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From the Archives: Read What ARTnews Critics Said About Robert Mapplethorpe

LGBTQ+ Artists Having Institutional Shows This Pride Month

“Robert was smart with his board because he knew that appointing family members or life partners who can make emotional decisions is not always great to manage an artist’s legacy,”lawyer and Mapplethorpe Foundation president Michael Stout told ARTnews. Mapplethorpe instead assembled a board with professional specialties in both law (Stout is a copyright expert) and photography to shape the future and legacy of his impressive oeuvre.

Stout estimates that Mapplethorpe left behind approximately 14,000 prints, made from around 2,000 negatives, as well as a smaller number of sculptural objects and Polaroids. And in recent years, the management of the artist’s legacy has become an intricate feat: 15 galleries around the world manage the sales from the estate based on their respective geography. Gladstone Gallery, Morán Morán and Olga Korper Gallery are among the five in charge in North America; in Europe, Xavier Hufkins Gallery, Thaddaeus Ropac, Alison Jacques Gallery, and Galerie Thomas Schulte are half of the eight galleries holding representation deals; Brazil’s Galeria Fortes D’Aloia & Gabriel manages the South American demand; and the Asian market is handled by Seoul’s Kukje Gallery.

At Art Basel next week, Gladstone Gallery, Ropac, and Alison Jacques will each have a Mapplethorpe work on offer. There’s also various institutional shows each year and brand partnerships, like those with Uniqlo, Chrome Hearts, and Honey Fucking Dijon, who license Mapplethorpe’s images. In its earliest days, the foundation only licensed paper-based products, such as postcards, calendars, and posters. “There was no way we could know if Robert would like a Chrome Hearts leather jacket, but we did it, as many artists started making licensing deals,” Stout added.

“We have to make careful decisions about licensing and act meticulously about publishing because books do survive,” Stout said. “They are not as popular in terms of sales anymore with everything being online, but Robert knew it was important to have them and he did an awful lot of books with different publishers.” He also added that the foundation’s trustees have reached a consensus of being “conservative about licensing” and that they aim “to make decisions that we thought he would have made.”

In addition to its management of Mapplethorpe’s art, the foundation has a lesser-known remit, acting as a grant-giving entity invested in supporting HIV research. “We largely depend on gallery sales, and running a photographer’s estate is more challenging than a painter’s,” he said about the given vast difference in pricing for the two mediums.

Mapplethorpe’s intriguingly enigmatic visual lexicon however has perhaps been more popular than ever in recent years. The first quarter of 2024 has so far seen four solo gallery exhibitions for the photographer: at London’s Alison Jacques, Gladstone in New York, Thaddaeus Ropac in Paris, and Morán Morán in Los Angeles, as well as a three-artist show, with Ann Craven and Mohammed Z. Rahman, at Phillida Reid in London. The Paris and LA shows both had high-profile curators: fashion editor Edward Enninful and artist Jacolby Satterwhite, respectively. Last month, the Currier Museum of Art in New Hampshire opened the exhibition Filippo de Pisis and Robert Mapplethorpe which places the photographer’s work in conversation with that of the 20th-century Italian painter. Their mutual fascination with flowers anchors the show, which features 38 photographs, all on loan from the foundation. 

The Gladstone show, which closed in April at the gallery’s Upper East Side outpost, sought to shine a light on a lesser-known part of Mapplethorpe’s oeuvre, his three-dimensional assemblages and photographs in sculptural frames. The exhibition benefitted from the gallery space’s former life as a townhouse, as the installation conveyed a demure blend of theatricality and domesticity. His ca. 1972 Untitled (Coat Rack Sculpture), for example, occupied a corner with a lit lightbulb (in lieu of a coat) adjacent to a black-and-white photograph of artist Jay Johnson in which the same sculpture appears next to Johnson’s nude body. In front of a backyard-facing window was Open Book (1974), a large aluminum floor structure in which a quartet of photographs of penises sit above a sleek triangular base.

The recent Gladstone show followed the Guggenheim Museum’s year-long exhibition “Implicit Tensions” (2019), which presented a considerable group of Mapplethorpe’s mixed-media constructions for the first time. The ambitious undertaking was an extension of the foundation’s gift of 194 artworks to the Guggenheim in 1993, which also established a photography department at the museum and a gallery named in the late photographer’s honor.

“Before Mapplethorpe, photography frames were more incidental, reflecting the uneasy transition of the medium from page to wall,” Guggenheim associate curator Lauren Hinkson recently told ARTnews of the two-part show.The second part of her project invited living artists like Lyle Ashton Harris, Glenn Ligon, Zanele Muholi, and Catherine Opie to exhibit their own images about queer resilience as a response to the first part of the exhibition. “Like the work of any canonical figure, Mapplethorpe’s work and its meanings are neither stable nor static, but are continually open to reinterpretation as other artists offer alternate approaches to image-making,” Hinkson said.

New-generation queer creatives, on the other hand, still find inspiration in Mapplethorpe’s unabashed handling of carnality, whether in his allusive flowers or dramatically lit double fisted rears. Ludovic de Saint Sernin, a fast-rising French designer with cult following, unveiled his Mapplethorpe-inspired men’s collection, in collaboration with the foundation, during New York Fashion Week in February. Pop star Troye Sivan currently wears some of the pieces from the bondage-inspired collection in his ongoing word tour, Sweat. The leather-heavy garments veer away from Uniqlo’s 2015 T-shirt line which were printed with the artist’s more approachable photographs.

Inviting new perspectives has been one lucrative way for the Mapplethorpe Foundation to keep his legacy alive. A suite of gallery exhibitions curated by cultural luminaries, from Isabelle Huppert to Elton John or the recent Enninful and Satterwhite ones, activate his large oeuvre through different personal lenses. (Ropac’s Enninful-organized exhibition drew around 2,000 visitors on its opening day in March.)

For Satterwhite, the opportunity to curate a Mapplethorpe show finds resonance in his own practice, which also traverses themes of power, autonomy, and euphoria. The foundation gave the Brooklyn-based artist access to the photographer’s entire oeuvre, and the resulting show, titled “Animism, Faith, Violence, and Conquest,” included a medley of Mapplethorpe’s less-charted images about utopia, resistance, and devotion. The show’s titular themes are subjects Satterwhite explored about belief systems and survival while working towards his recent Metropolitan Museum of Art commission, A Metta Prayer (2023).

A 1982-dated photograph, for example, shows a television with a chain hanging from its bottom; an image from 1985 includes a young boy in pirate costume looking through a spyglass. “I was thinking about how to subvert video games and ideas of violence, surveillance, and conquest in my project,” Satterwhite told ARTnews. He noted that he has long dreamed of doing a project around Mapplethorpe, “but if I had the chance 10 years ago, the result would have totally been different,” he said. Organizing the show fresh off his Met commission, in which he marinated similar ideas of devotion, power, and toxicity in beauty, the artist said he felt closer to Mapplethorpe’s similar concerns at this point in his practice.  

Mapplethorpe’s gallery representation itself has been important in the shifting perspectives of the artist’s work. “The dominant aesthetic of Robert’s estate, with calla lilies and nudes, was established by the foundation and Robert Miller Gallery, which initially had an exclusive representation,” Stout, the foundation president, said. The foundation changing its representation to New York’s Sean Kelly gallery in the early 2000s, helped bring forth a more multivalent approach to Mapplethorpe. In 2003, with the help of Sean Kelly, Cindy Sherman organized the first of these artist-driven curatorial projects that are now done multiple times a year.

“The public reaction and a Roberta Smith review in the New York Times convinced us that we should let other people make decisions for exhibitions,” Stout said. “Even we still see works this way that we never saw or forgot about.”

The challenge for the Mapplethorpe Foundation these days is to run an endeavor with funding from a finite repertoire. In an effort to monitor sales in various price points and avoid exhibiting the same work concurrently in separate shows, the foundation has established what they internally call “a core system.” The layout helps the board and staff break down and control the types of images sold across the globe and maintain a balanced inventory in terms of value and future demand. The works with exceptionally iconic subjects such as Patti Smith, Mapplethorpe himself, or Andy Warhol, as well as calla lilies are “for more special moments,” Stout said. This system also helps the foundation shuffle works between different gallery inventories for an even distribution.

“When we started the foundation with Robert, we weren’t sure if we would go on for over 20 years,” Stout recalled. “We don’t have trustees making emotional decisions and holding onto sentimental pieces on our board—we just want to place everything well.”

Pace Gallery will continue to represent the estate in Asia, with a focus on South Korea, as will Lisson Gallery and Marian Goodman. The estate will also maintain representation deals with Mai 36 and Regen Projects, as well as Cristina Guerra Contemporary Art, Galleri Sesanne Ottesen, Galleria Alfonso Artiaco, Galerie Hubert Winter, i8 Gallery, Konrad Fischer Galerie, Massimo De Carlo, Osl Contemporary, and Taro Nasu Gallery.

“I feel incredibly grateful for this opportunity to work alongside the estate of Lawrence Weiner,” Barbara Gladstone said in a statement, adding, “He proposed a radically new relationship to art through his exploration of language as a sculptural medium. Representing the estate is a dream come true.”

Born in Manhattan in 1942 and raised in the South Bronx, Weiner achieved decades of renown as a key figure in the highly influential Conceptual art movement  of  the 1960s and 70s—a title he rebuffed, preferring to call himself a sculptor.

The artist, who died in 2021, relied on an unusual definition of sculpture, however. He placed his text across floors, walls, T-shirts, matchbooks, often allowing his words to double as cheeky instructions. A 36″ X 36″ REMOVAL TO THE LATHING OR SUPPORT WALL OF PLASTER OR WALLBOARD FROM A WALL, from 1968, asked exhibiting institutions to remove a portion of a wall using the dimensions stated in the title. This irreverent spirit won him admirers across the art world. 

Over time, his creations, which he called “language + the materials referred to,” evolved in intention. In 2009, for example, he stenciled the big red words “AT THE SAME MOMENT” on a ferry dock at New York’s Governors Island. He maintained that art—or, at least, his sort of art—was powered by audience collaboration.

“Art,” Weiner remarked in 2020, “is people who saw the configuration and were not satisfied with it and went to change the configuration of the way we look at objects.”

Some of Jafa’s pictures are famous: readily available stills from notable films, glamour shots of pop stars, photographs of ugly moments from American history that have appeared in textbooks. But many more of his images are considerably less well-known: the various Instagram Reels and YouTube clips, for example, that Jafa has pilfered from the internet and re-presented for gallery viewers in a string of acclaimed videos, most notably 2016’s Love Is the Message, The Message Is Death, his famed elegy for the tenuousness of Black life that crams more than 100 pieces of footage into less than 8 minutes.

Tracking down the source for all this imagery is a pointless exercise—Jafa’s intent, it often seems, is to let all his pictures run free, reveling in the friction that results from when they rub up against one another, shorn of their initial context, as they might be on social media feeds. Which makes it a surprise that, for his latest video, he has lifted a very recognizable sequence from a very famous movie: the brothel massacre that concludes Martin Scorsese’s 1976 film Taxi Driver, a character study about Travis Bickle, a lonely cabbie who tries to find his place in New York City through vigilantism. (While the film hasn’t been a core reference to Jafa previously, two years ago, he spoke approvingly of a 1999 Douglas Gordon video that appropriates and modulates a different Taxi Driver scene.)

Travis’s bloody bid for attention is seen, over and over, in Jafa’s 73-minute ***** (2024), which presents the sequence half a dozen or so times. But the video, which recently debuted at Gladstone Gallery in New York, contains a twist: everyone Travis murders is now Black, not white. In a particularly strange gesture, the cops who arrive too late are also now Black.

The fascinating concept is rooted in the film’s mythology. Screenwriter Paul Schrader had initially written Sport, the pimp in control of the film’s bordello, as a Black man. But, according to critic Amy Taubin, Schrader and Scorsese ended up whitening Sport, fearing protests during screenings of Taxi Driver. Now, Jafa has undone that editorial decision, subbing out Harvey Keitel’s Sport for one energetically played by actor Jerrel O’Neal, who has been seamlessly integrated into Scorsese’s original footage by Jafa, a cinematographer by training.

That footage appears to shapeshift in Jafa’s hands, becoming liquid and subject to change. At each turn, there is a new surprise: certain shots drop out while a few are added, and periodically, some aural cues are elided entirely, so that mouths move but emit no noise. What we get is a succession of violent imagery that probably should come with a trigger warning. (The original film is equally graphic, and was even slightly altered to avoid an X rating, but Scorsese, unlike Jafa, spends a lot of time preparing viewers for this shocking scene.)

Here’s what ensues: A Black man being shot in the gut and dying quickly. A Black man getting several fingers blown off before screaming for his life, being knifed in the hand, then having his head exploded open, spraying crimson across a grimy wall. A Black man being gunned down at close range, then falling through a beaded curtain. Some shots are ported over unchanged: Jodie Foster, playing a young sex worker, screams in terror while Robert De Niro, performing as Travis, fails to put a bullet in his brain because he’s run out of ammo. Then it all starts over again. And again, and again, and again, perhaps not unlike the horrifying footage of snuffed-out Black life that has become an unfortunate staple of our current moment.

Jafa has said the film’s title can be pronounced as “Redacted,” though he hasn’t specified which word is censored). This seems like a sign that he’s trying to more explicitly draw out the racism that is just barely concealed within Schrader’s script. “My Travis Bickle is Dylann Roof,” Jafa recently told the New York Times, referring to the white supremacist who shot nine people in a Black church in Charleston in 2015.

But to what end? If the point is to portray Travis as a racist, Taxi Driver already did that. There’s a scene where Travis executes a Black man holding up a bodega. Travis is told by the shopkeeper, played by a Puerto Rican actor, to flee the scene, and he does so, leaving the would-be robber hunched over and bleeding out before the shopkeeper finishes off the job using a baseball bat. There is no attempt to diffuse the mugging, no attempt not to shoot him. The lack of consequences for Travis’s actions is plenty of proof that his racial animus is rewarded by the police, who apparently choose not to investigate the killing. Jafa doesn’t refer to that scene.

If the point of ***** is to take on Travis’s point of view, Taxi Driver already did that, too. In one shot, the camera situates the viewer in Travis’s eyes, tracing his hand as it holds a gun to a window, pointed at unaware passersby in a park far below. Travis never fires the revolver in that take, but he doesn’t have to—we know what he’s capable of, and we know enough to be scared. Jafa doesn’t allude to that part either.

Severing the climax from all that comes before it risks simplifying the film’s politics, which is hardly an endorsement of Travis’s inceldom, anyway. Jafa might have done better to go after a different work indebted to Taxi Driver: Todd Phillips’s Joker (2019), a film with an icky racial revision of its own in the form of an allusion to the Central Park Five, whose members are now Caucasian, not Black, in Phillips’s telling. Some critiqued Phillips’s film for elisions such as that one, but generally, they didn’t stick—Joker grossed $1 billion at the box office and won two Oscars, a rarity for a superhero movie. That should make it ripe for critique. But Jafa punches down, targeting a 48-year-old film rather than its 5-year-old derivative, whose values already feel dated.

Every so often in *****, though, there are moments of spellbinding imagination. At one point, O’Neal’s pimp, now rechristened Scar by Jafa, intones a soliloquy while puffing on a cigarette. For but a few minutes, Jafa has given this character’s original incarnation the inner life he deserved and never had. And at a later point, Jafa re-edits one shot so that Travis does succeed in offing himself, as though the artist were offering wish fulfillment for viewers who have slogged through the hour or so preceding this.

Then Jafa cuts the sequence short, fades out Bernard Herrman’s score, and restarts the clip, leading us back into the bordello, where the violence begins anew. ***** is a sad Möbius strip of a film that contains nothing to mark its opening or ending. You will want to escape its nihilistic loop, but you may find that you cannot.

Similarly, if you travel downtown to 52 Walker, where Jafa is having another, more successful solo show, you may find yourself lost in his maze-like sculpture Picture Unit (Structures) II (2024), a walk-in installation that, from the outside, looks like a black, gleaming Minimalist object. Inside, one is met with more of Jafa’s appropriated imagery: wall-size pictures of planets; an enlarged still from the last film he showed in New York, AGHDRA (2022); a lo-res shot of a dead body in a living room, splayed out beneath a couch with an American flag draped over it. Shocked by that corpse, I tried to seek an exit and realized the only obvious way out was to view more of Jafa’s pictures.

Those borrowed shots continue outside Picture Unit in the form of an assembly of cutouts, some of which have holes bore through them. These sculptures allude to similar ones by Cady Noland of Patty Hearst (from her Symbionese Liberation Army days). Noland’s portrait, featuring her hands in front of her face, is here appropriated by Jafa. He places her beside an image from 1970 of artist Adrian Piper, performing with a sock stuffed into her mouth. What do Piper and Noland have to do with, say, a black lamb with a red ribbon around its neck or a group of rock musicians? Nothing, except that the images all ended up in Jafa’s archive, as have many others that he has arranged, seemingly at random, in the form of binders.

In these works and related ones elsewhere in the 52 Walker show, Jafa envisions a state in which anyone and anything can be seen by everyone. That state is hardly a desirable one for Jafa, who implies that the only means of survival is avoiding the watchful gaze of others. Aptly, at various points, the gallery’s lighting is turned down, making it so that it is impossible to get a good look at Jafa’s art.

The only thing that is readily visible during those moments is the inside of Picture Unit and a video playing outside the structure, LOML (2022), whose slower segments correspond with the periods of relative darkness. The video is meant as a tribute to Jafa’s friend, the deceased writer Greg Tate, who did not appear on-screen for the section of it that I caught. Instead, there was footage of Kanye West, Michael Jackson, Donna Summer, tornadoes, and what appeared to be police violence against a person pinned down to the ground.

Never mind all that—Jafa’s cascade of stolen imagery is nowhere near as compelling as the pauses that induce darkness in the gallery. During one, the grainy contours of a figure could be seen moving through a field of black. Think of it as “going dark,” to borrow the concept of a recent Guggenheim Museum show, or merely consider it a moment to breathe. Either way, it offers a welcome respite from the horrors of *****.

Gladstone’s first exhibition with Weems will take place in the fall of next year at one of its New York spaces. She joins a roster that includes Sarah Lucas, Wangechi Mutu, Alex Katz, Shirin Neshat, Arthur Jafa, and many others.

A representative for Gladstone said that the gallery’s representation of Weems would be exclusive in New York. Fraenkel Gallery in San Francisco and Galerie Barbara Thumm in Berlin will continue to represent her.

“The opportunity to work with Carrie Mae Weems at this point in her trajectory is a great honor,” Barbara Gladstone, founder of Gladstone Gallery, said in a statement. “Her conceptually driven, aesthetically powerful work is unflinching in its call for social justice and equity. She has been profoundly influential as both an artist and a teacher on a generation of artists, and we look forward to bringing her art to a wide public.”

Weems’s most famous works are the photographs in her “Kitchen Table Series” of the 1990s, in which the artist herself appears in a dimly lit kitchen alongside Black men, women, and children. These works question how identity is constructed, highlighting Weems’s actions in them as performances that appear to be done specifically for the camera.

Since the ’90s, Weems’s art has taken a variety of forms, from photographic installations to a film made using the pepper’s ghost technique, in which images are projected such that they appear to be three-dimensional. Her focus has included anti-Black caricatures, intersections of Blackness and femininity, and the harmful legacy of past racist violence.

Her work is currently on view in New York at the Guggenheim Museum in the exhibition “Going Dark: The Contemporary Figure at the Edge of Visibility.”

Gladstone partner Gavin Brown called Weems “an artistic, cultural, and social force whose incredible body of work has catalyzed essential public discourse and continues to inspire artists to join her in tackling the most tenacious issues of our times.”

Salle will be represented by Gladstone in the US; Lehmann Maupin and Thaddaeus Ropac will continue to represent him in Asia and Europe, respectively. Yet the Gladstone move will mark a departure from Skarstedt, the blue-chip enterprise that has mounted seven solo shows by Salle in the past decade.

In an email to ARTnews, dealer Per Skarstedt said, “It has been a pleasure to work with David Salle these past ten years. Gladstone and David will be a good fit. Skarstedt will continue to be involved in the secondary market.”

His defection to Gladstone comes after that gallery staged a show of his work in Brussels last year. A New York exhibition with Gladstone will follow in the fall of next year.

In a statement, dealer Barbara Gladstone said, “We are delighted to formally welcome David to the gallery. I have always admired his work, both as a visual artist and as a writer. His unquestionable skill, wit, inquisitiveness, and psychological depth have helped distinguish him as one of the most unique and compelling painters of his generation. One of my very first coveted art acquisitions was a painting by David that I bought in 1979, a year before I opened my eponymous gallery on 57th Street, so I am very grateful to have this opportunity to work together.”

Salle has frequently been grouped in with the Pictures Generation, a group of artists, many of whom were based in New York, that used appropriation in his work during the late ’70s and early ’80s. For his well-known canvases from that era, Salle layered seemingly unlike images in ways that can variously recall Francis Picabia’s “Transparencies” and James Rosenquist’s Pop paintings.

“Salle’s canvases are like bad parodies of the Freudian unconscious,” critic Janet Malcolm famously remarked. “They are full of images that don’t belong together: a woman taking off her clothes, the Spanish Armada, a kitschy fabric design, an eye.”

Initially, these paintings polarized critics, some of whom labeled Salle’s repeated images of nude women misogynistic. Since then, his paintings have found a loyal following.

In addition to his artistic practice, Salle has written prolifically on painting, with some of his essays appearing in ARTnews.

Salle said in a statement, “Barbara Gladstone and I have been friends for decades and Gladstone has long been a bastion of independence and integrity. I’m very pleased to join the company of many artists I admire most.”

Those artists include Carroll Dunham, Arthur Jafa, Joan Jonas, Alex Katz, Wangechi Mutu, Richard Prince, and Rosemarie Trockel. Gladstone’s roster has expanded rapidly since 2020, when dealer Gavin Brown was brought on as a partner.

In 2015, the Rauschenberg Foundation, which manages the late artist’s estate, left Gagosian, which has been its gallery since his death in 2008, for a trio of galleries consisting of Ropac, Strina, and Pace. Pace last mounted a Rauschenberg solo exhibition at its New York space in 2021, which focused on his work from the 1980s through the mid-2000s.

In a statement sent to ARTnews, Pace said it had stopped working with the estate “in a formal capacity” in 2020: “We were honored to represent Bob during his lifetime and to collaborate with him on the realization of several major institutional projects and commissions. We remain dedicated to preserving his legacy and will continue to stage projects related to the significant Rauschenberg works in our possession. We wish the Foundation team a very successful collaboration with Gladstone.”

Last year, Gladstone mounted a two-part exhibition of Rauschenberg’s work, featuring his “Venetians” (1972–73) and “Early Egyptians” (1973–74) series. In a press release, Gladstone said that following that show’s “success,” this new relationship marks Gladstone’s “continued commitment to preserving the legacy of Robert Rauschenberg’s remarkable life and work and expanding upon his impact on contemporary artists working today.”

Kathy Halbreich, the foundation’s executive director, said in a statement, “Working with Barbara Gladstone and Max Falkenstein last spring was an immense pleasure especially as many artists saw the sculptures and, in their elated comments, suggested just how prescient Bob remains today. I am so grateful that Bob’s work will be seen alongside the remarkable roster of artists Gladstone Gallery nurtures.”

For its part, Gladstone will bring one work by Rauschenberg to Art Basel Hong Kong next week, a 1991 black-and-white piece, Maybe Market (Night Shade), priced between $800,000 and $1 million, according to FT. And it will mount an exhibition of the artist’s “Spreads” (1975–83) and “Scales” (1977–81) series in May at its West 21st Street location in Chelsea.

Considered one of the most important artists of the second half of the 20th century, Rauschenberg is known for his “Combines” series, begun in the mid-1950s, which drastically departed from the Abstract Expressionists who were in vogue at the time in New York art world. Those works merged painting and sculpture, often with found, everyday objects, into something entirely its own. A relentless experimenter, Rauschenberg created numerous other kinds of art in the decades that followed.

In a statement, gallery founder Barbara Gladstone said, “We feel incredibly grateful for this opportunity to work alongside the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation leadership and staff to help realize their mission of supporting innovative artists, art organizations, and socially engaged institutions, as well as the continued research and contextualization of Rauschenberg’s impressive body of work. There is so much to be discovered and discussed about his radically inventive approach to artmaking, and we are honored to take on this significant responsibility alongside the Foundation.”

Update, March 17, 2023: This article has been updated to include a statement from Pace Gallery.

The centerpiece of the show is Enclosure (2019), a 30-minute film set in 17th-century rural England during the time of the Enclosure Acts—”a series of legal maneuvers,” an exhibition description reads, “that seized communally used farmlands and privatized property ownership.” To make the period piece, Rose called on inspiration from historical paintings she had first come to know as a student—with a certain degree of sleight-of-hand.

“I shot Enclosure in upstate New York, which looks nothing like any part of England,” the artist said in an interview about the show. “The grass is grey; it doesn’t have that verdant green. The sun is high. There’s no mist. You can’t even pretend it’s England. So after I shot it, I was like, ‘What am I going to do? This all looks like upstate.’ One of the solutions came from looking at these paintings: just change the skies. If you change the skies, you immediately have a different relationship with the land.”

Views of alternate skies summoned by different means—”edited or stuck together with CGI, kind of like collaging or a form of compositing,” Rose said—give Enclosure an uncanny look, as if it is somehow both older and more futuristic than it is. And they resonate with the visions of the ages-old paintings that inspired Rose’s thinking about the time period she took as a subject.

Installation view of “Rachel Rose: Enclosure” at Gladstone Gallery, 2022.

The paintings had been a point of interest for Rose when she was enrolled at Yale. “I actually went to the Yale Center for British Art before I knew anything about British art because of Louis Kahn,” Rose said. “I was obsessed with Kahn’s architecture, and the Yale Center for British Art is one of the most extraordinary buildings ever. I thought I was going to be an architect when I was an undergraduate. I did not think I was going to be an artist at all.”

After the seed was planted, her interest grew—enough so that she became a student guide who gave tours of the Yale Center with ideas of her own about some of the artwork on view. “I had a tour that I gave—strangely or not strangely—about changes in the picturesque and the development of landscape painting,” she said.

A few years ago, with her student years in the past, Rose found herself thinking back. For a commission in 2016, she said, “I was thinking about magic and the role of women and where we are today, and that led me back to 17th- and 18th-century agrarian England.”

Then came another commission to create an installation for the LUMA Foundation in France and the Park Avenue Armory in New York. “I was interested in this time as really foundational to our relationship with the environment today, but also to America and ideas of utopia and the beginnings of where we are,” Rose said. “I was thinking of all the snake-oil capitalism of America and where that came from—and, once again, I was back in this moment in England.” (The commission resulted in a presentation at LUMA in 2019, but, because of pandemic-related complications, a planned follow-up at the Park Avenue Armory was adapted to become the version now on view at Gladstone Gallery.)

When she first thought of the idea to exhibit some of the historic works that she had drawn upon, Rose found an eager collaborator in Courtney J. Martin, the director of the Yale Center for British Art since 2019 (before which she worked as deputy director and chief curator of Dia Art Foundation). With Martin, Rose arranged for some of her favorite Yale Center paintings to visit New York—and shed light on what she had in mind with the work she created.

Below, take a guided tour of sorts through four such works, with thoughts from Rose and Martin.

Samuel Palmer, The Harvest Moon, ca. 1833.

Samuel Palmer, The Harvest Moon (ca. 1833)

Rachel Rose: The Harvest Moon comes out of a time when industrialization is underway and the landscape has been claimed. It’s being harvested, as you can see, and used for its resources in a more efficient way than ever before. In this work, Palmer is going back to a kind of spiritual relationship with the landscape. It feels like there’s a reverence and a magic in the way that he paints, a kind of storybook illustrative quality to the stars and the moon. The moon is huge. It has this enveloping battery-like presence. The farmers are working but you also get the sense that they might also be dancing. There is a kind of mystery to their work amidst this otherworldly image of nature. There is something regressive about it, like it’s looking back to a time that pre-dates the Industrial Revolution and the Agriculture Revolution.

Courtney J. Martin: “Regressive” is the word—you’ve hit the nail on the head. There was still farmland in the 1830s, but everyone who is living in a city is well aware of the effects of the Industrial Revolution. Everybody is also aware of something that is less known to us as Americans, which is the Enclosure Acts, which begin roughly around 1750. The Industrial Revolution is later because one feeds into the other. By 1830, you could have talked very easily about all these big changes that are happening, with tenant sharecropping taking place throughout the countryside, on small partializations of land where people had just been using the wilds. You could have seen this if you’d gone to the countryside. And immigration out of England, to America in particular, is happening at a mass scale. This emptying-out of once-populated rural spaces is something that people are very aware of because it led to labor shortages. There was a mass rural-to-urban move. Palmer is looking back toward something that … it’s not so much that it doesn’t exist anymore, but it’s different. There is perhaps a little bit of nostalgia. He’s laboring over something that he might be feeling the loss of at the same time.

John Constable, Hampstead Heath Looking Towards Harrow, 1821–22.

John Constable, Hampstead Looking Towards Harrow (1821–22)

Rose: There is something similar happening in Hampstead Looking Towards Harrow. This is in the city of London—it’s in no way the countryside—and yet John Constable has blighted out everything about the city. We feel like we’re in a true rural landscape, which is completely inaccurate. The feeling again is this kind of regression. It’s not joyful; it doesn’t have the kind of spiritual celestial reverence that is in The Harvest Moon. It’s a regression, and a dampened one. The sky foggy, the trees sooty and brown—this is not an ideal landscape. I think this is also an image, in some ways, of deforestation. Part of the Enclosure Acts was a massive felling and use of the forest for new kinds of building. Another thing I find interesting is that the land is just the bottom third of the painting. Two-thirds above is the sky. Here, we see what seems to represent an attitude toward the sky that predates the Industrial Revolution, when the sky is literally the decider of the seasons, the decider of the harvest, when people in pre-clock-time were living by the sun and moon.

Martin: Constable is known as the painter of Suffolk. If you’re if you’re looking at a map of England, London is in the center and Suffolk is to the east. Suffolk is rural and known for having a lot of low-lying areas and and valleys, with pockets of places with hills. Then there are areas with a build-up of geologic accretions; some of them give off chalk, and Constable was known for painting that. But this is London, so it’s a fantasy that, at this moment [in 1821], he is able to stand at the top of Hampstead Heath and look north toward Harrow and see that much of an expanse.

Rachel, you’re onto something in that so much of this is not landscape because there wouldn’t have been that much landscape to see. He’s having to weigh his fantasy of wanting to see this expanse with the reality that, to look that far inside of London going north, you wouldn’t just see the countryside, even back then. Fancy country houses had been developed at this point. Hampstead Heath had already been laid out with large-scale estates. It is no longer this rural place that he’s envisioning, so he has to make an accommodation for it by making so much of this painting about the sky. At the same time, this is from the same year that he starts his cloud studies, which are a whole series of studies of the formations of clouds, the way they come together and fall apart.

Rose: He’s made fog from the city pastoral, somehow.

Martin: It’s almost as if he’s trying to turn that slice of the city into the countryside where he’s really from. It doesn’t look that different than the kinds of paintings that would have been about Suffolk around the same period of time.

Joseph Wright of Derby, Dovedale, 1786.

Joseph Wright of Derby, Dovedale (1786)

Rose: This again feels like a fantasy to me. The light coming in in the morning, the perfect two swans, the fisher grabbing his fish with his assistant. It feels like an idyllic British countryside, and there’s a real emphasis on light in the forest. That’s initially what drew me to Joseph Wright of Derby. His paintings are so essential: it’s light, it’s trees, it’s light, it’s trees—repetition! There’s almost a kind of minimalism in his materiality. This is idyllic, but it’s foreboding. There’s a darkness inside the forest, black that punctures the morning light. It’s definitely a vision of a forest untouched, unfelled, undestroyed, unburned, uninhabited. One of the things I was interested in about this time period was what I imagined as people’s relationship to the forest in terms of magic and animism—the idea that there were magical things in the forest, that relationships between wind and a tree and an animal were all connected, that forests were alive. That translated to a kind of spirituality for people. There’s a mystery that’s being presented by the lushness of the forest.

Martin: Joseph Wright of Derby goes on his “Grand Tour” [of historical sites and artwork in Italy] a little bit later [than others of his cohort], partially because he’d been a working artist for so much of his life. By the time he goes in 1773, he’s going with his wife, a number of children, plus a few other artists with him—so he has an entourage. Upon his return, he’s able to establish himself a bit better than he previously had. He’s no longer living in Derby, which was an industrial seat, with the kinds of patrons that he collaborated with coming out of industry in Birmingham. He uses that to take him to Italy, but he doesn’t return to Derby— he goes to Bath. He submitted to the Royal Academy every year and was trying hard to be seen as very serious and not just someone who is caught in a rut.

Dovedale is actually close to Derby, so the lushness is, I think, him trying to make Dovedale look like something that comes out of the types of paintings he would have seen on the Grand Tour—but not for the same reasons that somebody like Constable is doing it. Constable is trying to undo the effects of the Industrial Revolution, whereas I think Joseph Wright of Derby is trying to prove that an English painter can make the kind of landscapes that the Italians and French are so capable of at this moment.

Joseph Wright of Derby, Matlock Tor by Moonlight, between 1777–80.

Joseph Wright of Derby, Matlock Tor by Moonlight, 1777–80

Rose: This other painting by Joseph Wright of Derby has a totally different lightscape. I wonder if there’s anything to this form of romanticism, the link between the heart and light. I think maybe a kind of projection of the self into the landscape is happening, which is cool because it’s a moment when people are being severed from the landscape. As Courtney said, everyone’s becoming urban. They’re literally leaving their entire country to come to America—you can’t have a sharper severance than that. And yet it’s also this time when there’s a suturing or replacing of emotion in the landscape. I think there’s something important to that for us now—how we extend or don’t extend our own senses of self into the landscapes around us. In a way it feels like romanticism is also a kind of mourning. This kind of regressive or nostalgic or elated ecstatic atmosphere is connected to the severance.

Martin: You’re so right. So much of what [artists at the time] are experiencing is obviously very personal, and the landscape becomes a kind of replacement for that—for what that they cannot say. There’s no space for conversation, but emotion can happen in the work in a way that it cannot, perhaps, in real time. We speak so much now about people’s ability to engage or reach a deeper emotional plane; we have public conversations about that. It’s not that people [during this time] weren’t allowed to do that, but artists could do it under the cover of aesthetics. It’s important for us to be able to recognize that, because artists can place all that into work without ever having to state it.

By familiar, I mean first that the show and its accompanying catalogue deliver few surprises. This is not a criticism. Curator Sabine Taevernier has hung a representative sampling of the artist’s work, nearly thirty pictures in various mediums and genres, “mainly from the period 1888–1896, eight years during which the artist created the quintessence of his work.” Also on view are four grotesque painted masks from Ensor’s studio, of the kind a tourist might have purchased at his family’s Ostend curio shop, and images of which populate some of his best-known paintings. Anyone previously unfamiliar with Ensor will leave the gallery with a textbook understanding of his peculiar aesthetic sensibility and range—here, he paints a little still life of fruit in nacreous oil tints, and there, he etches a gothic, Poe-inspired fantasia.

This curatorial efficiency is a real achievement. However, “An Intimate Portrait” flirts with a different form of familiarity, one too easily misconstrued as intimacy: the tabloid exposé. The painting that serves as publicity image and catalogue cover, Portrait of the Artist – “The Big Head” (1879), a glimpse of Ensor emerging from the shadows in three-quarter view, seems to have been chosen for its suggestion of a rare private exposure of an enigmatic figure: the man behind the mask. But as a painting, this work is unremarkable, as are the two other conventional self-portraits on display. All three precede Ensor’s exemplary period of activity. None captures the quintessence of his art. Don’t take my word for it. Here is Ensor himself, writing in 1894: “I tried many times to do my own portrait, but I never succeeded to capture my likeness.” The artist preferred to send critics photographs taken by someone else. In his own art, as in the exhibited etching My Skeletonized Portrait (1889), Ensor tended to visualize himself in the image of another. In that particular piece, the artist peels back a layer of the self to reveal bone, not depth.

View of “James Ensor: An Intimate Portrait,” 2021–22, at Gladstone Gallery, showing Portrait of the artist -“Big head,” 1879; Portrait of the artist – “Little head,” 1879; and Mon Portrait 1883, 1883.

How strange, then, for an exhibition to promise a close encounter with an artist through images that either do not capture him or were never meant to invite such acquaintance. In life, Ensor appears to have been a louche guy. In his art, he was a master of unsolicitous forms—smirks, grimaces, evasions. By 1888, Ensor was well on his way to becoming the so-called “painter of masks,” a moniker assigned him by his sharpest critic, Émile Verhaeren. The title stuck. Ensor made sure of it.

Earlier in the 1880s, the artist caused a stir in the Brussels art world first with a series of atmospheric tableaux of bourgeois interiors, and then as the resident weirdo of the independent art group Les XX (The Twenty). By decade’s end, he took to reproducing, with what he called “violent effects,” the lurid, polychrome forms of knickknacks peddled by his mother and grandmother in their Ostend gift shop, objects that had transfixed him since boyhood. “These masks please me because they put off the public, which had received me so poorly,” he reflected. Consequently, Ensor’s art developed, even as his aesthetic preoccupations remained immature, rooted in a child-like sense of monstrosity and an impish desire to shock.

The results of his eccentricity are uneven, which is part of their charm. In certain pictures on display, such as the scabrous etching Peste dessous, Peste dessus, Peste partout (1904), Ensor opts for easy punchlines with limited visual interest. Well-heeled weekenders sit pretty alongside indigents and a steaming turd. Their privileged pose is, of course, morally rotten, which is why stench lines—which could be mistaken for the swirling breeze of a plein air painting, if not for the title’s reference to pollution—emanate from all persons in Ensor’s picture, irrespective of their place in the class hierarchy. In other works, by contrast, such as the black chalk drawing The Skeleton in the Mirror (1890), the artist achieves the extraordinary: a skeleton appears within an ornately framed mirror positioned parallel to the picture plane, where we might otherwise expect to see the artist’s face. Masks surround the mirror, facing off with the viewer, except for two with beak-like noses that jut into the frame in profile, evoking the beholder’s vantage point, if only approximately. This is a space for spectating, not inhabiting.

James Ensor, The Skeleton in the Mirror (Le miroir au squelette), 1890, black chalk on paper, 11 ⅝ x 8 ½ inches.

In this and other drawings on view, Ensor reflects on a feature common to all faces: as observers of the world, we stand behind the faces we present—especially once we recognize how the bridge of the nose impinges on our field of vision—but we are also always standing before pictures of ourselves and others, forcing us to reconcile an inside view with an external one. This perspectival predicament, staged within The Skeleton in the Mirror, connects Ensor’s work with what art historian Andrei Pop calls the “doubling problem,” or the difficulty of making the private contents of consciousness publicly, pictorially available. Ensor addressed the problem in his own singular manner: with a grimace and a sneer. He invites us to look at his masks, not to wear them.

Verhaeren captured Ensor’s legacy best when he wrote, “Anyone who remains so durably young will never age. He carries within himself the power of incessant resurrection.” Sure enough, the Painter of Masks has since become one of art history’s iconic lost boys, consigned to a never-never land of his own making. I am glad to remain familiar, but not intimate, with James Ensor. I doubt that he would mind.

Gladstone Gallery—which has a trio of spaces in New York, one in Brussels, and an office in Los Angeles—has secured a location in the tony Gangnam district. An opening date has not yet been set.

“We are very happy to share the news that Gladstone will officially begin to expand its physical footprint to Asia,” the gallery’s founder, Barbara Gladstone, said in a statement. “We have a long history of artists showing at some of Korea’s most prestigious institutions, including a significant exhibition for Matthew Barney at the Leeum in 2005, and many more.”

The venture will be helmed by HeeJin Park, an alum of Seoul’s heavyweight Kukje Gallery who has worked for Gladstone out of South Korea for more than a year. “This is an exciting moment for the gallery and the greater Seoul art world,” Park said. “The Gangnam area of the city is a vibrant location with its own burgeoning art scene, so we are happy to embed ourselves into the fabric of this neighborhood at this significant moment of growth.”

The news comes as top-tier dealers from abroad have been racing to open and expand in the capital city. Next month, Thaddaeus Ropac is due to open in Hannam-dong, the same neighborhood where Pace just inaugurated a two-floor exhibition venue. König Galerie alighted earlier this year in an MCM store in Gangnam, which is also home to luxe art spaces operated by Louis Vuitton and Hermès. Other foreign outfits with Seoul locations include Perrotin, Lehmann Maupin, and Various Small Fires.

And then there is Frieze, the London art fair giant, which has said it will collaborate with the Galleries Association of Korea to start its first Asian fair next September at the COEX convention center, which is also in Gangnam.

Gladstone Gallery, which marked its 40th anniversary last year, has been in an expansionist mode of late. It christened its L.A office this summer, and took on the influential dealer Gavin Brown as a partner last year, bringing aboard a dozen of his artists. Its roster includes Ian Cheng, Carroll Dunham, Cyprien Gaillard, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Thomas Hirschhorn, and Anicka Yi.

News

Nancy Spector has departed the Guggenheim Museum following the conclusion of an investigation into the treatment of guest curator Chaédria LaBouvier, who was brought on to organize a show on Jean-Michel Basquiat. [ARTnews]

In a major win for street artists, the Supreme Court declined to hear 5Pointz developer’s appeal to overturn a decision to award a group of artists millions in damages after their work was washed from the facade of a warehouse in Queens. [The Art Newspaper]

In lieu of a national collection, the Dubai Collection will invite private patrons to loan artworks for temporary display at venues throughout the emirate. [The National]

The Drawing Center, an alternative space for works on paper in New York, has added six new trustees, most of whom are artists. The new board members are lawyer David M. Pohl; artists Adam Pendleton, Curtis Talwst Santiago, Amy Sillman, and Rirkrit Tiravanija; and writer Linda Yablonsky. In a statement, Laura Hoptman, the Drawing Center’s director, called the new additions to the board “six brilliant, creative minds.” [Press Release]

The National Trust, the largest heritage body in the UK, will cut 1,300 jobs. [The Art Newspaper]

Art & Artists

“These dynamic, agitated improvisations, on both canvas and paper, reaffirm her leading role in reviving the fortunes of gestural abstract painting,” writes Jason Farago in a review of Amy Sillman’s new show, now on view at Gladstone Gallery in Chelsea. [The New York Times]

Erin Christovale, associate curator at the Hammer Museum, breaks down changing the role of museums in the Black Lives Matter era.  [KCET]

Garrett Bradley’s powerful new documentary, “Time,” is out now. Decades in the making, it resists simple characterization of incarceration and the lives shaped by the system. [The Wall Street Journal]

Market

Over the next three years, Deutsche Bank will sell around 200 works from its collection, including paintings, sculptures, drawings and prints from the early postwar modernist period. [Bloomberg]

After a 75-minute bidding war, Shanghai’s Long Museum claimed a rare scroll by Chinese painter and government official Ren Renfa for $42 million. [Art Market Monitor]

& More

In a case of life imitating art, a fly landed on Mike Pence’s head during Wednesday’s debate. Here’s a dive into the long tradition of the fly as a symbol of disease and rot throughout art history. [The Washington Post]