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      In London, a Pro-Palestinian Protest Disrupts the Launch of an American Mural

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      The U.S. ambassador Jane Hartley was en route to the dedication of a climate-themed mural in London by Shepard Fairey, who created the iconic Obama ‘Hope’ poster. But then a protest began.It’s the kind of cultural exchange any diplomat would savor: A prominent American street artist paints a mural, dedicated to the cause of climate activism, on an apartment building in one of London’s hippest neighborhoods.Jane D. Hartley, the United States ambassador to Britain, who proposed the idea to the artist Shepard Fairey, has a track record in these projects. When she was ambassador to Paris from 2014 to 2017, she asked another well-known American artist, Jeff Koons, to create a sculpture to honor victims of terrorist attacks there.But when Ms. Hartley was on her way to the dedication ceremony for this latest project on Monday morning, she got word that a small band of pro-Palestinian demonstrators had gathered in the Shoreditch neighborhood, beneath the red-and-blue mural, which rises four floors above the street.They began chanting anti-American slogans and unfurling banners calling for justice for the Palestinians in Gaza — a message that seemed even more fraught than usual, given the timing on the first anniversary of the Hamas attack on Israel.It was another example of how the Israel-Gaza conflict has reverberated around the world, fueling protests, large and small, on college campuses, city squares,and in this case, in a normally tranquil neighborhood.Ms. Hartley’s security team diverted her car, while Mr. Fairey, who was on hand to greet her, hurriedly relocated with embassy staff members to a nearby café. He seemed bemused by the disruption, noting that much of his work has a protest element, even if his patron on this project was a government official.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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      Tacita Dean Draws Her Way Into the Menil

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      In the artist’s first major U.S. museum survey, she bonds with Cy Twombly through works on paper, films and photographs.During a residency at the Menil Collection in Houston last February, the British artist and filmmaker Tacita Dean spent the night in the Cy Twombly Gallery.She wanted to be surrounded by Twombly’s work, having long felt connected to the so-called Blackboard artist, who died in 2011, and in particular to his collage-drawings and preoccupation with the passage of time.“He connects to the classical world in a way that is deeply emotive,” Dean said. “I’m interested in where your mind goes when you look at one of his works. It can go to memory, it can go to envy — you think, ‘God, that’s so perfect.’”Now Dean is bringing her own monumental blackboard drawings and her rarely shown drawings on paper, found postcards, and albumen photographs to the Menil, in a show that opens on Oct. 11. The exhibition, “Tacita Dean: Blind Folly,” is her first major museum survey in the United States.“The presence of Cy Twombly in Houston really ignited the show and the conversation,” said Michelle White, senior curator at the Menil, who organized the exhibition. “It just became such a lovely point of connection.”In a recent interview at her Los Angeles studio, Dean, 58, said a focus on her drawings “is quite unusual for me,” given that shows typically focus on her films. And the artist said it is meaningful to be presenting her work in a place where Twombly’s presence is felt.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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      Arts District, Decades in the Making, in Ruins After Helene

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      The hurricane damaged an estimated 80 percent of the buildings in the River Arts District of Asheville, N.C., and upended the lives of artists who had recast the city as a cultural force.The French Broad River provided a scenic backdrop as an industrial neighborhood in Asheville transformed over the past 40 years into the River Arts District, a vibrant creative hub for art studios and galleries.More than 300 artists called the district home and its riverside vitality helped cement Asheville’s reputation as a cultural outpost, one worth settling near or venturing to as old warehouses and mills were converted into centers for both creative expression and economic growth.“There is nothing like the River Arts District in the United States and maybe even the world,” said Jeffrey Burroughs, president of River Arts District Artists, a support group. “It’s spaces where artists are in control of their businesses, their lives.”But much of the district was washed out by the floodwaters of Hurricane Helene. Buildings were swept away. Some galleries no longer exist. Creative works — some birthed decades ago — have been damaged and destroyed. Mud reigns.“It’s heartbreaking,” said Judi Jetson, founder and chair of Local Cloth, a nonprofit network of fiber artists, educators and enthusiasts. “We have three or four inches of mud inside the building and on most of our items. We’re trying to rescue whatever we can and people will take it home and wash them. The problem is a lot of us don’t have water, even at home, and nobody has electricity.”Jannette Montenegro tries to salvage items from the Cotton Mill Studios in the River Arts District.Andrew Nelles/The Tennessean, via USA Today NetworkWe 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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      From One Nonagenarian Artist to Another, a Tip of the Hat

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      Alex Katz admired a Mark di Suvero sculpture and gave it to the Brooklyn Museum. It now has pride of place in the museum’s 200th anniversary celebration.Consider two artists, now both in their 90s and both still working, who do not know each other personally despite coming up in the New York art scene around the same time.One of them, Alex Katz, became the painter of some of the most recognizable portraits of our age, the other, Mark di Suvero, a welder of huge steel sculptures that are ubiquitous wherever outdoor art is found.This is not a buddy comedy setup, but rather the philanthropic back story behind the recent permanent installation of a nearly 15-foot-tall abstract sculpture by di Suvero, “Sooner or Later” (2022), on the plaza in front of the Brooklyn Museum.The work is a gift to the museum from the Alex Katz Foundation, picked out by the painter himself, to honor the museum’s 200th anniversary.Katz, 97 and still making new paintings, went back to Paula Cooper Gallery three times to see it, before making the purchase; the gallery said that similar works are priced in a range from $3 million and $5 million.“I saw it in the window and thought it was fantastic,” said Katz, known for his striking, flattened and highly stylized portraits, frequently taking his wife, Ada, as a subject. (He had a large retrospective at the Guggenheim that began in 2022.)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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      What to See in N.Y.C. Galleries in October

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      This week in Newly Reviewed, Martha Schwendener covers Dennis Kardon’s wonderfully strange paintings, Klara Liden’s green vistas and Sheryl Sutton’s mesmerizing movements.Two BridgesDennis KardonThrough Oct. 26. Lubov, 5 East Broadway, Manhattan; 347-496-5833, lubov.nyc.Dennis Kardon, “Slashed Venus/Healed Venus,” 1989-2024, oil on linen.via Dennis Kardon, Lubov, New York, and Massimo de Carlo, Milan/London/Hong Kong/Paris/Beijing; Photo by Justin CraunDennis Kardon has been painting bodies for more than 30 years, but his approach has changed significantly over that time, as you can see in “Transgressions,” a compact survey at Lubov. Some of the earliest canvases, made in 1990, capture fragments of models Kardon hired from advertisements in downtown newspapers.There is also a wonderfully strange “Slashed Venus/Healed Venus” (1989/2024), painted after a photograph of Diego Velázquez’s “Rokeby Venus” (1647) that shows Velázquez’s painting after it was slashed with a meat cleaver by the suffragist Mary Richardson in 1914. (Interestingly, the same painting was targeted by climate-change protesters last year.) Kardon slashed his canvas, too, but “healed” it with thread, and made a few recent adjustments.Other works similarly question the boundaries between bodies and paintings. “Seeing Through Paint” (2010) is an eerie depiction of a mannequin holding a kaleidoscopic orb. There are also paintings that recall the curious compositions of Paula Rego, with human and animal figures crammed into the rectilinear spaces of a canvas.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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      Brooklyn Museum at 200 Celebrates Beauty and Art’s Hidden History

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      At 200 years young, the Brooklyn Museum, the second largest art museum in New York City, has begun celebrating the bicentennial of its founding. And it’s doing so in characteristic fashion — meaning in ways that make traditionalists crazy. It is emphatically re-emphasizing what it has, basically, long been: an institution with the heart and soul of an alternative space enclosed in the body of a traditional museum.And it does so with two large-scale season-opening projects. One is a complete rehang and rethink of its American art galleries, filtering centuries of art from two hemispheres through a post-Black Lives Matter lens. The other, less radical, is a community-based roundup of new work by more than 200 contemporary artists living and working in the borough.Let me wedge in some history here. The museum was founded in 1823 as a circulating public library in what was then the Village of Brooklyn, across the river and independent from a rivalrous Manhattan. In the mid-19th century, the library, called the Brooklyn Institute, began collecting, along with books, natural history specimens and art. (Among the first pieces acquired was a painting, “The First Harvest in the Wilderness” (1855), by the Hudson River School artist Asher B. Durand. It’s in the American galleries rehang.)Asher B. Durand, “The First Harvest in the Wilderness,” 1855.George Etheredge for The New York TimesIn 1898, what is now the museum moved into a version of its present McKim, Mead & White home where, over time, it scored some cultural coups. It was among the first United States museum to present African art as art rather than as ethnology. It organized a nervy survey of avant-garde European modernist art in 1926, three years before MoMA existed. The museum was also one of the first in the country to have an art school, and to create a conservation lab.As time went on it also courted controversy by giving space to art unwelcome elsewhere. In 1980, while two other museums backed out of a traveling tour of Judy Chicago’s “The Dinner Party,” Brooklyn not only took it in but acquired the installation for its collection. (It’s on permanent view in the museum’s Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, another Brooklyn first.)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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      What James Ensor Knew About the Masks We Wear

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      Seventy-five years after the artist’s death, the grotesque masquerades he painted aren’t so far from the manipulated faces of the present day.In our age of cheek fillers, makeup contouring and Snapchat filters, the face we show the world is often not our own. When it is this simple to manipulate how we look through cosmetics and digital media, have our masks become our selves?As unlikely as it may seem, James Ensor, a Belgian painter born in 1860, may have understood our lust for masking long before these face manipulation tools came along. Ensor painted figures whose real faces are grotesquely covered, and their new guises reveal their ugliest traits. His works offer us a society full of clowns, who know little about themselves.The case for Ensor’s prescience is being made this month in Antwerp, Belgium, where several simultaneous exhibitions are exploring the artist’s fascination with masks and masquerade as part of the 75th anniversary commemorations of Ensor’s death. Although he isn’t an international household name like his contemporaries Claude Monet, Edward Munch or Vincent van Gogh, at home in Belgium, Ensor is revered as a national treasure.Antwerp’s Royal Museum of Fine Arts, or K.S.M.K.A., which owns the largest collection of Ensor’s paintings, is presenting the lead exhibition of the commemorations, “In Your Wildest Dreams: Ensor Beyond Impressionism,” which runs through Jan. 19, 2025.Herwig Todts, a modern art curator at K.M.S.K.A., said he wanted to show that Ensor was a “game changer,” who used Impressionist brushwork techniques and colors, but then pushed them into new realms of avant-garde expressionism.One of Ensor’s most famous works, his 1890 picture “The Intrigue,” on display at K.S.M.K.A., hovers somewhere between the realistic and the Expressionist: It might be a group-portrait of carnival merrymakers, or a congregation of ghouls.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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      When Monet and Turner Found Beauty in London’s Toxic Fog

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      Monet and Turner found something sublime in the polluted 19th-century city — and maybe something darker, too.If you’ve been to London recently (or ever) you’ll probably recognize Claude Monet’s description: “Today the weather was maddening, gusts of snow, then sunshine, fog and dark weather and clear, it was magnificent but all too changeable.”Yet the French painter found London’s moody climate an inspiration, and he purposely came in only the colder months. During three visits from 1899 to 1901, he produced dozens of canvases of the city’s surging River Thames, 36 of which were shown to acclaim in Paris in 1904 but never exhibited in London.One hundred and twenty years later, the Courtauld Gallery has brought a selection of the series home for the first time in “Monet and London: Views of the Thames” (through Jan. 19, 2025). The effect is as radiant and sublime as Monet might have hoped — though today we might see those unsettled skies in a different light.“Every day I find London more beautiful to paint,” he wrote to his wife Alice from the swish Savoy Hotel, where he stayed on those visits. From his riverside balcony, the artist could observe the working waterway, chugging with boat traffic and steaming with trains on bridges above, from sunrise to sunset. Here, he would fulfill his enduring wish to “try to paint some fog effects on the Thames.”Monet’s “Charing Cross Bridge, The Thames” (1903)Alain Basset/Lyon MbaAt the Courtauld (less than half a mile from the Savoy), 21 canvases show the river in an atmospheric suite of cornflower blue, cobalt, dove gray and mauve. The choppy Thames glimmers in shades of silver and blue flecked with violet and pink, or flaming yellow, orange and crimson from the sun — “the little red ball,” Monet called it — that’s high above in a sky thick with “delicious fog.” “The extraordinary fog so very yellow,” he wrote, characterized the industrialized late-19th-century London. Locals already called it “the Big Smoke.”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