#warhols-muses

#warhols-muses

John Yau once remarked to Jasper Johns that the materials he uses - newsprint, hot wax, bedsheets - must be a conservator's nightmare. 'Yes,' Johns responded. 'It's falling apart, just like me.'

Evelyn McHale wrote in her suicide note that she didn't want her family to see 'any part' of her body. Instead, a photo of her death would become one of the most famous photographs of all time.

To call the oil paintings of Eyvind Earle "landscapes" is accurate but very sorely wanting. For more than seventy years, Earle turned his unique refracting eye on what he called the "stupendous infinity of nature," interpreting what he saw through a long lens shaped by a very particular kind of mythopoeia.

Kamrooz Aram is everywhere this year, from Mumbai Art Week to the Whitney Biennial, and critic Aruna D'Souza is grateful. She pens a beautiful meditation on his work, reading his abstract paintings as not simply a denunciation of Western modernism nor a reassertion of Islamic visual motifs, but something else entirely - something gestural, exuberant, riotous, and incomparably his own.

Bassman's photographs, in fact, looked more like illustrations. She achieved this effect through darkroom experimentation and manipulation: donning a cardboard mask with a pinhole aperture, she selectively exposed portions of the paper to light, tracing the contours of the garments until they seemed to dissolve into atmosphere.

The 2026 Whitney Biennial opened at the beginning of the month, providing a snapshot of current trends and curatorial interests in the art world.

Scopin's decision to room at the Hotel Chelsea was a matter of frugality, reflecting a serious class system within the ornate 12-story building.

The primary question in all matters concerning Melania Trump is " What is she thinking?" The First Lady is an endless font of utterly puzzling behavior. So it's fitting that at the premiere of her film on Thursday night she stood before the audience and declared, basically, "Ceci n'est pas une documentary." "Some have called this a documentary. It is not," she said.

AT FIRST GLANCE, the phrase "avant-garde advertising" might seem like a contradiction in terms: The avant-garde is assumed to be inherently anti-capitalist and the realm of advertising crassly commercial. But the involvement of avant-garde artists with advertising is in fact rich, complex, and long-standing, encompassing a full century of collaborations, critiques, and reworkings of all sorts. That entanglement-in all its diversity-is the topic

I work outside, carving and shaping the stone. Outside my house, I have a table, an extension cord, and tools. It's very cold and I have to wear all my winter clothes. When it's too cold, I do the filing and finishing work inside after I shape it outside. I listen to all kinds of music. I listen to Eminem all the time; his albums are all my favorites. For drawings, I work at Kinngait Studios or at home on my kitchen table.

"As I stood and looked at it on a drizzly gray day," John Yau writes of looking at a radiant painting by Edward Zutrau, "I forgot that it was raining." That's what art can do - stop you in your tracks, make you forget absolutely everything save for that essential encounter between you and the work.

We knew everything we needed to know about the art world before the Epstein Files dropped. Before heinous allegations against Museum of Modern Art trustee Leon Black emerged, or School of Visual Arts chair David A. Ross's sympathetic endorsement of Epstein came out, we knew about the intimate connections between institutional heads and donors and trustees. The exchanges of money, donations, or favors that bind them.

Presented with improbable dignity in a golden box is a hanging ornament in the shape of the Trevi Fountain that comes with a "complimentary papal blessing." Its roughly shaped details would be dull if the whole thing weren't drowned in glitter. Under the shop lights, this perfect miniature of late Baroque architecture explodes in shine: a beacon promising a brighter future and a better life.

Happy New Year! Our first book reviews of 2026 are here, beginning with critic Bridget Quinn. There's a special place in hell for Pablo Picasso, but you probably already knew that. Because the conversation tends to stop there, what you may not have known are the names of some of the women whose artistic legacies have long been overshadowed by his: Fernande Olivier, Olga Khokhlova, Marie-Thérèse Walter, Dora Maar, Françoise Gilot, and Jacqueline Roque.

Why the volte-face? Because it is now widely recognised in the art world that it was as much Moss who influenced Mondrian as the other way round, at least when it came to the double or parallel lines he started using in the 1930s to add tension to his harmonious abstract paintings, one of which hammered last May for $48m.

Naomi Campbell will offer a supermodel's perspective on the intimate relationship between artist and muse in an essay for an upcoming exhibition of Pablo Picasso paintings being staged by Nahmad Contemporary in Switzerland. The New York-headquartered gallery was founded in 2013 by Joseph Nahmad, a scion of the billionaire art-dealing family. Nahmad's father, David Nahmad, is believed to have the largest private collection of works by Picasso.

Mornings are best for concentrated work. In the winter, I turn on the heat at 8am and get started around 10am. Summer, I start around 9am. I have two areas in the studio for projects. The large, heavy wood sculptures are carved in the front section of the studio, closest to the roll-up wide door. Smaller sculptures are placed on a hydraulic workbench. Before I start, I focus, connect with the Source, and ask for guidance.