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      The Works of Christo and Jean-Claude Are Experiencing a Revival

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      Known for their outsized and revolutionary art projects, the couple’s work is seen again in Florida, New York and Germany.It was 42 years ago. Miami awoke to a strange, crooked line of hot pink images floating in the waters of panoramic Biscayne Bay.Eleven small islands had been wrapped in wide, rippling swaths of pink plastic. They were almost glowing as the morning sun swept over the beaches and skyscrapers of the city. Crowds came out in helicopters and speedboats and the family car. Some people perched on condo balconies.It was the work of Christo and his wife, Jeanne-Claude, the European artists who had wrapped the Reichstag building in Berlin, the Pont Neuf bridge in Paris and run a billowing, tall white nylon fence 24.5 miles over the cattle ranges just north of San Francisco and into the Pacific Ocean.People flew in from Europe and around the world to see the show, and collectors and museum directors and many others say it lifted the curtain on Miami as a city of natural beauty that would eventually become a dazzling global art center.“It was a world happening,” said Norman Braman, a former owner of the Philadelphia Eagles, a collector and a Miami car dealer with about a dozen brands, from Hyundai to Rolls-Royce.But it was a tough time for Miami. Cocaine seemed to be everywhere. Gunmen were in the streets. Time magazine had put the city on its cover as “Paradise Lost.” In 1984 — a year after the extravaganza on the bay — the “Miami Vice” TV show took the city’s crime and fashion into American living rooms.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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      TEFAF New York Keeps Its Focus on the Classics In a Turbulent Time

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      With the art market outlook uncertain, the New York fair aims to keep collectors coming, with a wide array of art and (relatively) less expensive prices.When the European Fine Art Foundation (TEFAF) held its very first New York fair at the historic Park Avenue Armory in 2016, the global art market was in robust health: Art sales had marked a near-record of $64 billion worldwide in the preceding year, and were at a peak in the United States, according to an art market report by the cultural economist Clare McAndrew.As TEFAF New York prepares to welcome visitors again — running from May 9 through 13, and coinciding with the closely watched May auctions — the outlook is downright cloudy. Global art sales tumbled for the second year in a row in 2024, totaling an estimated $57.5 billion, and the U.S. market was down 9 percent from the previous year, according to the recent Art Basel and UBS Global Art Market Report. More recently, stock markets have been jittery since President Trump announced sweeping tariffs on countries around the world on April 2, then said he would back down on tariffs on goods from most countries, except China, for 90 days. Economic turbulence has an immediate impact on the net worth — and the collecting appetite — of those who buy art.“The volatility that you see in the markets writ large is reflected in the art market,” said Alex Logsdail, chief executive of the Lisson Gallery, an international art dealership. He said business had “slowed significantly,” though it was “still happening” and “has not fallen off a cliff” as it did at the time of the 2008 global financial crisis.“This is a funny thing for me to say out loud, but it’s true: Nobody needs any of the things we are selling,” he said. Collecting art is “a question of want and desire and passion and confidence. It is up to us to create those conditions,” regardless of the economic context, he added.Lisson has exhibited at TEFAF New York’s spring fair from its first iteration in 2017, and Logsdail served for a time on its selection committee (which decides which galleries will get booths). He said TEFAF New York was well positioned for the current circumstances, because in unstable economic conditions, the focus turns to quality and value, and to “well-tested” and affordably priced objects. And right now, he said, “people are taking a very active interest in artists whose prices are quite low.”Among the works showing at Lisson’s TEFAF booth this spring are works by Sean Scully, including “Wall Tappan Deep Red” (2025).Sean Scully / Courtesy Lisson GalleryWe 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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      Art to See on Day Trips From New York City This Spring

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      Exhibitions and discoveries await in New Jersey, the Hudson Valley and the Catskills, and on the East End of Long Island.The busy calendar of fairs and auctions in May makes New York City an attractive hub of activity for the art crowd. But if a breather is needed or desired, a day trip may be in order. Here are a few art destinations worth considering.The Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University, about an hour from Penn Station by train, has drawn record attendance since “Indigenous Identities: Here, Now & Always” opened in February. The show is a broad survey of 97 Indigenous artists.McKay Imaging PhotographyZimmerli Art Museum, New Brunswick, N.J.Located at Rutgers University, about an hour from Penn Station by train, the Zimmerli — with a substantial collection strong in American, European and Soviet nonconformist art — has long been overshadowed by New York City institutions. But the museum has drawn record attendance since “Indigenous Identities: Here, Now & Always” opened in February. The show is a broad survey of 97 well-established and emerging Indigenous artists including Jeffrey Gibson, Terran Last Gun, Wendy Red Star and Marie Watt. It was curated by the artist Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, who was honored with a Whitney Museum retrospective in 2023 and died at 85, a week before the Zimmerli show opened.On view through Dec. 21, it is the largest of more than 30 exhibitions that Smith organized throughout her career in the United States. “Jaune helped define Native art history based on the artists she gave a platform to over the years,” said the Zimmerli director, Maura Reilly. Rather than apply an authoritative curatorial style, Smith asked each artist “how they wanted to be represented,” Reilly said, “very different from how I’ve worked typically.” Smith called the show “a celebration of life,” Reilly recalled: “She said it was about ‘kinship, community, survivance, solidarity and resilience.’”A piece from “Emily Cole: Ceramics, Flora & Contemporary Responses,” at the Thomas Cole National Historic Site.Thomas Cole National Historic Site Thomas Cole National Historic Site, Catskill, N.Y.Two centuries ago, the artist Thomas Cole took a momentous boat ride up the Hudson River to Catskill, where the scenery inspired him to found the Hudson River School of landscape painting. He also fell in love with Maria Bartow and moved in 1836 to her family home in Catskill, painting the view from their porch of the Catskill Mountains more than any other.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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      Painting From Memory, Salman Toor Conjures Passion and Freedom

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      Salman Toor needed a better perspective.Backing slowly away from his easel, the 42-year-old artist closed one eye and raised a thumb. He arched his back to gain a few more centimeters of distance and then snapped upright. Exasperation led to acceptance. He buried any doubts and raised a paintbrush, once again, to the emerald-green portrait of his mystery man in heart-shaped sunglasses.There is only one rule in the airy Brooklyn loft where Toor paints: Everything must come from memory.Fleeting impressions of a friend’s face, the arch of a lover’s eyebrows, and a smirk maybe sourced from a Velázquez drawing merge into the composite creatures that occupy his paintings.But there are no photographs, wooden models or reclining muses allowed in the studio, which is mostly empty except for a couch, some plants and a table used to hold brushes, pigments and oils.On a morning in March, the walls were covered with dozens of new drawings, paintings and etchings that Toor has created over the last few years in anticipation of his largest exhibition to date, “Wish Maker,” which opens May 2 across Luhring Augustine’s two galleries in Manhattan. The show aims to reintroduce the artist — who was born in Lahore, Pakistan — as one of the most fascinating painters of his generation, capable of remixing old European techniques into contemporary scenes of queer desire and the immigrant experience.This was Toor’s first chance at seeing everything in one room to decide which pictures he is comfortable exhibiting at a time when his work has become more politically conflicted and emotionally raw.“There is a lingering question,” the artist said. “What am I doing here in America?”Toor is one of the most fascinating painters of his generation, capable of remixing old European techniques into contemporary scenes of queer desire and the immigrant experience.Receiving his United States citizenship in 2019 and committing to life in New York felt like he was leaving his family behind to some degree. His parents remained supportive but distant; they have never seen one of his major shows in person because, he suggested, of the frank depictions of queer sexuality that run counter to their conservative community in Pakistan.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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      How Art Stars Are Made

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      We explain how a few big players wield enormous influence in the art world.Museums provide the first draft of art history. They decide which artists get to share wall space with masters like Michelangelo, Rembrandt and Picasso.Choosing which artists to exhibit requires museums to consider ultrasubjective questions about, say, the artistic merit of a painting or the historical relevance of a sculpture. The task has traditionally fallen to curators, who maintain their scholarly independence and grapple with the complexities of mounting shows.But in recent years, museums have increasingly turned to another source for logistical and, at times, financial support for their shows: major commercial art galleries.The scale of these partnerships was largely unexamined until now. This morning, The Times published an analysis by my colleague Julia Halperin and me of more than 350 solo exhibitions by contemporary artists in New York’s biggest art museums over the last six years.We found that nearly a quarter of those exhibitions featured artists who were represented by just 11 major galleries. These were no ordinary mom-and-pop dealerships but “mega-galleries,” as professionals call them — an elite slice of the art world that accounts for a sizable chunk of the $57.5 billion art market.In today’s newsletter, I’ll explain how the increasingly close relationship between museums and commercial galleries is shaping whose work is shown to the public.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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      In Philadelphia, Art Shows by Women Teem With Eros and Audacity

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      Devotees of the human figure, Cecily Brown and Christina Ramberg turn the Benjamin Franklin Parkway into a showplace for the female gaze.Is there such a thing as being too tall to be an artist? Christina Ramberg, the subject of a long-overdue retrospective at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, stood 6-foot-1 and considered her height a liability. She grew up in the Eisenhower era, when the average American woman was 5-foot-4 and aspired to have an hourglass figure, and she sewed her own clothes, since standard sizes didn’t fit. As if wanting to somehow shrink herself, she painted images of the female body constrained by fabric — corseted, cinched, girdled and even bound.By a nice coincidence, Cecily Brown, a generation younger than Ramberg and the subject of a retrospective at the nearby Barnes Foundation, is also a devotee of the human figure — but unbound. If Ramberg’s imagery evokes a period when women were tethered to traditional roles and constricting fashions, Brown’s world is just the opposite: untethered and uninhibited.Brown is known for exuberant semi-abstractions, in which gleaming nudes in shifting gradations of salmon pink turn up in French forests and other far-flung places. The two artists could not be more different, but their work teems with eros, emotion and painterly audacity, and it has turned Philadelphia’s Benjamin Franklin Parkway, the site of both museums, into a temporary capital of the much-heralded female gaze.Christina Ramberg, “Untitled,” 1970-1971. Felt-tip pens, with graphite and colored pencil on ivory wove graph paper.via Philadelphia Museum of ArtRamberg, who died in 1995 and remains underknown, was officially a Chicago Imagist, one of a dozen or so figurative artists who defined their work in opposition to New York, the country’s No. 1 painting town. Spurning abstraction, the Chicago Imagists worked on the margins of cartooning and surrealism. They pursued the rough, often raunchy edges of American culture with a zealousness that made the art of both coasts seem relatively polite.Ramberg’s work is easy to recognize, even from the next room. She painted cropped, centered, fastidiously crafted images that isolated a female hand or a vintage hairdo against a blank ground, as if turning them into heraldic emblems. And she can fairly be called a connoisseur of undergarments. With nearly devotional detail, she captured the texture of different fabrics, contrasting the smooth, blue-black sheen of satin bands with the intricate patterns embedded in lace. Her colors, compared to the screaming hues of other Imagists, tend to be soft and muted, with an emphasis on peachy beiges and grayed lavenders reminiscent of women’s slips.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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      Sculpture Museum in Dallas Names a New Director

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      Carlos Basualdo, a veteran curator who has spent most of his career at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, will take over the Nasher Sculpture Center next month.Carlos Basualdo visited Dallas for the first time in October with interest in seeing the Nasher Sculpture Center, a prized small museum. It mingles 20th-century European sculpture by Pablo Picasso, Constantin Brancusi and Alberto Giacometti with contemporary works by American artists like Arlene Shechet and Carol Bove.“I fell in love with the building and the garden,” said Basualdo, a veteran curator who has spent most of his career at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.He will be returning to the Nasher on May 12 with the title of director, his first time overseeing an institution.The Nasher is relatively intimate, with a collection of about 500 works and an annual operating budget of about $13 million, but it has long commanded an outsize reputation for its holdings. It is housed in a jewel of a building: a light-flooded, travertine-and-glass structure by Renzo Piano. From the museum’s entrance you can see, in a nearly seamless glance, through the interior and across the length of the sculpture garden out back.A sculpture by Otobong Nkanga at the Nasher, which has a collection of about 500 works.Nitashia Johnson for The New York Times“When I walked into the place, coming out of the street, it was super-powerful,” Basualdo said. “It’s open, it’s very present, it’s not ostentatious, it’s generous, it’s full of light.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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      Brad Holland, Subversive Artist Who Reinvented American Illustration, Dies at 81

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      Brad Holland, an idiosyncratic artist who upended American illustration in the 1970s with his startling imagery for Playboy magazine and The New York Times’s opinion page, spawning a generation of imitators, died on March 27 in Manhattan. He was 81.His brother, Thomas Holland, said he died in a hospital from complications of heart surgery.Mr. Holland was in his late 20s and contributing to Playboy and a few of New York City’s underground papers, including The New York Review of Sex and Politics and The East Village Other, when he was invited to be part of an experiment at The New York Times.In 1970, the paper had introduced what it called an Op-Ed page — the name referred to its placement opposite the editorial page — as a forum for essays and ideas. The art director of this new page, Jean-Claude Suares, was another veteran of the underground presses; while working at The Times, he was also designing Screw magazine.For The Times, Mr. Suares wanted to commission standout art to accompany the writing, but he didn’t want to illustrate the themes of the articles literally. He was an admirer of Mr. Holland’s work and recruited him, along with other notable insurgents, including Ralph Steadman, the British caricaturist who had been illustrating Hunter Thompson’s gonzo adventures, and a coterie of European political cartoonists.One of three illustrations for a 1968 essay by P.G. Wodehouse, “The Lost Art of Domestic Service,” that were Mr. Holland’s first assignment for Playboy magazine. He would work for the magazine for a quarter-century.Brad Holland/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New YorkMr. Holland had already attracted attention with the gorgeous rococo images he made to illustrate Playboy’s “Ribald Classics,” a series that reprinted erotic stories by the likes of Ovid, Jonathan Swift and Mark Twain. His work could be surreal, grotesque and beautiful, and it was often inscrutable. It recalled the satirical engravings of the 19th-century caricaturist Thomas Nast and the more terrifying paintings of Francisco Goya.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