—its rectangles slant askew ever so gently, and its gorgeous hues mismatched.

At 10 feet wide, this painting feels like a universe unto itself, one that is torn from the strictures of our own. Its title: As Wild as the World, an allusion, perhaps, to the fact that art can reshape everything around us.

Correction, 2/15/24, 12:50 p.m.: A previous version of this article misstated the name of the show’s new work. It is As Wild as the World, not As Wide as the World.

But the film unfortunately tells the same story that has already been told about Kahlo, without providing much new material along the way, other than some kitschy animations of her paintings. Her Wikipedia page remains more insightful.

Gutiérrez has said she came to make the film by diving deep into Kahlo’s archives: she read her diaries and colorized black-and-white photos. This is a noble cause, because ever since the rise of Fridamania beginning in the 1980s, we’ve lost sight of what makes Kahlo truly important.

As Carolina A. Miranda wrote in ARTnews in 2014, in an article called “Saving Frida Kahlo From Her Own Celebrity,” Kahlo’s overnight rise from “obscure Mexican painter to popular saint” had caused her mere mention to be met with disdain: “Recently, when I told a fellow art writer that I was working on a story about Kahlo, she replied, ‘You know, I kind of cringe when I hear the name.’” I’ve felt that way, too, in the past, not because I’m not a fan of Kahlo, but because few have been able to adequately deal with artist with such a complex legacy.

Recent exhibitions prove as much. A 2016 exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, came closest to looking at Kahlo’s lens through a more critical and historical lens, but even that blockbuster was occasioned by the museum’s acquisition of its first Kahlo, as opposed to a serious curiosity about her art. Meanwhile, an exhibition about Kahlo’s fashion sense has been traveling since 2012, but it has failed to offer many insights, either, beyond attesting to how sharp of a dresser she was. Still, it has succeeded in drawing large crowds.

These shows often don’t feature enough of Kahlo’s own words, which is one of the few positives of the new documentary. There’s value to that, but she and her legacy still needs to be critiqued and analyzed. There’s a lot to unravel in Kahlo’s story, not just because her politics were complex and deliberately opaque at times, but also because she frequently self-mythologized, embellishing her own biography in ways that require interrogation. For the sake of this film, an easy fix would have been to bring in some experts, yet Gutiérrez does not do this.

In order to understand Kahlo and her art, it’s crucial to view it against the backdrop of post-Revolution Mexico. She was born in 1907, three years before the Revolution began, but at a certain point in her life, she redated her birth to 1910 so that she arrived in the world along with the Revolution. At a time when the new Mexican government was fixated on constructing a national identity through the arts—look no further than the work of Los Tres Grandes, the painters David Alfaro Siqueiros, José Clemente Orozco, and her future husband, Diego Rivera—that is a significant detail, if not an essential one. Even if Kahlo was often dismissed as Rivera’s wife or a second-tier Surrealist painter during her lifetime, she was just as committed to the cause of a new Mexico. That goes unmentioned in the film.

A major theme in Frida is Kahlo’s own self-fashioning. Through her years in medical school, when she was the only woman member of a friend group called Las Cachuchas, she dressed decidedly butch. Kahlo met Rivera in 1928 and showed him four of her paintings. He was so taken by her that he almost immediately painted her into one of his murals.

They married the following year, and it was around this time that Kahlo began to dress more femininely, adopting the Tehuana dresses of the Indigenous Zapotec people as her everyday costume. Later on in the documentary, we learn that Rivera was acceptant of Kahlo’s bisexual identity. Her iconic painting Self-Portrait with Cropped Hair (1940), featuring the artist dressed like a man, flashes on screen. The year before she painted this, Kahlo and Rivera had divorced, only to remarry months later. This second marriage was intentionally devoid of sex (to avoid jealousy on Rivera’s part), likely meaning that now that Kahlo was no longer an object of Rivera’s desire, she was free to dress more freely. The film doesn’t provide enough information of how often Kahlo dressed in suits post-1940.

In 1930s Mexico, the act of adopting Tehuana dress was seen as just one more way to construct José Vasconcelos’s notion of la raza cósmica (cosmic race), in which all other races would amalgamate into a fifth one that would be superior to all others. Gutiérrez doesn’t address that history, or its neo-colonial, racist, and social Darwinist underpinnings, or even the simple fact that Kahlo’s appropriation of Tehuana dress and culture would have added insult to injury for a group that had by then been significantly impacted by land redistribution, displacement, and violence.

In general, Gutiérrez has a strange way of dealing with Kahlo’s politics. As a clip of a speech by Emiliano Zapata, one of the leaders of the Mexican Revolution, plays, we learn that Kahlo decided to join the Communist Party. Not much more is said on that front. Later in this mostly chronological documentary, we also hear that Kahlo and Rivera were instrumental in getting the Mexican government to grant asylum to Leon Trotsky, who lived at the couple’s Casa Azul for two years and with whom Kahlo had an affair. The details of their falling out with Trotsky are rushed in Frida, and Gutiérrez omits the fact that Kahlo and Rivera were initially suspected of carrying out Trotsky’s assassination in 1940, though they were later cleared. 

Between 1931 and 1933, Kahlo and Rivera lived in the United States as Rivera worked to complete several commissions. Gutiérrez does not elide how stylistically ambitious Kahlo was during this period. The filmmaker even takes the time to highlight the backstory of three quintessential Kahlo paintings: Henry Ford Hospital, My Dress Hangs There, and Self-portrait on the Borderline Between Mexico and the United States (all 1932), which filter Kahlo’s feelings of isolation in the US. Kahlo’s diaries do show that she found the wealthy commissioners of these paintings to be “rich jerks,” but the contradiction of a Communist hobnobbing with the elite goes uninterrogated, as it often does.

Bafflingly, at its end, Frida turns Kahlo’s death into a metaphor by considering one of her most famous paintings, The Wounded Deer (1946), in which Kahlo’s face is transposed onto the body of deer that has been shot with nine arrows. Painted eight years before her passing and a year after a major operation, the painting, as with other works from the era, like The Broken Column (1945), is a reflection on her declining health, a topic that became increasingly important to her after the death of her father in 1941.

Gutiérrez, however, treats this work differently. In one of the film’s 48 animations, she removes the arrows from Kahlo’s deer. This seems like a way of liberating Kahlo. In order for Kahlo to be famous, Gutiérrez appears to claim, she had to suffer. But that’s just a rehash of the uninspired trope of the tortured artist, and it isn’t very interesting.

A successful artist documentary should look at how the subject’s biography impacts their work. But it also shouldn’t be afraid to look at the subject’s warts—their failings, that which makes them human. Any subject is an unreliable narrator of their own biography, and it should be the job of someone like Gutiérrez to reveal myths rather than feeding them, as she does in the deer animation. Frida is a film that’s good at portraying what we think we know about Kahlo. Too bad it can’t also portray what we should know, too.

“What is the nature of the game we’re in?” the late Robert Irwin asked me during an interview in 2016. So began his standard 90-minute art school lecture, recounted in a nondescript McDonald’s in San Diego. It was riveting, to be honest. In Irwin’s telling, the story of modern art was a radical, heroic event: “100 years of dismantling pictorial reality” during which Kazimir Malevich had achieved a new artistic ground zero. Recognizing “nothing they knew or loved,” friends of the late Suprematist called his floating squares a desert. Malevich however, freed from the burden of pictorial representation, looked at his own paintings and saw what he described as “the supremacy of pure feeling.” “It’s not ‘I think therefore I am,’” Irwin said. “It’s ‘I feel, and therefore I think, and therefore I am.’ And that is the name of the game.”

Irwin, the pioneering Light and Space artist who died last October at the age of 95, had over the course of his decades-long career diligently unraveled the great mysteries of art. Yet there he was, having just finished a McMuffin, explaining it in the simplest terms. To me, his practice has always been a profoundly spiritual endeavor. In the 1960s, he had successively stripped his work of the conventions of art-making—he shed mark-making and the edges of the frame before abandoning his studio entirely—like a monastic journey of abandoning one’s material possessions. In his itinerant installations that sought communion with the elusive, ephemeral qualities of light, I saw the pious pursuit of the sublime. He minimized the imagery in his work to maximize its physicality, that ineffable feature that can’t be captured by photographs, but only felt in person. In that 90 minutes Irwin had imparted countless bits of wisdom, all of which boil down to the most uncomplicated rubric through which to view art: the simple desire to be moved.

“Art is about maximizing our understanding of feelings alongside thinking,” he said. “I feel, I think, therefore I am.” Irwin redefined my perception of the artist as the one who seeks art beyond the limits of that which we know and love, following their curiosity to its unknown ends. In this edition of “To See or Not to See,” that describes the way Paul Pfeiffer’s experiments in video show us the perversely religious subtext of our ordinary rituals of spectatorship. Or how Hugh Hayden imagines the queer future and comes to delightfully absurd conclusions. Taking us on her own journey of self-actualization, Barbara T. Smith embarked on a new art form called performance. So much of what artists do involves showing us the things we don’t see. “Part of my shtick,” Irwin often said, “is to make you aware of how fucking beautiful the world is.”

These images, along with 300 or so others, appear in one of the most comprehensive exhibitions of her career, on view currently at the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas. But don’t assume the show, which runs through January 29 before traveling to other museums, is a typical retrospective.

Most retrospectives are chronological and remain unchanged for the course of their runs. Yet as of its opening this fall, Leibovitz, 74, was still shooting images for the show. What the show is today may be different than what it was yesterday or will be, when exhibited elsewhere. That’s a testament to the trust that Alejo Benedetti, the museum’s curator of contemporary art, has placed in Leibovitz, and the power of any permutation of images she could produce.

The exhibition begins at the dawn of her career in midcentury America, segues into her cultural ascension during the roiling punk era, and ends with newly shot photographs done on commission for Crystal Bridges. Leibovitz has stressed, however, that the show is not merely a means to track the arc of her career. Instead, she told journalists, it should be an inspiration “for young photographers.”

Its first two rooms, which contain 54 years’ worth of archival materials, are “set up as a kind of aha moment for me,” she added, describing them as the shoots that taught her how to be an artist. (She refers to herself as a “conceptual photographer,” rather than a photojournalist, the term more commonly applied to her.)

The photographs she shot on commission appear here as a digital slideshow, rather than as prints. Their subjects are more glorious and remote than any cover star: space, as seen through the monitors of the NASA technicians tasked with illuminating its (largely) achromatic dust storms. Earlier this year, Leibovitz was invited into NASA’s inner sanctum in Houston, where she photographed, in addition to the monitors, the Artemis II astronauts in their orange jumpsuits and some sleek metal spacecraft.

Leibovitz is a meticulous portraitist, and her best-known pictures reintroduce celebrities in unexpected circumstances that conjure unexpected expressions. But space guards its story; there’s no face or figure to grab hold. That, I think, is what makes these images so intimate. Out of the whole sensational lot, they read like self-portraits, in the same vein of her “Pilgrimage” series. “Pilgrimage”—another commission, shot in this case for the Smithsonian between 2009 and 2011—features landscapes devoid of people: geysers and craggy cliff-sides and hermetic woods. These pictures are infinitely more mysterious than a celebrity portrait, and promise an exciting, irreverent direction for any later stages of the project.

Like most of Leibovitz’s other projects, this show, titled “Annie Leibovitz at Work,” began with a person: Alice L. Walton, heir to the Walmart fortune and founder of Crystal Bridges, who brought Leibovitz to Bentonville in 2021 to shoot her portrait. Walton then invited Leibovitz to exhibit at the museum, but Leibovitz said she would rather display new work. Walton agreed, making Crystal Bridges the first museum to commission Leibovitz to create new images for its permanent collection.

Crystal Bridges has dedicated five rooms and 5,800 square feet to the show. It turns out the institution and Leibovitz are a good match. The museum opened in 2011 with the mission of welcoming “all to celebrate the American spirit,” Olivia Walton, the museum’s board chair, told ARTnews. “We think of ourselves as a platform for diverse storytellers and different perspectives. And I think that’s exactly what this exhibition does. It captures some of the leading thinkers in our country, and celebrates them. Also, we emphasize female artists, because we are trying to tell this more inclusive story of the history of American art and history of our country.”

Some of Leibovitz’s subjects aren’t American, but they share “American” attributes, as defined (in generous terms) by Western media: charisma, individualism, ambition.

Leibovitz had free rein with her latest subjects, and the results are eclectic. Her rabbi, Angela Warnick Buchdahl of Central Synagogue in Manhattan, the first woman in its 180-year history to lead the Reform congregation, appears in a wispy blue shirt and pants that match the muted lake scenery. In another work, there’s the billionaire Elon Musk, shown alongside his mother Maye. According to Leibovitz, Elon agreed to the shoot, but proved elusive, inspiring her studio to call Maye for help. She got him in front of Lieboitz’s camera the next day. 

Some of the most exciting work from 2023 features famous sculptors, dancers, and painters, including Julie Mehretu and Michael Heizer. The latter was photographed walking among his magnum opus, City, the vast installation in the Nevada desert that was under construction for 50 years before opening to the public. In my favorite image of that lot, Golden Lion–winning sculptor Simone Leigh sprouts like a ceramic bust from one of her signature bell-shaped raffia skirts. The Leigh and Heizer shoots stun for roughly the same reason: both picture how great artists realize complicated desires while the rest of us fumble about.

These new and recent works are projected on four monumental screens that surround the viewer. Over the 25 minutes or so it takes for the images to completely cycle, you may get whiplash from turning your head in different directions, trying to catch or study any one image. The appeal of the digital presentation is clear: the colors are crisp, and it can be easily edited. (Leibovitz, for her part, was eager for feedback on the setup during interviews.) An inquisitive viewer, however, may find this set-up wanting in clarity and context. 

The author Salman Rushdie, for example, first appears on screen healthy and relaxed, and nestled among a crowd of friends. Later in the cycle, there’s a tense portrait taken sometime after the 2022 stabbing that left him blind in his right eye. This could have been a chance to study how circumstances ravage and reinvent its captives. But because it flits by so quickly, it is hard to observe much about these striking images.

Rushdie is hardly the only person Leibovitz has shot multiple times during the course of their career. In an interview, she described the process of photographing Joan Didion in the 1970s and then again toward the end of her life. “I took that [last] picture, but you know, I really didn’t want to publish it,” Leibovitz said. Both appear in this show, however, and it would be instructive to seem them hung together.

What if Leibovitz’s entire archival materials, especially the famed ones, were allowed less routine arrangements, or more challenging wall text? What is left to know about images that have been picked apart by critics for decades, and are inextricable from the American imagination? The answer can’t be ‘nothing’.

This is not to say that Leibovitz’s photography has lessened in impact. In 2023, the number of true celebrities—ones with real holds on the public consciousness—are dwindling. Leibovitz has remained a true believer in star power, however, and some of the more recent works attest to that, with appearances of Bruce Springsteen and Cindy Sherman, among others.

Old and lesser-known images of celebrities strike a chord, too. Some feature her longtime partner, the late thinker and writer Susan Sontag. In one image, an aged Sontag and her friends, both dressed as bears, can be seen galavanting in what could be the lobby of a hotel or an expensive apartment complex. They have wine flutes in one hand, cameras in the other; gazes and gestures both trained out of the picture frame, into the future.

By 1939, Colquhoun had broken with Surrealism, whose leaders didn’t believe occultism to be a valuable source of artistic inspiration. Perhaps Colquhoun left by her own volition, perhaps she was ejected from its ranks. Historians are unclear on what happened, exactly.

Time has vindicated her. In 2019, the Tate acquired Colquhoun’s entire 5,000-piece archive, labeling her a “key figure” of the Surrealist movement in its announcement. More well-known British Surrealists, like Roland Penrose and Paul Nash, cannot say the same for themselves—they are not nearly so well-represented in the Tate collection. The joke is on them.

Colquhoun’s art has moved inward, appearing not just at Tate but also in recent editions of biennials in Liverpool and Venice, too. If Colquhoun’s flirtations with occultism were formerly so taboo that not even the avant-garde would touch them, now her experiments with thought systems like theosophy seem all the more intriguing. Spiritual art like hers, once considered a taboo among critics too, has been embraced with open arms—and even etched into the history of modern art.

Colquhoun is one of the protagonists of Jennifer Higgie’s new book The Other Side: A History of Women in Art and the Spirit World, a survey of witchy women of the past two centuries who translated other realms into painting, photography, illustration, and dance. The chapter on Colquhoun follows a similar trajectory to the others: she begins as a mysterious figure (“a ghost, her eyes white in her shadowed face” in one Man Ray portrait), then comes into focus, then gets her due. Higgie attributes the slow recognition to the fact that Colquhoun was a true nonpareil: “She thumbed her nose at convention: she was bisexual, took lovers, didn’t have children, and while she believed in the power of the ‘divine feminine’ she held that at some time in the distant past masculine and feminine energies had been united.”

Colquhoun isn’t the only artist who didn’t fit within the confines of her day that Higgie explores. There’s Georgiana Houghton, whose spirit drawings filled with swirling abstract forms found an audience but few buyers—perhaps because “no one was making anything like this in the London art world of the 1860s,” as Higgie writes. There’s Helena Blavatsky, whose nonconformist Theosophy system inspired a host of modernists, from Piet Mondrian to Marcel Duchamp, but whose edgy beliefs may have kept her out of art history. And naturally, there’s Hilma af Klint, the Swedish abstractionist whose mystical imagery was supposedly dictated by otherworldly beings with whom she communed.

What all these women have in common is that they’ve become fixtures in Western institutions in the past few years. Houghton is currently the subject of a show at Australia’s Art Gallery of NSW that finds a parallel for her drawings in the abstractions by Wassily Kandinsky, a much better-known artist. Blavatsky’s name recurs regularly in texts for exhibitions, including the 2018 retrospective for af Klint at New York’s Guggenheim Museum, which became the most well-attended show ever staged there. It turns out you can cram all this art referencing invisible worlds, spectral figures, and more into museum walls, those hallowed settings where art history is made.

Is there any way to free these women from the deadening force of the canon? Higgie makes a valiant attempt by writing something that is not necessarily a history. The Other Side broadly has a chronological structure, but it does not always move from Point A to Point B, as a textbook might. Partly, that is an attempt to reflect the very nature of this art itself, which, as Higgie points out, resists rationality and scientific study.

It’s worth quoting Higgie at length here: “For too long, these works were seen either as fascinating curios or sidelined or omitted from Western art history, despite the clear and documented reality of their existence. Even in art, reason, order and ambition were considered to be masculine traits; men were active and intellectual, whereas women were assumed to be passive, fragile and emotional. Many of the explorations and innovations of artists who happened to be women were seen as eccentric – although in the early days of modernism they often drank from the same spiritual well as their male contemporaries, many of whom were lauded.”

Take the case of Agnes Pelton, a member of the Transcendental Painting Group who painted works that she described as “little windows” into heretofore unseen universes. This American painter’s visions are vivid and gorgeous, filled with semi-translucent globes and starbursts that combine in twilit settings. This was simply too weird to exist within the confines of what institutions like the Museum of Modern Art had envisioned as being relevant, so Pelton didn’t make the cut. It wasn’t until 2023 that MoMA acquired a Pelton painting.

Higgie’s invocation of Pelton does not derive from a larger investigation into MoMA’s exclusionary history, although Higgie does go on to address that. Instead, it is spurred on by Higgie’s own travels in the Cyclades—specifically, the dusky period “when the hard edges of daylight begin to dissolve, the air cools, birds fall silent, and the indigo sea ripples with pinpricks of star light.” Higgie is not sure that Pelton visited this part of Greece, not that it matters much. The point is to create an art history that cannot be seen as objective, since it is so clearly filtered through Higgie’s own experience.

Higgie, an Australian-born critic who formerly served as an editor for Frieze, has written a book that blends multiple modes. It’s a memoir, a pandemic-era travelogue, and an art-historical inquiry all in one—which is unfortunately too much for this book to bear. The beaches of Greek isles contain an intensity that Higgie’s descriptions of art do not. Pelton and others in her ilk feel tamed as a result.

To a reader who has closely followed exhibitions like the 2022 Venice Biennale and the af Klint retrospective at the Guggenheim, almost all of the protagonists of The Other Side are familiar. That, too, is a shame, since the book accidentally ends up affirming a Eurocentric canon that has only recently welcomed women like af Klint. First Nations artists are only dealt with in a few pages; artists from the Global South remain on the sidelines. It is hard not to come away thinking that certain spiritualities still matter more than others.

Sprinkled throughout are reminders, however, that women artists with spiritual inclinations are still coming into focus. That means The Other Side is merely a first step in the right direction. There is still more work to be done.

Higgie even nods to this when she brings up Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn, a Dutch artist whom Higgie admits was entirely unfamiliar to her. Fröbe-Kapteyn’s abstractions formed from hard-edged shapes set against monochromatic backgrounds were intended to open portals to worlds beyond our own. Though the psychologist Carl Jung was among those who praised her work during her lifetime, Fröbe-Kapteyn remains lesser-known today. She’s never had a major retrospective.

“Despite having been immersed in thinking about art for the past four decades,” Higgie writes in the section on Fröbe-Kapteyn, “I’m constantly surprised by what I don’t know.” Hear, hear.

YUAG acquired the portrait in 2016 from Caroline Phillips, a descendant from the matriarchal line of the Tucker family, who had enslaved (and later manumitted) Rose; she remained employed by the family until her death, around 1852. In the accompanying exhibition catalogue, YUAG curator Keely Orgeman suggests that Eliza Tucker MacGregor, a daughter in the family whom Rose raised (perhaps alongside her own son, Leonard), likely commissioned the portrait to keep as a memento of Rose when Eliza left New England for New York City as an adult. Given this history, all that was initially known about Rose came from Tucker MacGregor’s descendants. And, while it is remarkable to know anything about a formerly enslaved woman, curator Key Jo Lee, who wrote about the miniature in 2017, reminds us that “[d]espite any hopeful desire to see Rose’s story as ultimately triumphant, this narrative is complicated by her silence.” This tension—between the interiority of a Black woman tenderly captured by Goodridge and the weight carried in the image—complicates our understanding of the relationship between portraiture and slavery.

The complexities and contradictions presented by this work are decidedly foregrounded in “Mickalene Thomas / Portrait of an Unlikely Space,” co-curated by Orgeman and artist Mickalene Thomas. The exhibition borrows its title from a line in scholar Elizabeth Alexander’s essay collection The Black Interior, in which Alexander discusses Gwendolyn Brooks’s “The Sundays of Satin-Legs Smith”—a 1963 poem about an “eminent fop” insightfully described via an inspection of “the innards” of his closet—as a “portrait of an unlikely space.” Alexander offers Brooks’s work as a prime example of her text’s underlying query: “What do we learn when we pause at sites of contradiction where black creativity complicates and resists what blackness is ‘supposed’ to be?”

Featuring 45 artworks, the exhibition, which is on view until January 7, pairs historic objects and contemporary works. Small 19th-century portraits (painted miniatures, daguerreotypes, tintypes, silhouettes, and prints) featuring Black sitters—some known, some unknown, some free(d), some enslaved—make up an imagined community, in Thomas’s words a “chosen family,” in the exhibition space. These are joined by 20th- and 21st-century pieces by the likes of Lebohang Kganye, Sula Bermudez-Silverman, Curtis Talwst Santiago, Wardell Milan II, Devin N. Morris, Adia Millett, Mary Enoch Elizabeth Baxter, and Betye Saar. The curators chose the contemporary works to expand upon notions of “domesticity, family, interiority, intimacy, and ownership that existed under slavery and continue to affect our lives today,” as Thomas writes in her catalogue essay.

The show consists of four sections—“Solitude,” “Togetherness,” “Posing,” and finally “Holding”—that each embody domestic spaces, specifically the living rooms, of the 19th-century Black sitters. These sections build on Thomas’s established installation practice, but unlike her previous funky and vibrant 1970s-inspired interiors decked out with bright colors, lush fabrics, and bedazzled surfaces, “Portrait of an Unlikely Space” presents somber and restrained spaces that conjure the charged climate of antebellum era and speak to the importance of having access to spaces of respite. Several of the gallery walls are painted blue-gray or dark-brown, the latter of which is based on Thomas’s own skin tone, suggesting the artist’s physical embrace of these sitters. Other walls feature an African-inspired wallpaper designed by Thomas.

At the center of one gallery, atop stately emerald-green rugs, are high-back armchairs that have been upholstered with various patterned fabrics, a mixture of delicate floral prints and bold diasporic ones inspired by the textiles crafted and worn by Black women on both sides of the Atlantic. The low lighting in certain galleries, used to protect the light-sensitive historical objects, also lends a melancholic mood to the exhibition.

In the “Holding” section is a daguerreotype of a young Black man cradling a carpenter’s triangle. Because the curators have opted to go without wall texts, it’s only upon stepping out of the low-light gallery that visitors will learn that this elegantly posed man is Haywood Dixon, who was enslaved at the time his portrait was taken. Like Rose, Haywood did not commission his own portrait. Moreover, it was likely created to surveil and regulate his movements in the event that he ever fled enslavement.

The exhibition’s dialogue between images depicting 19th-century sitters and work by contemporary artists enacts Saidiya Hartman’s notion of “critical fabulation,” or an imagining of “what might have happened or might have been said or might have been done” by people—Black women, especially—whose voices have been purposefully obscured in historical records. Though this process, Hartman constructs alternative narratives that reveal the past as intwined with the present and allow for better futures.

Mary Enoch Elizabeth Baxter’s Consecration to Mary (2021–23), for example, re-narrates the story of an unnamed Black girl (perhaps as young as five or six years old) who was photographed nude on a couch in 1882 by the acclaimed (and now defamed) Philadelphia artist Thomas Eakins. In her 2019 book Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, Hartman meditates on the same photo, notinghow the photo “makes it impossible for her to be a child”; when reproducing the image, Hartman covered the girl’s exposed body with text as a way to mediate the violence perpetuated by Eakins.

In her artistic intervention, which mimics the pocketbook format of the other 19th-century daguerreotypes and miniatures in the exhibition, Baxter inserts herself into the scene, and gives the young girl a name, Mary. In one daguerreotype, she covers Mary’s body with a blanket, and in another, the artist tenderly embraces the girl, who is now positioned away from the camera and Eakins’s gaze. Instead, Baxter confronts us with her own unflinching gaze. In making photographic copies of the original daguerreotype, Baxter further refuses to replicate poisonous practices, as daguerreotypes were processed using toxic levels of mercury. Additionally, the complex technology of the daguerreotype references, as Baxter told ARTnews, “the inability for children to have the language to understand, talk, and process the violation.” In one final act, the third photograph in the series is a school photo of Baxter, implicating the artist’s experience as a survivor of childhood sexual abuse.

The exhibition closes with Imitation of Life, a 1975 assemblage pieceby Betye Saar that features a Mammy figurine set within an upright box with an open lid, onto which Saar has drawn a Black woman sitting with a child in her lap. Behind the figurine, who holds a grenade, is a newspaper advertisement for “a valuable Negro woman, accustomed to all kinds of house work,” who the ad notes would be sold separately from her four children. This final work brings us back to the first: Rose noted in her will that she did not know the whereabouts of her son Leonard, whose fate remains unknown to researchers today.

It is through these specific juxtapositions, of the historical with the contemporary, that we see the explosive potential of art in helping to reframe our understanding of the past. While Rose’s portrait is a stunning work of art and its backstory serves as a moving tale of interracial affection, the exhibition repeatedly reminds us that we can never know how Rose felt about the fact that her former enslavers wanted to keep a piece of her—even after she moved on. Engaging with Black American history—much like acknowledging and living with the difficulties faced by Black people today—can be an arduous task that requires a great deal of care, work, and purpose. But in placing history at the center of our present, an exhibition like “Portrait of an Unlikely Space” asks us to sit with the beauty and the pain.

Correction, December 29, 2023: An earlier version of this article misstated which Gwendolyn Brooks poem Elizabeth Alexander discusses when she writes about a “portrait of an unlikely space.” It is “The Sundays of Satin-Legs Smith,” not “Bronzeville Woman in a Red Hat.”

Claude Picasso died this year, along with his mother, the painter Françoise Gilot, and the notion that there is such a thing as too many Picasso shows. To mark the 50th anniversary of Picasso’s death, dozens of museums across the globe staged exhibitions devoted to the artist. Some were small, some were large. Some were widely seen, others largely ignored. All contained a familiar refrain: Picasso’s art still matters, like it or not.

But did we really need 50 exhibitions to figure that out? It was already self-evident based on museums’ permanent collection galleries, which almost always contain their prized Picassos. It was also obvious based on the glut of mid- and late-career Picassos that hit the auction block every year. (This year’s top lot was a $139.4 million Picasso painting of Marie-Thérèse Walter.) And by the way, good luck finding a museum bookstore that doesn’t have something Picasso-related, be it a 2024 wall calendar, a salt shaker emblazoned with his face, or a tea towel printed with his cutesy, pacifist dove image.

It’s safe to say that, because of all those shows, 2023 was the year of Picasso. But it’s also safe to say we learned just about nothing in the process.

Some museum shows tried to suggest that there was actually still more to be gained from studying Picasso. One was “Picasso in Fontainebleau,” a show at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (through February 17) that surveys one summer spent at a commune in the south of France in 1921. This is a remarkably specific slice of Picasso history—it occupies about a dozen pages of John Richardson’s 1,800-page biography of the artist—but curator Anne Umland suggests that it can teach us a lot about his method. She fixes on the fact that he was creating two major works at the same time: Three Musicians (1921), whose sitters fracture into a dazzling array of intersecting shapes, and Three Women at the Spring (1921), whose sitters wear drape-like dresses reminiscent of ancient Greece instead of contemporary France.

What explains the fact that Picasso was navigating “multiple temporalities,” as Umland puts it in the catalogue—that he was shuttling between classicism and avant-gardism simply by walking the short length of his studio, whose walls were hung with versions of both pictures simultaneously? The exhibition seeks to get to the bottom of things, burrowing so far down the rabbit hole that Umland has even created a gallery that reimagines Picasso’s studio down to its precise, cramped dimensions.

“Picasso in Fontainebleau” gets points for art-historical nerdiness, and for digging up oddities such as studies for Three Women at the Spring that show off Picasso’s knack for painting fattened fingers and bulbous palms. The problem is that “Picasso in Fontainebleau” comes up short. You get a sense of how rapidly Picasso was able to transition between artistic modes, but anyone with even passing knowledge of the artist’s oeuvre already understands that. You want it to go a step further, showing why these two paintings unlock something mysterious about the inner workings of Picasso’s mind, which remain just that: opaque and unknowable.

Where “Picasso in Fontainebleau” is successful, however, is in its implicit exploration of Picasso’s supposed genius. With its panoply of studies and failed artworks, the show sands down the notion that Picasso produced masterpieces overnight, that his first stroke was his best stroke. That sets it apart from a show like the Guggenheim Museum’s “Young Picasso in Paris,” which probably would have rankled Claude Picasso.

That small exhibition, which closed over the summer, asserted that Picasso père was more or less born with talent, with works that date to his early 20s. Some really are that good: Moulin de la Galette (ca. 1900), featuring revelers who flit through the darkness of a bar, remained striking. But others, like The Diners (1901), with its female figure who melts into the white table beneath her due to Picasso’s ill-defined brushwork, are slapdash and slack.

These were two of just 10 works in the entire exhibition, but you wouldn’t know it based on the crowds. When I visited the exhibition in June, visitors jostled for an unobstructed view of Moulin de la Galette. Meanwhile, Gego’s 160-work retrospective lining the rotunda was much more sparsely populated. Her wire sculptures swayed gently in the wind, with few onlookers to observe them as they did so.

Of the 50 shows mounted in the “Celebración Picasso” series, none were retrospectives. This didn’t mean there were no big shows—the Centre Pompidou in Paris, for example, has a blowout survey featuring around 1,000 works on paper by the artist. But mostly, what we got were scraps related to Picasso’s legacy, the result being that nothing felt grand enough to say anything major.

The tendency was particularly pronounced in New York. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, which has a world-class collection of Picassos in its arsenal, mounted a one-gallery show devoted to the Picasso masterpiece that never was: a vast commission for Hamilton Easter Field’s Brooklyn home. Field would’ve had a fabulous library lined with Cubism of the highest order were it not for his mother, whose conservative aesthetic sensibilities ended up influencing his own. The whole thing gradually came apart; the show (through January 14) endeavors to understand what could have been.

What we are left with, at the Met, are some of the works made in the run-up to the commission: tangles of brown and grey forms that cohere to form female nudes and still lifes (with the help of explanatory wall texts). Anna Jozefacka, the curator of the exhibition, makes a compelling case for how Picasso tried to fit his rough-hewn avant-gardism into a refined patron’s digs, finding along the way that the two were fundamentally incompatible. The show does provide an interesting case study for Picassoheads, but without the finished product, it all comes off a bit staid.

The Met’s Picasso show aims to unravel a side of Picasso that no one ever saw—in this case, because the work doesn’t exist. But in the case of “A Foreigner Called Picasso” at Gagosian gallery (through February 10), the side of the artist explored—his identity as an immigrant—was not always easy to see because Picasso sometimes hid it away as best he could.

The show is curated by art historians Annie Cohen-Solal and Vérane Tasseau; the former is the author of the terrific book Picasso the Foreigner, finally released in English this year after publishing in France in 2021. The book traces how Picasso, a Spaniard by birth, refashioned himself a Frenchman, only to unknowingly lead an antagonistic relation with the French state, whose officers surveilled him for years because of perceived connections to Communism. (In reality, he was not much of an activist for most of his career.)

Cohen-Solal’s book is a massive contribution to the crowded field of Picasso studies, which generally does not view the artist as a political subject. Unfortunately, the Gagosian show doesn’t offer the same thrills as its related book. That’s because much of what Cohen-Solal deals with in her writing isn’t all that visual: official documents, letters, and the like.

The exhibition attempts to provide a visual armature for all that text, but it’s not always easy to understand the relationship between the Picasso paintings and the Picasso file kept by the Sûreté General—especially because the show itself contains almost no captions at all. A section about how Picasso hunkered down during World War II, for example, is mainly composed of paintings of Dora Maar and Marie-Thérèse Walter. Notably, the exhibition does not discuss his failed attempts at becoming a French citizen during that period much, even though that is the subject of an entire chapter in Cohen-Solal’s book. This is a shame, and all the more so because the show is the kind of gallery exhibition many might describe as “museum-quality,” seeing as it has loans of important works from the Met and other institutions.

Not far away from the Gagosian show, Pace also has its own Picasso show (through December 22), this one focused on 14 sketchbooks. The sketchbooks included are meant to provide insights into Picasso’s process, with one dating to around the time he made Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907) intended to illuminate elements that didn’t make it into the final product. But these are simply sketches after all, and it’s worth remembering that although Picasso did periodically rip some from his notebooks and claim them as artworks in their own right, many are not major, since they were meant only for private consumption. Yet the show, with its darkened lighting, has the feeling of a space meant to inspire contemplation in the face of greatness.

Greatness, however, is decidedly not what is on view. Take one 1956 ink drawing of a couple caught in an erotic embrace. Unlike Picasso’s paintings, whose conflations of torsos, legs, arms, genitals, and facial features do offer their pleasures, this drawing comes off as a sloppy, testosterone-induced mess. Why, I wondered, does this man’s thigh awkwardly disappear into his lover’s crotch? Then I realized I had thought too hard about a work that Picasso himself probably tossed off—and maybe didn’t even want the public to see at all. For a man who is estimated to have made tens of thousands of artworks, it only makes sense that some of them don’t merit closer attention.

But no one can forget Guernica, or Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, or Picasso’s portraits of a sobbing Dora Maar, or his painting of a stoic Gertrude Stein, or his Cubist still lifes, or his Blue Period harlequins. That’s the implicit assertion of many exhibitions that appeared in museums and galleries this year that aimed to show Picasso’s enduring influence on contemporary artists. The sheer existence of these shows suggests that dealers, artists, and curators still cling to Picasso’s legacy, even as they critique it.

Yet some may wish to forget Picasso altogether, and one of those people is the comedian Hannah Gadsby, who, in their 2018 Netflix special Nanette, dressed down art historians for continuing to worship at the altar of a man who inflicted physical and emotional abuse on the women he called his lovers. Gadsby’s Brooklyn Museum show “It’s Pablo-matic: Picasso According to Hannah Gadsby,” arguably the most talked-about Picasso show of the year, was meant to expand the critique made in Nanette. It did so by putting art by the “passionate, tormented, genius man ball-sack”—the comedian’s words—alongside feminist works from the institution’s collection.

On paper (and without an embarrassing pun for a title), this is actually not a bad idea for an exhibition. If only Gadsby had succeeded in highlighting genuine connections between Picasso and, say, Nina Chanel Abney, whose work here alluded not to his art but to Édouard Manet’s. It was clear that the women artists in the show didn’t pay much mind to Picasso—the painter Joan Semmel even admitted to as much in a companion guide to the show. Ironically, Gadsby seemed to center Picasso within art history more than these artists did.

But let’s say you really wanted to move on from Picasso. What might that look like? The French artist Sophie Calle faced that quandary when she agreed to take over the whole of Paris’s Musée Picasso several years ago. This fall, she ended up coming up with one of the very few interesting Picasso-related shows mounted this year.

Calle told Art in America that she did not want to cancel Picasso. Her solution: empty the museum of his art and fill it with her own belongings and art. She kept a select few pieces by Picasso on view, but she relegated them to the basement and concealed some of them beneath paper. In Calle’s hands, those Picassos look more like objects packed for transport than they do immovable masterpieces. They are now things that are temporary, ready to pass on to another place.

If one was to visit the Musée Picasso right now, expecting to see Blue and Rose Period paintings and Cubist experiments, they might come away peeved and underwhelmed. In a strange way, that seems to echo Claude Picasso’s words from 2018: “Many people expect to make discoveries that, at the end of the day, they do not make, and they are not satisfied with what is on offer.” Perhaps Calle, in draining the Musée Picasso’s galleries of almost all things Picasso, had diagnosed the problem and found the only possible remedy for it: a temporary pause on the Picasso festivities that would allow for some actual thinking to occur. Finally, a moment of contemplation.

This documentary, which was shot partly using 3D cameras, is set mainly in two palatial French towns where Kiefer has set up shop: Barjac, the southern commune where he has erected a 98-acre compound that functions as an art installation in its own right, and Croissy-Beaubourg, the Parisian suburb where he currently runs a massive studio for his oversize art. Wenders, like many others who have visited those places, is clearly in awe of what Kiefer has done at both.

At many points in Anselm, Wenders’s camera sweeps around Kiefer’s many creations at Barjac. At dawn, it romantically encircles Kiefer’s steel sculptures of dresses, sans wearers; sometimes they are outfitted with objects like open books or metal globes for heads. In the fog, it traces Kiefer as he walks amid a suite of his towers that rise high into the air. On a sunny day, it floats godlike above it all, revealing the vast compound in all its glory.

Rarely, if ever, does Wenders show anyone other than Kiefer traipsing through Barjac, which dates back to the Renaissance. Perhaps that makes sense, given that the compound, known as La Ribaute, only opened to the public last year. (It’s also a two-hour drive from Marseille, not exactly a tourist destination itself.) But Wenders’s choice to depict a solitary Kiefer affirms this cloying film’s belief in the artist as a powerful soloist without really interrogating that line of thinking.

Witness the scenes set in Croissy-Beauborg, where Kiefer is shown creating paintings so big, they must be wheeled around. Most times, Kiefer is shown alone, slopping chunky paint onto his vast landscapes.

Yet it takes roughly half the film’s runtime to realize that Kiefer actually gets a good bit of help. We finally see assistants doing the hard stuff—melting down lead and gathering straw for Kiefer to apply to his canvases. Wenders, clearly fascinated by the artist’s sinewy body and the muscular prowess seemingly required to create such gigantic work, trains his attention mainly on Kiefer, who, donning a uniform of a black T-shirt, wields a flamethrower on these paintings to scorch them. Mostly not pictured: the people who help put out the fires, so that the works don’t burn to a crisp.

Some would prefer those paintings to be set ablaze entirely. Within the German art world, and in some cases beyond, Kiefer has been a controversial figure. During the ’80s, when his career was at its peak, Kiefer was criticized for resuscitating ideas and themes held up by the Nazis—the philosophies of Martin Heidegger, a faith in the German landscape. It did not help that Kiefer did a performance series during the ’60s in which he visited famous sites and photographed himself doing the Nazi salute while wearing his father’s Wehrmacht uniform. In 1975, art historian Benjamin H. D. Buchloh famously quipped that Kiefer was a fascist who thought he was an antifascist.

Wenders’s film does not elide these accusations. He features old interviews from around the time that Kiefer represented Germany at the 1980 Venice Biennale, where he showed his gigantic landscapes displaying barren fields. Were these works, with their emphasis on the greatness of the German landscape, a variation on a Nazi theme? Not quite, Kiefer tells a German journalist. “Because I was born in 1945, I have the chance to take up the subject again,” he says. Wenders doesn’t press it further.

In fact, he doesn’t press much with Kiefer, who rarely speaks on camera with Wenders. To its credit, Anselm is not a talking head–style documentary because it doesn’t have much talking at all. Twenty minutes passes before Kiefer’s voice is even heard; much of the musings about his art are intoned in a breathy, dense voiceover primarily by the artist. Instead, Wenders works observationally, conjuring the same melancholy struck through with awe that Kiefer does in the footage of him at work, sometimes in darkened spaces where he paints over images projected onto the canvas.

There are other artsy flourishes too. Anselm is being released in 3D, a format Wenders has used previously in the excellent 2011 documentary Pina, about choreographer Pina Bausch. But whereas Pina makes good use of its extra dimension to make the dancing feel more immersive, Anselm mainly feels like a further attempt to monumentalize its subject, not that he really needs it. (There are plenty of shots of Kiefer’s art in close-up, by the way, but his paintings, flat as their ideas may be, don’t require the added depth to make clear just how textured their surfaces are.)  

Then there are the reenactments, which see actors playing Kiefer at multiple stages in his life. In one, a young-ish Kiefer traverses a snowy field and snaps a picture with his camera. That picture then becomes a painting that stands for a lot: the coldness of the West German psyche, the untappable past hidden beneath the snow, maybe even the Blood and Soil metaphor used by the Nazis. Wenders’s reimagining of Kiefer’s process is meant to portray his tortured mindset. But the scene comes off as overly fraught, weighted down by the same baggage that many have claimed hinders Kiefer’s art.

Wenders’s point, perhaps, is really that Kiefer cannot run away from history. Neither ought we as viewers, Wenders seems to suggest, because the past is all around us, even when we can’t see it. Spoiler alert: by the film’s end, the actors playing Kiefer commune with the artist himself in expressive interludes set at Venice’s Palazzo Strozzi, where, in 2022, he memorably mounted his paintings floor to ceiling. But if we must return to the past, is it not too much to hope for something new to be said about it? The myths peddled in Anselm are the same ones that have been repeated over and over about Kiefer. Then again, maybe this is the point. Wenders includes footage from 1991, shot on the occasion of a Neue Nationalgalerie show in Berlin, in which an interviewer asks Kiefer if he’s retreating into falsehoods about German history. “There is no such thing as escaping into myth,” Kiefer tersely responds. “Because myth is present.”

You could travel all the way to West Palm Beach to visit ARTnews Top 200 Collector Beth Rudin DeWoody’s collection or take in closer ones like those of the Rubell Family and Jorge Pérez. At the museums, the offerings range from a disappointing solo for Miami-based Hernan Bas to a standout survey for Charles Gaines at the Institute of Contemporary Art. 

Below, a look at some of the good and the bad on view in South Florida ahead of the fair.

Collectors with an Eye

DeWoody and her curatorial team, Maynard Monrow and Laura Dvorkin, are on a roll this year. Those who made the trek to West Palm Beach to visit her private exhibition space, the Bunker Artspace, could find a group of spectacular exhibitions that acted as a testament to the depth of DeWoody’s collection. Thankfully, those shows also don’t take themselves too seriously.

The best of them was “Utility,” set in a gallery decked out to look like a utility closet. It was filled mostly with sculptural pieces depicting everyday household items, like a Target bag by Lucia Hierro, an iron by Willie Cole, and a copper FedEx box by Walead Beshty. But the starriest show was “Family Affair,” the result of a yearlong dialogue between DeWoody and dealer Peter Harkawik.

“Family Affair” is a maximalist, salon-style exhibition that is teeming with gems, some of which are placed in conversation with one another. There’s a wall devoted to works by members of the Saar family: Betye and her daughters Alison and Lezley. And there’s a section for the Mullicans: Lee and his wife, the painter Luchita Hurtado, plus their children Matt and Lucy. Harkawik, in an essay accompanying the show, says that his exhibition has “no curatorial position, nor does it make attempts at comprehensiveness, concision or timeliness.” Rather than making a grand statement about the art included, it makes the case for how creativity is passed down among the generations.

DeWoody kept especially busy this year, and with Monrow, Dvorkin, and Zoe Lukov, she curated the exhibition “Gimme Shelter” for the Historic Hampton House Museum of Culture & Art. A former Green Book Hotel, the venue was Miami’s only luxury hotel for African Americans during Jim Crow–era segregation. Presenting contemporary art upstairs—by the likes of Richard Mayhew, Carrie Mae Weems, Nick Cave, Terry Adkins, Lauren Halsey,Christopher Myers, Bony Ramirez, Kandy G Lopez, Devin Reynolds, and Moises Salazar—alongside two preserved rooms where Martin Luther King Jr. and Muhammad Ali once stayed was truly special. That the sense of history was palpable and its meeting cutting-edge, contemporary art poignant. That the Historic Hampton House was almost demolished more than 20 years ago shows just important it is to hold onto history like this.

Also in Miami proper, Jorge Pérez’s El Espacio 23 has “To Weave the Sky,” expertly curated by Tobias Ostrander, the Tate’s adjunct curator for Latin American art. Here, textiles meet abstract works, resulting in pure beauty. A recently acquired Lee Krasner work from 1951 and a 1973 Joan Mitchell hang near a woven floor piece by Ximena Garrido-Lecca. Elsewhere, an Etel Adnan tapestry is shown alongside her enamoring paintings.

The close-by Rubell Museum has given over several rooms to LA-based artists, including Patrick Martinez, Danie Cansino, Mario Ayala, Noah Davis, Sayre Gomez, Alfonso Gonzalez Jr., and Lauren Halsey. You will want to spend time with them all. And in the Design District, Craig Robins hosted a reception to see the works on view from his collection in the offices of his Dacra Development, while the Juan Carlos Maldonado Collection has recently moved to a new space and has on view works from his deep holdings of international geometric abstraction, including Gego, Josef Albers, Kenneth Noland, Noboru Takayama, César Paternosto, Glenda León, and Alexander Apóstol. Miami’s private collections continue to play to their strengths.

The State of Museums

While I was in West Palm Beach, before heading to the Bunker, I checked out the Norton Museum of Art, which has a significant collection of European, American, and Chinese art. While the older stuff is middling at best there, it’s clear that the museum has built up a formidable contemporary art collection. Works by Awol Erizku, Gisela Colón, and Cheyenne Julien—all acquired within in the past few years—show that the curators have their fingers on the pulse.

The state of museums in Miami and Miami Beach, where quantity trumps quality, is direr. Take the Bass in Miami Beach, which is staging so many shows that one devoted to Etel Adnan, an important artist whose spare landscapes are enchanting, ended up in a glorified hallway. An exhibition about Nam June Paik and his connections to Miami also didn’t feel scholarly enough to merit much attention.

The most buzzed-about Bass show, a solo exhibition for Hernan Bas, was another big disappointment. I’ve never been a fan of Bas’s painterly aesthetic; his handling of the figure is a bit uninspired, and his focus on specifically white gay subject matter has started to feel retrograde. But I went into the exhibition with an open mind, hoping to be swayed. I left feeling even less convinced than I was before.

Titled “The Conceptualists,” this series has Bas imaging different types of conceptual artists who take exacting approaches. The work that opens the show is also the first in the series, an artist who “exclusively mixes his paints with water from Niagara Falls,” per the work’s title. I’ll admit it made me chuckle. But further along was less compelling subject matter: artists who work with popsicle sticks, make snow angels out of blood, take Polaroids of themselves and put them on milk cartons. Conceptual art is an easy punching bag, and these tableaux featuring interchangeable white twinks are low blows.

Ironically, the biggest work in the show, the 21-foot-wide Conceptual artist #37 (he exclusively paints portraits of conceptual artists who have never existed), seems to assert Bas as a conceptual artist. In it, an artist stands in his studio surrounded with the various studies for the other artists as well as the calling cards of their practices. Good conceptual art is all about ways of working—how one executes an idea. Ironically, Bas doesn’t seem very interested in thinking much about it all. If he tried any of these approaches, he’d realize how bad the art is.

By the way, it’s worth remembering that although Art Basel Miami Beach is a selling event, museums are not immune to the whims of market either. Several works from this series have already been shown in the past year at two of the artist’s galleries, Victoria Miro in London and Lehmann Maupin in New York, who also provided support to the show. A few of the works at the Bass have been scooped up by collectors, who can now boast that their painting has the bona fides of being shown in a museum.

Across Biscayne Bay, at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, most shows also promise more than they offer. Exhibitions for the Egyptian-born nonagenarian Ahmed Morsi and the young Brooklynite Sasha Gordon are being billed as firsts for these respective artists, but they’re formless and small. These are mainly just milestones to put on the artists’ CVs. In the case of Morsi, a 13-painting show isn’t going to reveal much that hasn’t already been covered by his acclaimed 2017 retrospective at the Sharjah Art Foundation. As for Gordon, I was hoping to be learn a bit more about why the art world is buzzing so much about this young artist, but failed to do so.

There is, however, a solid Charles Gaines survey at the ICA. Focusing on works from the early ’90s to today, the two-floor show is highlighted by Falling Rock (2000–2023), a grandfather clock–like structure in which a 65-pound chunk of granite is lowered toward a sheet of glass every ten minutes. When I entered the gallery, the granite happened to crash into the glass, shattering it. It provided a welcome shock to the system amid mostly bland museum offerings here in Miami.