The blockbuster of the past season was “Caravaggio 2025” at the Gallerie Nazionali Barberini Corsini (also known as the Palazzo Barberini) in Rome, which was reported to have attracted upward of 450,000 visitors and had to be extended. This thoughtfully chosen, scholarly gathering of twenty-four works, some recently discovered, some recently attributed, and some well-known, traced the rapid evolution of the short-lived virtuoso’s radical new approach, from his arrival in Rome, in 1592, as an unknown 21-year-old, to the year of his death, 1610, as a mature, highly original artist with powerful admirers. The selection began with paintings of seductive street boys in white shirts and scenes of innocents being fleeced by ne’er-do-wells. The installation continued with the dramatic, theatrically lit stagings of religious scenes, their protagonists threatening to spill into the viewer’s space, that made Caravaggio the most influential painter of the seventeenth century. The harrowing late self-portrait of the artist as the severed head of Goliath, held by a handsome, young David, was a spectacular finale. And, as both context and bonus, there were the splendid Caravaggios in Santa Maria del Popolo, San Luigi dei Francesi, and Sant’Agostino, and the collections of the Vatican, the Palazzo Doria Pamphilj, and the Villa Borghese to be visited after spending time at the Palazzo Barberini. Because of the Jubilee year, moving through Rome to visit these dispersed sites required avoiding gangs of exhausted pilgrims trooping from church to church, but the wealth of important works by this astonishing artist made it, as always, worth the effort.
Caravaggio, David with the Head of Goliath, 1606–1607 or 1609–1610, oil on canvas, 125 x 101 cm, Galleria Borghese, Rome. Photo: Mauro Magliani for Alinari, 1997. Copyright © Alinari Archives / Mauro Magliani / Art Resource, NY.
On this side of the Atlantic, there was no shortage of more modest, but often rewarding exhibitions last season, in Williamstown, Mass., Cooperstown, N.Y., and New York City—shows that focused attention on both well-known and less familiar women painters, as well as politically engaged male artists, through assemblies of works ranging from intimate drawings to canvases to monumental photographs. The Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, offered the ambitious, albeit highly specialized “A Room of Her Own: Women Artist-Activists in Britain, 1875–1945.” The title, of course, comes from Virginia Woolf’s 1929 essay, which posits a private space (and a decent income) as essential to a woman’s being able to realize her creativity and defy the conventional role assigned to her. Organized by Alexis Goodin, associate curator at the Clark, the exhibition focused on women active in Woolf’s lifetime—1882–1941. Divided into sections headed “A Room of Her Own,” “Home,” “Studio,” “Art School,” and “Exhibition Sites,” the more or less chronological installation responded, also more or less, to the themes of included works, while reminding us of the personal, social, and professional expectations and obstacles faced by aspiring women artists, from the Victorian era to World War II. With rare exceptions—Vanessa Bell, Gwen John—the names of the exhibited artists were mainly unfamiliar, although there was the occasional flash of P. G. Wodehouse-type extravagance—Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale—for light relief. Surnames that resonated—Anna Alma-Tadema, Winifred Nicholson, Laura Sylvia Gosse—proved to belong to the daughter or wife of an established painter, or the daughter of a well-known critic. Some of the included artists not only challenged the position assigned to women who wished to study and make art seriously in Britain during the period under review, but also rejected traditional gender roles. That position was stated, most overtly, it seems, by the single-named Gluck, who recorded the overlapping, androgynous profiles of her lover and herself with Neue Sachlichkeit clarity in 1936. Some of these determined women, we learn, were respected and admired in their day, exhibiting at the Royal Academy and prestigious galleries in London, Europe, and the United States, and attracting noteworthy patrons, positive criticism, and the support of their fellow artists.
The biographies of the exhibited artists included in the handsome, informative catalogue are extremely interesting and sometimes impressive records of perseverance and dedication. I wish I could say that the exhibition was revelatory or full of happy surprises, since it was clearly the result of exhaustive research, but, again, with rare exceptions, the cumulative effect of the more than 75 paintings, prints, drawings, embroideries, book covers, and decorated plates was to trigger the unkind thought that many of the artists on view were now obscure for reasons other than prejudice against women. Part of the problem is that the British were remarkably immune to the attractions of Modernism, possibly out of native xenophobia because of its French origins. Despite the example of Vanessa Bell and her immediate circle, and Roger Fry’s pioneering exhibitions of Impressionism and Post-Impressionism at the Grafton Galleries in 1910 and 1912, most of the women included in “A Room of Her Own” were, to put it politely, extremely conservative in their conception of what a painting could be. At the Clark, Vanessa Bell’s rapidly brushed, economical portrait of her sister Virginia Woolf (c. 1912), seated in a curvaceous armchair, was a welcome exception, a standout, despite its small size. Fresh, bold, and direct, with an unpredictable palette of sienna, lavender, and pale blue, it thumbed its nose at the finicky illusionism of other inclusions made about the same time. Bell’s uncompromising self-portrait (c. 1915), notable for the loose, repetitive drawing of the artist’s checked dress, was another pleasure. So was Ethel Sands’s patchy, energetic The Chintz Couch (c. 1910–1911) as was her intensely colored interior, with its collapsed space, Tea with Sickert (c. 1911–1912). But Gwen John’s intimate The Brown Teapot (c. 1915–1916), an unpretentious, straightforward exploration of the essential geometry of an interior, anchored by the eponymous pot, may have been the best thing in the show.
Gwen John, The Brown Tea Pot, c. 1915-16, oil on canvas. Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, Connecticut, Paul Mellon Collection, B2001.2.107.
Gwen Raverat’s crisp, black-and-white wood engravings (1909 to c. 1922) held up to scrutiny, but as we moved through the installation, it was sometimes difficult to keep a straight face. Marie Spartali Stillman’s Pre-Raphaelite-inflected Love’s Messenger (1885), a seated woman in profile, including a dove with a letter tied to its foot, wasn’t the worst of it. That distinction would be shared by the plodding, illustrative, often very large celebrations of wartime industry in both 1918 and 1943, although for sheer silliness, I’d have to nominate Miss Fortescue-Brickdale’s sleek, sentimental The Posthumous Child (c. 1904), with a glowing infant backed by a swooping angel, under a rainbow. The artist seemed to have lavished most attention on the multiple folds of the black-clad praying mother’s sleeve. (Please note the date: the year Henri Matisse painted the first version of Luxe, Calme et Volupté.) The catalogue of “A Room of Her Own” tells fascinating stories. If only the art it speaks about were as interesting as the text.
Two better-known women who worked in Paris were the focus of “Mary Cassatt/Berthe Morisot: Allies in Impressionism” at the Fenimore Art Museum, in Cooperstown. Organized by the Fenimore’s curator Ann Cannon and the scholar Nancy Mowll Mathews, the show was prompted by the museum’s acquisitions of a Cassatt drypoint in 2023 and her canvas Madame de Fleury and Her Child (c. 1890–1891) in 2024. These welcome additions to the collection suggested an opportunity to examine the connections between Cassatt (1844–1926) and her Parisian contemporary, Morisot (1841–1895). Despite their different backgrounds—Cassatt, an affluent American expatriate, Morisot, an impeccably connected Parisian—and their very different lives—Cassatt never married, while Morisot married and had a daughter—the two were linked, as the exhibition’s title implies, by their embrace of progressive ideas about painting, as well as by their commitment to ambitious art-making. Each had a special relationship to an Impressionist master. Cassatt was close to Edgar Degas, Morisot to Edouard Manet, whose brother Eugène she married. Both were encouraged by these male artist friends, who also used them occasionally as models. Both women exhibited in the Paris Salon of 1870, and later, both were included in the Impressionist exhibitions of the 1870s and 1880s. Still later, Cassatt encouraged her friends to buy Morisot’s work. Throughout, the two women moved in overlapping circles within the small world of Parisian vanguard art. Etchings of both women, Cassatt by Degas and Morisot by Marcellin Desboutin, placed them within that context, while a small but fully illustrated catalogue documented both their individuality and their connections.
The Fenimore exhibition was a commendable exercise in working with what was available, but anyone expecting a scaled-down equivalent of last year’s “Manet/Degas” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art would have been very disappointed. There were plusses. The portrait of Mme de Fleury was contextualized by a generous selection of Cassatt’s etchings and Japanese-inspired aquatints, along with about half a dozen canvases, mostly, like the portrait, of women and children. Most were from the 1890s and early twentieth century, including the audaciously composed Mother and Child in Boat (1908), with its shimmering fabric and leafy background. There were only two (rather undistinguished) earlier works, but given such inclusions as Caresse Maternelle (c. 1902), with its embracing mother and child against the snappy diagonal of a dark-framed yellow sofa and a green rectangle in the upper right, we gained a sense of Cassatt’s strengths and received intimations of what she learned from her friend and mentor, Degas. Morisot, however, was not well served, represented mainly by (admittedly spirited) drawings and a few brushy, less than dazzling paintings, all from the 1890s, concentrated, for the most part, in a section titled “Unfinished,” intended to call attention to both artists’ cultivation of the appearance of spontaneity. But there were none of Morisot’s bold, vigorous, earlier paintings, the celebrations of the evocative qualities of roughly stroked passages of white, that made her a star of “Paris 1874,” at the National Gallery last year. Cassatt dominated the selection at the Fenimore, even though the works that represented her were often, of necessity, less than stellar. You’d never have known what a fine painter Morisot is, at her best, from “Mary Cassatt/Berthe Morisot,” which made the exhibition something of a missed opportunity.
The concurrent exhibitions “Ben Shahn: On Nonconformity,” at the Jewish Museum, on the Upper East Side, and “Edward Burtynsky: The Great Acceleration,” at the International Center of Photography, on the Lower East Side, forced us to think about social issues, climate change, and the state of the world, in addition to aesthetics and the history of art. “Ben Shahn: On Nonconformity” is as much an account of politics and social conditions between 1930 and 1970 as it is an art exhibit. Shahn (1898–1969) was a contemporary of Stuart Davis (1892–1964), an ambitious, fully engaged artist who, like Shahn, was deeply committed to social justice. But Davis always kept his art and his activism separate, making almost no paintings during the Depression, apart from some commissioned murals, because he was so involved with demonstrations and with organizations and publications benefiting artists as he worked, successfully, to have them recognized as workers deserving support through the WPA. Shahn, by contrast, made his response to the world around him the explicit subject of his art. The exhibition at the Jewish Museum, organized by guest curator Laura Katzman, makes clear that for him, art and activism were inseparable. The show traces the work he made based on that conviction: photographs, paintings, drawings, posters, illustrations, magazine covers, and more, with different mediums and different functions inextricably intertwined, in a wide-ranging selection that makes clear Shahn’s ubiquity in the 1940s and 1950s. That seamless relationship between art and actuality was summed up by the title of his widely read book, The Shape of Content, the 1957 publication of the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures he delivered at Harvard the previous year.
Ben Shahn, Liberation, 1945, gouache on board, 29 ¾ x 40 in. (75.6 x 101.4 cm.). The Museum of Modern Art, New York. James Thrall Soby Bequest, 1980. © 2025 Estate of Ben Shahn / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY.
Born in what is now Lithuania, then part of the Russian Pale of Settlement, Shahn grew up in Brooklyn, after his family immigrated to the U.S. in 1906. Remarkably, he not only managed to study art, but to travel extensively in Europe and North Africa, furthering his art education; the selection suggests that it was not the history or art or even direct observation, but rather perception already translated into two dimensions that was the most important stimulus to his image-making. The show reveals Shahn’s use of source material, especially photographs, as the basis for his stylized, subtly modulated images, with their delicate surfaces and elegant, flat shapes. In the 1930s, he photographed people and places in the rural South and New York’s Lower East Side, along with protest marches and the like. These, as well as photos published in the press, informed his passionately engaged comments on such causes célèbres as the trial of Sacco and Vanzetti and the murder of civil rights activists, the destruction of European cities in World War II, the civil rights movement, and more, including protests against nuclear weapons. Nothing was used verbatim but became a starting point, edited, cropped, and adjusted for maximum clarity, with different sources sometimes combined. Fierce portrait drawings skewering political figures Shahn despised, such as the witch-hunting Joseph McCarthy and his sidekick Roy Cohn, as well as others celebrating those he admired, such as Gandhi and Martin Luther King, are impressive for their combination of likeness, hostility or sympathy, and expressive line. (That stuttering contour drawing line became a dominant feature of advertising, album covers, and the like, in the late 1950s and 1960s.)
Shahn was a brilliant illustrator, able to distill the essential elements of narratives into simplified, sensitively composed images. Witness Liberation (1945), a meditation on Europe in the aftermath of the Second World War, with airborne little girls swinging on an invented, improvised type of playground fixture, against a ruined house and a pile of rubble. The geometric shapes and patterns of the wallpaper of exposed rooms contrast with the expressive silhouettes of the children. Posters and book covers, often based on photographs, often with Shahn’s distinctive typography (sometimes in Hebrew lettering) are powerful and memorable. The exhibition’s few “fine art” allegorical works, made in the 1950s, are handsome but somehow less compelling. “Ben Shahn: On Nonconformity” makes clear that the artist was at his best as an eloquent storyteller, an inventor of emblems for specific events, people, and circumstances he cared deeply about. He would undoubtedly have found ample triggers for searing representations in our present administration.
The wide-ranging retrospective “Edward Burtynsky: The Great Acceleration,” at the International Center of Photography, assembles more than seventy of the alluring, disturbing images the Canadian photographer has made over the past four decades, most of them very large. The title, we learn, refers to the human impact on our environment, worldwide, of what the wall text itemizes as “population growth, water usage, transportation, greenhouse gas emissions, resource extraction, and food production.” Shahn would sympathize with the photographer’s desire to alert us to the issues, but where, I suspect, the older artist would have found ways of embodying these ravages unequivocally, Burtynsky compels us to acknowledge the damage we have wrought through a kind of subterfuge. His big, confrontational photographs seduce us with omniscient views that reveal often gorgeous colors, textures, and shapes of places we don’t immediately recognize and might otherwise never encounter. Case in point: his well-known images of a bright orange river, snaking through a desolate landscape, its improbable color caused by the tailings of a nickel mine, or the pale Cubist planes describing the immense wounds of exhausted marble quarries. The photos are so beautiful and expansive that they read momentarily as abstractions; it takes a moment to realize that we are looking at an almost certainly irreversible affront to the natural world.
The all-overness and forthright quality of Burtynsky’s images are his response to postwar Abstract painting: Jackson Pollock’s skeins and tangles or Mark Rothko’s floating rectangles, for example. Burtynsky seeks out high viewpoints and, for the most part, light that flattens and homogenizes. The earliest works on view, plus some done more recently, during the Covid lockdown, when he was unable to travel, are of layers of bare branches that fill the entire image—ordinary experience transformed into near abstraction, here, we discover, in part through some kind of technical manipulation. (An informative section of the installation analyzes Burtynsky’s methods; lately, it seems, he has been experimenting with drones.)
Edward Burtynsky, Manufacturing #10b, Cankun Factory, Xiamen City, China, 2005 (right half of a diptych). Copyright © Edward Burtynsky, courtesy Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York.
Occasionally, Burtynsky comes in close to his subjects, as in a series about recycling plastic scraps in China, which includes portraits of the recyclers and their unappetizing materials. Then he backs off again, giving us a rather terrifying image of a factory floor, seen from above, with what seems to be an impossible number of workers, in identical yellow jackets, at their stations, vanishing into the distance. Other series, made in Asia, Africa, Europe, and the Americas, document piles of tires, ships being reduced to scrap metal, endless suburban housing, and more. The content is alarming. The photographs, from the point of view of pure aesthetics, are surprising and compelling. They make us at once profoundly uncomfortable as reminders of how hopeless the physical state of the planet appears to be. But they are also tributes to a gifted artist’s singular vision. One doesn’t cancel out the other.