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    Jillian Sackler, Philanthropist Who Defended Husband’s Legacy, Dies at 84

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    Though the Sackler name was tarnished over Purdue Pharma’s role in the opioid crisis, Arthur Sackler’s should not be, she insisted; a company founder, he died well before the trouble began.Jillian Sackler, an arts philanthropist who struggled to preserve the reputation of her husband, Arthur, by distinguishing him from his two younger Sackler brothers and their descendants, whose aggressive marketing and false advertising on behalf of their pharmaceutical company, Purdue Pharma, triggered the opioid epidemic, died on May 20 in Manhattan. She was 84.Her death, in a hospital, was from esophageal cancer, said Miguel Benavides, her health proxy.Dr. Arthur Sackler, a psychiatrist and researcher who became a pioneer in medical marketing, bought Purdue Frederick, originally based in New York City, in the 1950s and gave each of his brothers a one-third share. They incorporated the company as Purdue Pharma in 1991. (Its headquarters are now in Stamford, Conn.)Dr. Sackler died in 1987 — nine years before the opioid OxyContin was marketed by the company as a powerful painkiller. Shortly after his death, his estate sold his share of the company to his billionaire brothers, Raymond and Mortimer, for $22.4 million.The company’s misleading advertising claim that OxyContin was nonaddictive prompted doctors to overprescribe it beginning in the 1990s. The proliferation of the medication ruined countless lives of people who became dependent on it.Ms. Sackler in 2012. She spent decades defending her husband, who died nine years before the opioid crisis.Fairchild Archive/Penske Media, via Getty ImagesIn 2021, the company proposed a bankruptcy settlement in which members of the Sackler family agreed to pay $4.2 billion over nine years to resolve civil claims related to the opioid crisis. In return, they sought immunity from future lawsuits.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Lorna Simpson: Painting as a Weapon of Freedom

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      In a small but haunting survey at the Met, a celebrated conceptual artist shifts gears, with meteoric results.Some of our most interesting artists have one thing in common. They do outstanding work early on, then, rather than coasting by recycling that success, they complicate it, even change gears.The artist Lorna Simpson is one these restless souls, and she has the technical and imaginative chops to make major changes work, as is evident in a corner-turning retrospective of paintings, “Source Notes,” now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.In the late 1980s and 1990s, Simpson gained a strong reputation as a standout among a new generation of conceptual photographers and artists who — following “Pictures Generation” progenitors like Cindy Sherman a decade earlier — used photographic techniques somewhat the way painters used paint. Through a traditionally point-and-shoot, ostensibly reality-capturing medium, they created entirely fictional images.Simpson began as a straight-up picture-taker. A native New Yorker — born in Brooklyn in 1960, and raised in Queens — she studied photography at the School of Visual Arts and initially identified her work with the genre of “street photography.” Graduate school at the University of California, San Diego, where Conceptualism was the reigning mode, added a new dimension to that early impulse. So was the perception that her career opportunities in the field were limited: “Being a Black woman photographer was like being nobody,” as she has put it. So she saw no reason not to experiment both with her medium and with the subjects that interested her, namely the politics of gender and race.To that end she developed a studio-based style that combined staged images, notably shots of unnamed Black women posing in plain white shifts against a neutral backdrop, their faces turned away from the camera or out of its range, with results that evoke voyeuristic 19th-century ethnological documents, mug shots, and performance art stills. Most of these images have incorporated short texts that hint at explanatory narratives, some violent, without actually providing anything explicit.Detail of “5 Properties,” 2018. Ebony and Jet magazines, poly sleeves, bronze, plaster, glass.Dana Golan for The New York TimesCreating on aura of mystery has been her generative M.O., one she has applied to film and installation work as well as to still photography. What has changed in the past decade is her primary medium. Around 2014, she began, for the first time since her pre-art-school years, to focus on painting, and the Met exhibition is a tight but monumental survey of this new work.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Rosana Paulino, a Brazilian Artist Who Wields Poetry and Persistence

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      Rosana Paulino, one of Brazil’s most influential artists, works from a narrow three-story house in Pirituba, a neighborhood of simple homes and shops that huddle along the hillside in the northwest outskirts of São Paulo. Her small balcony looks toward a pocket park, a railway line and a nature preserve on a ridge that belies the urban sprawl beyond.The daughter of a cleaner and a house painter, Paulino has pushed her way with stubborn insistence from modest origins in the Black working class into Brazil’s top institutions — at one time working clerical jobs for three years to pay for prep classes to get into the best universities. But she remains rooted in São Paulo’s north-side neighborhoods, where Black culture formed around the rail yards and the warehouses where laborers transferred coffee and other crops before shipping them abroad.“Espada de Iansã,” watercolor and graphite on paper, from the Senhora das Plantas series. Paulino’s female figures seem to merge with Brazilian plants that carry ecological or spiritual symbolism.Gabriela Portilho for The New York Times“It’s very important for me to stay here,” Paulino, 58, said, on a muggy afternoon in April, as a tropical rainstorm gathered. “It’s that old story — you start to have a name and money and so you move out of your community. No, no, no. That’s absolutely not for me.”She emerged as an artist when bourgeois tastes and Modernism dominated the museums and schools, making little space for the work and perspectives of artists from Brazil’s Black majority.Lately the climate has changed. A survey at the prestigious Pinacoteca de São Paulo museum in 2018 and participation in the 2023 São Paulo Biennial cemented Paulino’s hometown recognition; her inclusion in the 2022 Venice Biennale, with some two dozen large-scale drawings of part-human, part-plant female figures, brought visibility abroad.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Ready for Their Reboot: How Galleries Plumb Art History’s Forgotten Talent

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      Saara Pritchard, an art adviser, was visiting a friend in Miami when a painting in the bedroom caught her eye. Bordered in silver leaf, it was a close-cropped, black-and-white image of John F. Kennedy, eyes skyward and mouth slightly agape. The haunting image resembled a death mask — as if made by the love child of Andy Warhol and the Surrealist Giorgio de Chirico. Who, Pritchard wondered, had painted it?The answer was Marcia Marcus, a popular artist in the downtown New York scene in the 1960s and ’70s who had since faded from view. Pritchard, 40, set out to learn everything she could about Marcus. Within a year she was standing in the home of one of the artist’s daughters, Jane Barrell Yadav, in Yonkers, N.Y., who had more than 200 of her mother’s canvases. The paintings were packed tightly in closets and makeshift storage racks in the living room.Marcia Marcus from “The Human Situation.” Left, “Tyna, Alvin, Baby,” 1970-71; right, “Family II,” 1970. The two girls are modeled on her daughters Kate, left, and Jane, with their father. via Lévy Gorvy Dayan, New York; Photo by Elisabeth BernsteinThrough June 21, many of those artworks are on view at Lévy Gorvy Dayan, a stately Upper East Side gallery, as part of “The Human Situation,” an exhibition conceived by Pritchard that put Marcus’s work in dialogue with two better-known female painters from the era, Alice Neel and Sylvia Sleigh. Over the past two and a half years, Pritchard has worked alongside Barrell Yadav and her sister Kate Prendergast to piece together Marcus’s story in the hope of turning her from an art-historical footnote into a blue-chip star.Marcus is among a growing group of artists who have benefited from what could be called “the rediscovery industrial complex”: a cottage industry within the art market that looks to the past to find figures — often women and artists of color — neglected by the establishment. By repackaging them for a contemporary audience, savvy dealers hope to enrich the art-historical canon even as they make a healthy profit.The upside can be considerable. Consider the case of the painter Lynne Drexler, who lived on a remote island in Maine. Before she died in 1999, she sold her work to tourists for as little as $50. In recent years, her lyrical landscapes have sold for more than $1 million at auction.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      The Creativity Challenge: Start With Some Quick Doodles

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      <!–> [–><!–> –><!–> [–><!–>Many of us have a narrow definition of creativity. We think it’s a rare gift reserved for artists. But we’re all creative in some way, whether or not we think so. And being creative comes with big health benefits. It can energize you, sharpen your ideas and problem-solving skills and act as […] More

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      10-Minute Challenge: A Surrealist Scene by Gertrude Abercrombie

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      Today, we bring you another focus challenge, in which we invite you to spend uninterrupted time looking at a piece of art. This one is called “Where or When (Things Past),” painted by the Chicago artist Gertrude Abercrombie in 1948. (Sign up here to be notified about future challenges, which are published on the first […] More

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      Trump says he fired National Portrait Gallery chief in latest conflict with arts

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      Donald Trump says he is firing the first female director of the National Portrait Gallery, which contained a caption that referenced the attack on the US Capitol that his supporters carried out in early 2021.The president announced the termination on Friday in a post on his social media platform that accused Sajet – born in Nigeria, raised in Australia and a citizen of the Netherlands – of being “a strong supporter” of diversity initiatives that his administration opposes as well as “highly partisan”. He cited no evidence for either claim.Legal experts, including Eric Columbus, a former litigator for the January 6 select committee, suggested Trump does not have the power to fire Sajet, since the gallery is part of the Smithsonian, which is not run by the executive branch.In its collection of portraits of American presidents, the gallery had this text about Trump: “Impeached twice, on charges of abuse of power and incitement of insurrection after supporters attacked the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, he was acquitted by the Senate in both trials. After losing to Joe Biden in 2020, Trump mounted a historic comeback in the 2024 election. He is the only president aside from Grover Cleveland (1837-1908) to have won a nonconsecutive second term.”Sajet arrived in the US with her family in 1997, held positions at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and the Historical Society of Pennsylvania and was appointed director of the National Portrait Gallery in 2013, according to a Guardian profile of her.The National Portrait Gallery is an art museum in Washington DC that opened in 1968 and is part of the Smithsonian Institution. It boasts the only complete collection of presidential portraits outside the White House.After beginning his second presidency in January, Trump issued an executive order directing the removal of “improper, divisive or anti-American ideology” from the institution’s storied museums.Sajet had said the gallery under her leadership tried “very hard to be even-handed when we talk about people and that’s the key”.“Everyone has an opinion about American presidents, good, bad and indifferent,” Sajet said. “We hear it all, but generally I think we’ve done pretty well.” More

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      Ben Shahn’s Social Realist Art Feels Relevant Again in Landmark Survey

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      An old master of the Great Depression painted a portrait of America as it still may be.With some artists, there’s one work that seems to capture their essential achievement.In the long-overdue retrospective now at the Jewish Museum in New York, the entire artistic project of the American painter Ben Shahn comes clear in a single fascinating painting from 1940 called “Contemporary American Sculpture.” It depicts a gallery at the Whitney Museum hosting sculptures from that year’s survey of the nation’s artists — except that Shahn, left out of the Annual, reimagines the walls surrounding those stylized modern works as covered in his own realist paintings.Those show scenes of everyday life during the Great Depression — decrepit workers’ housing; a farmer by his shack; poor Black women at a welfare hospital — depicted as though the Whitney’s walls have been pierced to reveal the all-too-real world out beyond. It recalls how Renaissance murals pierced church walls to let in the more-real world of the Bible.“Contemporary American Sculpture” captures what’s at stake in the most potent works in “Ben Shahn, On Nonconformity,” as this revelatory survey is called. Those works use the time-honored art of painting to make the modern world, and its signature troubles, as present as Shahn can manage. The effect is gripping, and feels utterly relevant for the troubled moment we are living in now.For a decade or so on either side of World War II, Shahn’s achievements made him an art star, earning him a major show at the Museum of Modern Art and honors including a place in the American Pavilion of the 1954 Venice Biennale, shared with the Abstract Expressionist Willem de Kooning.Ben Shahn, “Scotts Run, West Virginia,” 1937. During the Great Depression, Shahn felt sympathy for Americans suffering the deprivations he grew up with. (This painting was based on a photograph he took.)Estate of Ben Shahn/Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY; via The Jewish MuseumBut it was de Kooning and his ilk who went on to dominate the art world; as Cold War reaction took hold, Shahn, a dedicated leftist, saw a slow but unbroken decline in his critical fortunes. There has barely been an uptick since. The Jewish Museum show is Shahn’s first notable survey in the United States since one at the same museum in 1976. Featuring 175 artworks and objects, photos by Shahn and his peers as well as illuminating ephemera, it was organized abroad, at the Reina Sofía museum in Madrid, where it was a big hit in 2023; the curator Laura Katzman had to work hard to find an American museum to take it.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Venice Biennale 2026 Will Realize Koyo Kouoh’s Vision After Her Death

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      Koyo Kouoh had spent nearly seven months preparing the art event’s main exhibition before she died this month. Her team will complete the work and open the show in May 2026.The organizers of the Venice Biennale announced on Tuesday that next year’s edition would go ahead as planned, despite the sudden death this month of Koyo Kouoh, the curator who was overseeing its main exhibition.Kouoh died of cancer on May 10, just days before she was scheduled to reveal the title and theme of the event.Cristiana Costanzo, a Biennale spokeswoman, told reporters at a news conference in Venice that next year’s edition would run from May 9 through Nov. 22, and that a team of curators, art historians and editors who had been working with Kouoh would deliver her exhibition “as she conceived and defined it.”Kouoh had been preparing the exhibition for almost seven months, Costanzo said: Working with a five-member team, she had selected some of the participating artists and artworks, and given it a title, “In Minor Keys.”During Tuesday’s news conference, members of the team used Kouoh’s words to present her plan.Gabe Beckhurst Feijoo, an art historian from the team, said that Kouoh had wanted her Biennale to be “neither a litany of commentary on world events, nor an inattention or escape from compounding and continuously intersecting crises.” Instead, Beckhurst Feijoo said, Kouoh had wanted to present “a radical reconnection with art’s natural habitat and role in society — that is the emotional, the visual, the sensory, the affective, the subjective.”The central pavilion of the Venice Biennale, which usually hosts part of the main exhibition.Matteo de Mayda for The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More