Category: Reviews

As part of its bicentenary celebrations, the National Gallery turns to Vincent Van Gogh, paying particular attention to the two years the artist spent in Arles and Saint-Rémy in the south of France (14 September – 19 January 2025). Featuring more than 50 works, the exhibition captures his romantic idealisation of the region through paintings such as Starry Night over the Rhône (1888), which depicts two lovers strolling under a twinkling night sky. Also on display are some of the artist most famous works from this period, including one of his Sunflowers (1888) and The Bedroom (1889), as well as lesser-known works on paper such as a delicate sketch, Landscape near the Abbey of Montmajour (1888). Find out more from the National Gallery’s website.

Preview below | View Apollo’s Art Diary

Landscape near the Abbey of Montmajour (1888), Vincent Van Gogh. Photo: © Rijkmuseum, Amsterdam

Starry Night over the Rhône (1888), Vincent Van Gogh. Musée d’Orsay, Paris. Photo: Patrice Schmidt; Photo © Musée d’Orsay, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais

Not all the artists in “Asian-American Abstraction” are Asian-American, but no matter. Who can tell the difference anyway?

Think I’m joking? The gallery, Hollis Taggart, asks just that. Wall text roughly midway through poses the question, and not even a checklist of works stops to answer. Take as long as you like with a challenging summer group show, through September 7. It is not the only summer group show to take American abstraction overseas and back, and I work this together with a recent report on “Americans in Paris” as a longer review and my latest upload.

Nearly fifty artists, past and present, fill both floors of the gallery for “Asian-American Abstraction” and who are they anyway? They show the influence of East Asian tradition, but also Abstract Expressionism—and there, too, you may have trouble untangling the threads. Don Ahn, for one, works with an eye to calligraphy, but with ink spatters as well. He may have you marveling at the sheer control of Chinese “Companions in Solitude” before him and, in a very different way, drip painting from Jackson Pollock. And then a second work adds a glowing yellow that not even Pollock could know. Ming Wang has her own descending black brush, but also an accordion book of pages twice “letter” size, to accommodate so much more.

Influence here runs every which way—all the more so in a room that includes Abstract Expressionists, too. It also bears text with that stubborn question. Franz Kline has his seeming calligraphy, but then so does Robert Rauschenberg in characters of his own invention. Black for Sheila Isham spirals down a red canvas as Song of the Palace, while Michael West is Drunk with Turpentine. Vivian Springford, like West (surprise!) a long-neglected woman artist, applies acrylic stains in near concentric circles. You may think of Georgia O’Keeffe or Morris Louis, but she had her first solo show in Tokyo, and she credits the influence of Walasse Ting, from Shanghai on his way to America.

If those artists looked to Chinese art, Chinese Americans had their versions of modern art as well. Ivy Wu brings almost Pop Art colors and well-defined geometry to her calligraphy, while Oonju Chan paints on open fields out of Joan Mitchell. Think, then, that you really cannot know the difference? Think again. Just to describe them is to see them as individuals. Those without a signature style can get lost along the way.

Abstract Expressionists relied heavily on their signature, like Kline’s monumental characters. Adolph Gottlieb has one of his characteristic explosions, of one symbol atop another. Sam Francis has his splotches of red, yellow, and black. They are easy enough to recognize even in relatively small works on paper. Chinese Americans, by comparison, can be more intricate or more fluid. You may pass that test after all.

Nor does it really come down to Asia and America. Postwar American artists had many influences and many that they influenced. Were they formal or gestural? Were they the heirs to Cubism, Surrealism, or something else again? Where they as American as the Hudson River School, which they admired as well? More and more, too, curators are looking beyond Abstract Expressionist New York to a global movement. Asians, say, had their share starting around 1954, in Gutai.

The question still matters, and it sets this show apart. It asks one to look beyond major works and heavy hitters. It asks, too, to well-known artists as infinitely changeable. Who would have thought of Rauschenberg as an abstract painter? He rejected all that, right? You might have to read his indecipherable letters to find out.

Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.

In 1959, at sixteen, Rose Percita Brooks had two choices: the navy or the nunnery. The way her grandmother Rosie beat her for kissing a boy on a couch in her home made the girl want to run into a convent. At least there she would be far from the old woman’s wrath. Whatever inspired Rosie’s cruel beatings may have been a holdover from an ancestor’s pain during slavery times, some ghost haunting the old woman. Rosie was not yet born when slavery existed in Memphis, but she would always moan joyfully in church, as though she had witnessed the first Juneteenth. It was clear when the spirit possessed her. She grunted more loudly than anyone else. Oh, that’s Grandma, Rose thought. She’s happy now. She’s got the Holy Spirit.

It was Rose’s grandfather who told his wife that the girl was in the living room with a stranger. They had flirted from opposite ends of the sofa until Rose accepted the boy’s slow departing kiss. That same evening, Rosie surprised the girl when she was changing for bed. As she recoiled from her grandmother’s blows, Rose thought of herself as an abused housewife, so wholly bound to her captor that she started to feel indistinguishable from Rosie. Would she ever escape her grandmother’s orbit? Rose bathed the woman, laid out her church clothes, and had nearly the same damn name.

“What are you doing with that man?” Rosie demanded. The worst thing the girl could do was lift her arms to protect her face. Rosie’s force increased each time the girl tried to shield herself from the blows.

The old woman’s rage pushed Rose Percita away. Her dreams of Howard University and Tennessee State receded. In Nashville, the navy recruited Rose before the sisterhood could. She gave them her loyalty and hoped they would be gentler than the marine corps or air force. Boot camp and a nearly fatal swimming test were her first obstacles. She was posted at a naval station in Arlington, Virginia, as a stringer photographer for a navy paper. Over the next four years, few aspects of life on the base escaped her notice. She and her sole colleague, a white man from North Carolina, ran the publishing operation—“a cute little thing up on a hill,” Rose would later call it, a world of their own.

The delight of developing film and watching outlines take form on the photo paper kept Rose’s mind active.

Clubs for noncommissioned officers and enlisted men adjoined the photo lab. One captain, a surgeon at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, charmed Rose. He would not let the usual rites of courtship stand in his way, however, and so he tied her up and “took it.” It was her first time. Rose could not hide her “little watermelon” for long. Her honorable discharge in 1963 stranded her again, as a twenty-year-old. She was an expecting mother with no income and no roof. One of Rosie’s daughters, the girl’s aunt, lived in Detroit and agreed to take her in. The aunt was just as mean as Rosie. Rose forgave it but could not live with it, and she fled to the home of her uncle. She then met and married a kind man, naming her son after him: Bernard Waldon, Jr. They called the baby boy Barney.

Rose Waldon. Photograph from the Albert B. Cleage Jr. Papers, courtesy of Kristin Cleage.

***

By 1967, Rose Waldon had been in Detroit for a few years, but she still could not afford to buy herself a washing machine and dryer. She would often take her three-year-old son to the laundromat with her. A man approached them one day by the laundromat entrance as they were walking in. Was he some kook? What did he want? The man introduced himself as the assistant at an artist’s gallery. He made a claim that Rose would start to hear more often in the North: he told her that she had a memorable face.

It was true. Her jawline was sharp and her cheeks reflected varied gradations of light. Each of her dimples was a shallow depression. The assistant asked Rose if she would like to model for a mural of a Black Madonna and child at Reverend Albert Cleage Jr.’s Central United Church of Christ. She did not know what the church was or why this man would think a mother with her child at a laundromat would accept his invitation, but when he explained what the church was about—that it envisioned self-determination for black people everywhere—she said, “Why yes, I would be honored to try that.”

Rose and the artist Glanton Dowdell developed an easy rapport during the first interview at his studio, the Easel Gallery. He was quite handsome with that beard, those wide eyes, and the baby-faced pucker to his lips.

He asked her where she lived.

Not far from the gallery.

Had she done any modeling previously?

She had not.

Well, she might consider it.

Glanton had her sit in the back of the studio as he drew a portrait study in charcoal. The oils came later. Rose was asked to find a beautiful outfit. She had a designer weave a pretty caftan that made it appear as though she moved like water over rocks. Some of their evening sessions were brief, with not much accomplished, Rose thought. But on Glanton’s canvas, she took on a new form. Her face was looking like the sculpted clay busts of Modernist black artists—William Ellsworth Artis’s Head of an African American Woman (1939) or Sargent Claude Johnson’s Chester (1931). The collaboration between the artist and his subject took one month. In the final image, Glanton captured not only some semblance of Rose but also of his earliest memories of growing up in Black Bottom, the poor enclave of blacks and immigrants that had once existed on Detroit’s east side, where the first sights he remembered were the brown legs, worn shoes, and swishing skirts of his mother and grandmother. Those women had “hummed, chattered, and laughed,” alchemizing Glanton’s hunger and want into something more bearable.

Glanton’s Black Madonna was too stocky to be a replica of Rose alone, and when she later walked into Central Church to view this woman who was herself and not-herself, she would observe her dark face on a woman with a “happy” body. It was hard to say who the original woman was or where the artist’s influence began. Was the shawl over the Madonna’s head what Glanton would later describe in his memoir as his own grandmother Annie’s “thick iron gray hair … over a deep, brown face”? Were her lips drawn tight because of Annie’s “awesome quietness” and her aversion to idle chatter? If Annie was in the painting, too, it was because the stories she had told Glanton when he was a child were, the artist wrote, “meant to define me to myself.”

Was Rose looking at herself, or at the mother figure that the women in her own family wished they could have been? Was this what she would look like in her thirties or forties, or was this the person she must try to become? When Rose first saw the Black Madonna, she began to cry, for the first time of many throughout that day. She understood at once the pride that the Muslims of Elijah Muhammad’s Nation must have felt when they grew their own food, as they were known to do in states across the South and Midwest, including in Michigan. The mural brought to Rose’s mind the landscape of a farm. The portrait had the power to sustain.

Rose could not see the future, but if she could have, she would have seen how the hard-jawed Madonna exhumed black people’s memories of their mothers, grandmothers, and other ancestral spirits. She would make people feel that they had seen someone like her before. The Black Madonna had the difficult task ahead of her of reminding black people that they could be united in a single image or purpose that reflected many conflicting selves. She was a divine archetype and an individual unlike anyone else. For all her poise and stillness, the Black Madonna was not static. She looked out, and in her eyes were glints of recognition.

Photograph from the Albert B. Cleage Jr. Papers, courtesy of Kristin Cleage.

***

Throughout history, Black Madonnas from Europe to Asia have usually been understood as alternatives to the norm. In Poland, an ancient Black Madonna icon housed at a monastery in Czestochowa became a beloved symbol of national independence and resistance against invaders. The original icon of Our Lady of Kazan in western Russia was a foot-tall wood painting adorned by admirers with precious stones and said to have inspired miracles and armies. Before the Crusades, the Black Madonnas of the Byzantine Empire were revered outside of the Roman church. The materials that Black Madonna statues were made from—meteoric stone; the wood of oaks, cedars, and fruit trees—were as diverse as the guises she was thought to have taken in various mythic traditions: Isis, Demeter, Saint Mary of Egypt, the queen of Sheba, the bride in the Song of Songs.

The mystery of the Black Madonna’s color had perplexed historians and priests for centuries. Had she been blackened by candle soot? Was it aged wood or paint? Was she darkened by the solar radiance of her love? Stained by soil after a burial, to hide her from Muslims during the Crusades? Few seemed to believe that her blackness made sense, despite her popularity in many parts of the world and the tendency of people to create art in their own image.

Years after Glanton Dowdell painted his mural, some New Age astrologers, spiritually minded feminists, and psychoanalysts inspired by the theories of Carl Jung would regard the Black Madonna as the archetype that best embodied the Aquarian age (though none of these people seemed to know about Glanton’s painting). The Age of Aquarius would be defined by the destruction of dangerous ideologies that threatened the Black Madonna, who for some became the symbol of a fertile, healthy earth. For different Utopian thinkers from the sixties on, the Black Madonna was understood as an enemy of capitalism, militarism, nuclearism, environmental degradation, white Christianity, and white supremacy. Her emergence from the black collective unconscious, when Glanton awakened her from a long dormancy with his brush, sounded the bells of kairos—the appointed time for what Jung in The Undiscovered Self (1958) called a “metamorphosis of the gods.”

Painting by Glanton Dowell.

From The Black Utopians: Searching for Paradise and the Promised Land in America, to be published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux this October.

Aaron Robertson is a writer, an editor, and a translator of Italian literature. His translation of Igiaba Scego’s Beyond Babylon was short-listed for the 2020 PEN Translation Prize and the National Translation Award. His work has appeared in the New York Times, The Nation, n+1, The Point, and Literary Hub, among other publications.

Yto Barrada photographed Gibraltar, near her African home town, as a touch point for North Africans in the treacherous passage to safety. She embraced it, too, for the sun and sea.

YThat was 1999, but even now she is traditional enough to work not digitally, but in the darkroom. At the International Center of Photography, you may wonder if she ever leaves its confines, even with a camera. She prefers photograms, of candy wrappers and child’s toys, as a cavalcade of overlapping colors and blocks of light. Sweet.

You may not think of Barrada as a photographer, but she began as one. She graduated from the one-year programs at ICP in 1996—then in a Fifth Avenue mansion that could have converted anyone to the medium. Now she returns home several times over. She was back in the darkroom ten years ago, on her return to New York, and she has a solo show at her old school of the results, while recent graduates of those programs share their work a floor above. It may not define her once and for all, but it helps broaden the museum’s self-definition. She may never become a full-time photographer, but she is, as the show has it, “Part-Time Abstractionist,” through September 2.

Actually Barrada has had several homes and successive media. Born in Paris to Moroccan parents in 1971, she spend much of her childhood in Tangier, studied at the Sorbonne, and co-founded a cinema art house in Tangier as well. She exhibited at the LMCC Art Center on Governors Island in 2020, with Bettina Grossman (or simply Bettina) as her guest. Her work there included sculpture, installation, and abstract art (and I leave you to my review then for more). Now she brings a long overdue touch of color to the barren, pebbled courtyard of MoMA PS1. The piled cubes of Le Grand Soir look like attempts at grand pyramids that never quite made it—or just long overdue seating.

ICP displays sculpture and video, too, in a small show curated by Elisabeth Sherman. A makeshift vase holds cardboard flowers, while the video takes her from the darkroom to an arid but tempting suburban landscape. Cars with what might be a hearse at its front pass homes whose only face rotates open and shut, like an oversize garage door. The procession reaches a traffic circle without heeding the temptation to turn, on its way to what must remain unseen and unknown. As the cars pass, red and white striped curbs swell into red along the pavement, and palm trees sink into the ground and rise once more. They, too, are part-time abstraction.

Are they playful in tone, formal exercises, or deeply allusive—much as the houses might pass for toys, Minimalist sculpture, or the American southwest? Do they belong at all at ICP? Whatever your answer, do not be too sure. The year’s celebration of “ICP at 50” recalled its founding mission, to promote photojournalism and a concern for humanity. Barrada earned her certificate in documentary photography as well. Yet ICP’s anniversary show also saw a broadening as far as abstraction, and so does she.

Barrada does not need a camera to approach the heights of abstraction. She relishes darkroom tools, like dodge and burn, and rescues paper from the trash. A sewing machine without thread punches its way through more paper, leaving first vertical and horizontal axes, then parallel lines between them. By the time she is done, she has a near textbook reproduction of a black painting by Frank Stella. In the one series with a camera, plumbing supplies from Tangier look like actors in a silent comedy. Take it seriously, but keep smiling.

There is another kind of television. It’s not quite live action, nor purely animated. It exists in three-dimensional space, yet people, in their conventional forms, are absent, and the stories and characters don’t fit neatly into our practical world. It makes sense that we find this kind of television in the children’s category, because that’s where we leave most irrational things. 

Toys, especially ones designed for make-believe play, occupy a similar middle ground. Toys are real objects that you can touch, but they don’t work in the way nontoys work. You have a toy elephant, but you don’t have an elephant. You have a toy vacuum, but not a vacuum. If toys are soft, plush, rounded, and malleable, with holes and faulty parts, so are the worlds we create for them. We might watch this happen on TV.  

Costume

The role of logic in the world of Teletubbies is unclear. Sometimes, the show seems overly dedicated to the principles that structure real life. Po learns that she cannot slide up the slide, because slides are for going down. Dipsy walks away from home, and therefore must walk back again. At other times, these rules are abandoned. Tinky Winky is able to fit a piece of Tubby Toast, a cow-print top hat, a large orange ball, and a scooter all in his small red purse. 

Each episode of Teletubbies isolates a very simple action—one of the basic units of everyday life. The Tubbies look in the mirror, hold hands, or take turns sitting in a chair. There are four of them, the eight-foot-tall creatures, each with a unique color, signature accessory, and slightly differentiated personality. Actions sometimes produce consequences, and conflict (which itself is rare) will only sometimes find a meaningful resolution. When the Teletubbies can’t decide what to eat, for example, they go outside. 

It’s beautiful here in Tubbyland. Like a normal field in the English countryside, but special. Decorated with plastic flowers and dotted with bunnies, the terrain is enhanced with small ski mogul–like hills. The Tubbies live in a grass dome that emerges from a depression in the landscape. Its interior is decorated in a futuristic style, with a toaster, a custard machine, and a control center fashioned with levers and buttons that have unspecified functions. The sky, which happens to also be our sky, is partly to mostly cloudy, depending on the day. If you look far enough into the distance, the grass becomes more muted and brown, where Tubbyland merges into ordinary farms.

Before long, the magical windmill spins, indicating that it’s time to watch TV on your stomach. Each episode, one of the Teletubbies is selected to have a short live-action segment broadcast on their stomach-screen. This is a great privilege and a curse: the honor of featuring the video, but the challenge of having to watch it upside down.

Each of these TV clips shows real-life children completing normal activities. Drawing cacti, digging for potatoes, having a barbecue. After the clip ends, the Teletubbies yell “Again! Again!” and the clip repeats. No, the recording isn’t messed up—the Teletubbies, like children, are naturally drawn to repetition, unconcerned that it disrupts the flow of the episode.

The Teletubbies like to watch us, and we like to watch the Teletubbies. Does it matter that somewhere, deep inside the Tubby, is a human actor (if you can call it that)? On the back of each Tubby is a raised piece of fabric covering up the closure of the suit. The separation between the headpiece and the body is equally obvious. These details beg to be edited out or smoothed. Yet these disruptions don’t point to the human inside the Teletubby as much as they suggest a different comparison: a toy. 

The Teletubby suit itself—lumpy, soft, bulbous—withstands its human interior. It is more toy than human. This is intentional: the four-foot-long Flemish Giant rabbits were selected to make the Teletubbies appear comparatively toy-size. Yes, Teletubbies look like aliens, or babies, but they mostly look like toys. 

Like all toys strewn across a playroom floor, the Teletubbies really do exist. There, in the field, being filmed in front of the camera. The set is real—so real that it was intentionally flooded by its owner after an influx of fans trespassed onto her cattle fields in an attempt to reach Tubbyland. 

And like toys, the Teletubbies are also not real, not distinctly alive, with no place in our physical, human world. The Teletubbies, as we see them, are more than a sum of their parts (the actor, the suit). The hybrid Teletubby mirrors the process by which we animate toys through our imagination—giving them life and using them to test out what things are supposed to do and mean. Hence the logical holes poking through Tubbyland. This is all an experiment—these are just toys. Rules will be picked up only to be put down again. And again, and again.

Clay

Pingu, the penguin protagonist of his namesake series, lives his life through pure, raw emotion. He is a very bad penguin. Blind to consequences, he acts impulsively, triggering tears, wounds, and scoldings. His major irritants are typical of any young boy: a younger sister who gets too much attention, rules, bullies, the seaweed he has to finish before leaving the table. What is not typical of Pingu is that he’s made of clay. 

Specifically: soft, matte plasticine with the texture of fondant. Few things are made of clay, but at the same time, clay can be made into anything. In Pingu, this means: tables, chairs, planks of wood, igloos, mailboxes, sleds, red balls, popsicles, lollipops, fish, fishing poles, hats, accordions, barrels, baskets, pillows, popcorn, packages, straws, stilts. A world made from clay is not realistic (everything has rounded edges), but in many ways, it is preferable.

In the South Pole dollhouse arena where Pingu’s dramas unfold, things stretch, bend, spread. The world we live in doesn’t really move like clay, but when it does, here on the screen, it moves better. It feels good to hold clay, to squeeze it, roll it, flatten it out, break it apart. It feels good to watch clay move like this, as if my hands were inside the screen. Clay needs human touch to warm up before it changes shape. Pingu needs our warm hands.

Meanwhile the characters speak in Penguinese, an uninterpretable language that sounds like talking but doesn’t say any words. Only the sensory qualities of language remain. It’s surprising how well this works: full exchanges decipherable only through tone and gesture.

It turns out that clay is perfectly suited for slapstick comedy. Pingu sleds down the hill so fast that he crashes inside a snowman—we watch the base of the snowman stretch as he tries to push himself out. He flips over his fishing hole like a Slinky, catching his friend Robby the Seal stealing his fish behind him. Luring the seal out of the ice hole with a piece of seaweed tied to a string, Pingu chases him by rolling his entire body into a perfectly cylindrical ball. When Pingu falls onto the ground, he flattens on impact.

Animators call the freedom of movement in claymation “squash and stretch.” Characters change shape as they move. This kind of stuff happens in cartoons all the time, but the effect seems more extreme in three dimensions—in the clay that we can feel in our hands. 

Other fictional worlds limit their characters’ expression to movement of the eyes, mouth, and limbs, but Pingu characters emote with their whole bodies. When Pingu is surprised or overwhelmed, his body melts into a puddle. When he wants to intimidate someone, his torso stretches and his shoulders expand. His signature expression, “Noot Noot,” erupts from his beak as it stretches into the shape of a trumpet, expressing a range of extreme emotions from excitement to anger.

Though exaggerated, the reactive morphings of Pingu’s body never feel unrealistic. Emotion has a tendency to manifest physically. Emotion is a kind of exaggeration in itself—it stretches, it shrinks, it melts into the ground.

Pingu’s mischief brings consequences, then tears. Fat, white, opaque tears that rest for a moment on his face. Again: sadness is physical. Clay is soft, but not because it is gentle. Clay has a quality of softness that promises flexibility. The opportunity to be something, and then be something else. In the next few frames, tears roll away. Pingu bounces back.

Hands

Cookie Monster was discovered, in a way, on a game-show segment in the first season of Sesame Street, called “The Mr. and Mrs. Game.” A blue monster and his wife appear on a game show. His voice sounds like a used car salesman’s. When they win, they are offered the choice between ten thousand dollars, a new house, a three-week vacation in Hawaii, or a cookie. He chooses a cookie, and there’s no coming back from that.

Cookie Monster would not consider his timeless bit a bit. After all, the only way Cookie Monster can understand his world (the number three, the moon, the word there) is by thinking about it through cookies (three cookies, it’s a good thing the moon is not a cookie, there are cookies there). To the librarian’s dismay, he is unable to request a book without also requesting a box of cookies. His letter to Santa says it all: two dozen coconut macaroons, a pound and a half of “figgy newtons,” four dozen oatmeal cookies, banana cookies, chocolate-covered-marshmallow-with-jelly-inside cookies. He has to stop there because he has become so hungry he has eaten his pencil. 

It takes two to “animate” Cookie Monster, who is a live hand puppet, unlike a rod puppet (Elmo) or a wearable puppet (Big Bird, Snuffy). Cookie Monster is also referred to as a bag puppet, which seems right—he is basically just a giant bag. One puppeteer uses both of their hands, one in Cookie Monster’s head and the other in the left arm, and another puppeteer controls his right arm. In review: Cookie Monster’s hands are human hands, his arms are arms, but then his head is also a hand. “The hand speaks to the brain as surely as the brain speaks to the hand,” you can read in a book called The Hand.

Puppets are fidgety. This has a physical explanation, because a human arm and hand have more mobility than a torso and head. It’s also a coping mechanism, making up for the absent faculties of facial expression and body language. 

Cookie Monster flaps all over the place, repeatedly showing us the dark hole that is his mouth. No one’s face moves like that, which makes sense because what’s moving is actually a hand. Cookie Monster is grabby, catchy, punchy. It’s not a coincidence that these adjectives also describe actions completed by a hand. 

In another children’s show, Oobi, the hand-mouth relationship is interrogated. Instead of placing their hands inside the puppets, the puppeteers’ hands function as the puppets themselves, with the sole addition of a pair of glass eyes. Picture a puppet, but naked. These puppets can do all the typical kids’ show things—play, explore, navigate simple conflict. They can also do all the typical puppet stuff: talk, look around, move up and down. The thumb sometimes becomes an arm, or a hand, scratching the side of the head in confusion. The mouth of the characters takes a break from being a mouth to become a hand and carry something—say, a toolbox—into the scene. We have decided, with certainty, on what our body parts can do for us. But then we find it’s easier to relate to a mouth that is actually a hand than to a mouth that is truly a mouth. 

Something is off: these characters composed of human flesh feel more alien than the matted blue Cookie Monster. With a ratty, loose bag over his head, Cookie Monster looks like a well-loved toy. His movements are not dissimilar from those of a toy handled by a child, its body grasped and shaken around to imitate speech during play. Would you call eating all the cookies a character flaw? Cookie Monster might think about this, and then shake his head no. Which means that someone, under the blue fur, is waving goodbye, or maybe hello.

Isabelle Rea is a writer who lives in New York.

What’s in a name? For the dodo, if it could have understood human speech, a world of hurt. So-called father of taxonomy Carl Linnaeus dubbed the bird Didus ineptus, meaning ‘inept simpleton’, while the word ‘dodo’ is believed to come from the Dutch Dodaars, which means ‘fat-arse’. In 1598, a Dutch vice-admiral visiting its homeland of Mauritius named it Walghvoghel, meaning ‘tasteless’, ‘insipid’ or ‘sickly’ bird.

Of course, not everyone has agreed with such harsh judgements. Ralfe Whistler, the inventor of the litter-picker and the outdoor pub table, was a superfan: he inherited bones of the long-extinct bird from his ornithologist father, which sparked a lifelong passion. By the time of Whistler’s death last year, his home in Battle, East Sussex, was known as the Dodo House. He filled his nest with all manner of dodo-themed objects: paintings by the likes of Beryl Cook and Richard Bawden, sculptures, drawings, prints, letters, tableware, stamps, carpets, and even a toilet seat. ‘I wouldn’t say I am an eccentric,’ he once told the press. ‘But other people around here do, including my own family.’

On 24 September, objects from Whistler’s collection will go on sale at Summers Place Auctions in West Sussex. What better occasion, Rakewell feels, to revisit some of the finest depictions of our late feathered friends in the history of art.

The Dodo and Other Birds (c. 1630), attributed to Roelant Savery. Natural History Museum, London

In this most famous of dodo depictions – often thought to be one of the very first – painted by the Dutch artist Roelant Savery in around 1630, several decades before the bird’s extinction – there is little trace of the sad self-awareness described in 1634 by the English diplomat Thomas Herbert, who visited Mauritius a few years earlier: ‘Her visage darts forth melancholy, as sensible of Nature’s injurie in framing so great a body to be guided with complementall wings, so small and impotent, that they serve only to prove her bird.’

Untitled (1628–33), Ustad Mansur. Institute of Oriental Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences

Around the same time, the Mughal court artist Ustad Mansur also rendered the dodo in all its glory. He managed to instil the bird with a degree of gravitas notably absent from most paintings – perhaps thanks to the fact Mansur is thought to have painted from life, unlike Savery, who probably modelled his depiction on a taxidermied dodo.

Alice meets the Dodo (right) in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) by Lewis Carroll, illustrated by John Tenniel. Photo: Universal History Archive/Universal Images Group via Getty Images

No discussion of the dodo is complete without mention of the radically egalitarian specimen in Alice in Wonderland (‘Everybody has won, and all must have prizes’). John Tenniel’s illustration of 1865 shows the moment after the assembled creatures have run their ‘caucus-race’: ‘The Dodo solemnly presented the thimble, saying, “We beg your acceptance of this elegant thimble;” and, when it had finished this short speech, they all cheered.’ Whether in life, death or Wonderland, Rakewell suspects that there are few things more cheering than a dodo.

This could be the most difficult review that I shall ever write—not because the art is all that hard to explain, but because it is so painful to try. To describe a performance by Carlos Martiel is to relive the terror, disgust, and shame that he hopes to produce. I can only imagine the pain for him, at El Museo del Barrio.

Not that he is present in performance at a survey of twenty years of work apart from photographs, occasional video on small screens, and titles that are painful enough in themselves through September 1. It is still his “Cuerpo,” or body. Is it good or bad if he causes you to turn away?

Martiel is, somehow, still going in a line of performance art that includes Chris Burden, who dragged himself across broken glass, and Pope.L, who crawled the twenty-two miles of Broadway in New York. Not for nothing did ExitArt, the former nonprofit, call a group show “Endurance.” Still, their work can come across as a stunt, and Martiel is all the more vulnerable at thirty-five in remaining stock still. In that he is an heir to Yoko Ono, with Cut Piece, but the scissors that cut away her clothing never touch her for all their threat. He may be closer yet to Marina Abramovic, impassive and unmoving on a gallery shelf. Her work, though, is one long ego trip, while he harps on, let us say, serious matters.

Born in Havana, Martiel may come closest of all to another Cuban artist, Juan Francisco Elso—and I work this together with my earlier report on him as a longer review and my latest upload. A retrospective of Elso at the museum last year gave pride of place to Por América, a man in wood pierced by arrowheads many times over, like Saint Sebastian. And still the sculpture, modeled after José Martí, the Cuban revolutionary, wields a machete. His near namesake, too, fights back, but with his body on the line. Martiel has no time for epic heroes, the first Christian martyr, or fine art. He is a gay Cuban American in the real world, now.

I have put off saying more as long as I could. This is his body and his show, although Por América could make a fine alternative title. In its very first work, not arrows but a flagpole pierces his skin, leaving the Stars and Stripes to drape from his chest. He has become a human flagpole, the very symbol of America, but an America that will never acknowledge him. Another flag hangs from above, with the red and blue turned to black and the white stained with blood. Let the blood be on your hands.

At the very least, it is all over his feet. They appear coarse and discolored in another performance. Blood is fresher still in another photo, where he holds a creature to his chest like a child or a pet. He might comforting it or taking comfort from it, but the seeming animal is only a loose collection of vital organs. It could make anyone who stares too long a vegetarian. What, though, does it say about gender, America, or him?

That can be a problem. Martiel can seem a one-note artist, and the note can ring all too clearly or hardly at all. He can also turn you away.That can be a strength, too, and critics must have brought the same complaints to Burden long ago. Martiel addresses Cuba’s repressive state honestly as well. He pins three of its medals directly to his chest—medals awarded to his father before him.

Still, it can fail. At his best, performance engages the viewer, daring one to turn away. He stands on a block in the Guggenheim’s rotunda, hands cuffed behind his back, like a slave at auction. He asks only for recognition, as a step toward freedom. In the show’s title work, he relies on others to save his life, with his neck in a noose as in a lynching waiting for him to fall. It is safe to say that enough people came through.

Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.

April 12, 2024

I live on a mountain and am surrounded by mountains and last year I planted five rosebushes. Last year I dug five holes and it took a few days because the ground is hard where I live and it is full of bluestone and other rocks. In the old days they made use of the rocks that they found when they were digging into the ground. They built walls of bluestone to keep the cattle from going past the property line and you can still see many of these walls today and there are even some of these walls on my own property. These days the rocks are not useful to me at all and they were a big nuisance to my digging. Once the bushes were in the ground, four out of the five bushes from last year bloomed once or twice, and they had some nice flowers but it was nothing too spectacular. The blooms were small and the flowers were plagued by bugs and beetles and slugs. The beetles were the worst of the pests in the way that they crawled and in the way that they chewed on the petals. The blooms barely smelled like anything at all. The bush all the way to the right never bloomed and its leaves stayed small like fingernails. The lack of frequent blooms made every bloom feel like a gift. Now these bushes are more established and it is their second year. With another year come more established roots and with more established roots come more frequent and beautiful blooms. All of the rose experts and all of the expert rose gardeners agree on this.

I prune the five bushes from last year down to the minimum. I take my clippers and trimmed off any long leftover shoots or old growth that shows signs of disease. This will help the bushes conserve energy and produce healthy and strong shoots. The five bushes from last year look like five bunches of sticks in the ground. This season is sure to produce beautiful blooms.

April 13, 2024

Last year I planted three English shrub rosebushes and two hybrid tea rosebushes. This year I would never plant a hybrid tea rose. I know now that hybrid tea roses are tacky with their supermarket physique and their lack of a formal aroma. The hybrid tea rose is a Valentine’s Day card from the Dollar General and the hybrid tea rose disgusts me.

Instead I will plant four new English shrub rosebushes. The English shrub rose is closer to an old garden rose or even a wild rose than a hybrid tea rose or God forbid a floribunda. By the mid-to-late nineteenth century nobody in England was that interested in old garden roses and roses that looked wild or rough. Most of these old plants would bloom only once a year, which was not enough for the greedy Victorians, who wanted fat roses to put on their tables and on their dressers. The hybrid tea rose was created and when most people see a rose in a romantic comedy they are probably looking at some version of a hybrid tea rose. Hybrid tea roses bloom many times throughout the season and they can be bred in a large variety of colors, which was very impressive to the gluttonous Victorians and their French counterparts. What the hybrid tea rose gained in abundance it lost in charm and in romance and in fragrance. Most hybrid tea roses don’t smell like anything at all. The old style of roses fell out of fashion and gardens were filled with hybrid tea roses and their demented and mutated siblings. Roses started to look less like something Rilke would cry over and more like something Oscar Wilde would use as a pattern on his silk smoking jacket. Luckily, sometime around 1950, another British guy said enough was enough, and David C. H. Austin started to work to cultivate roses that bloomed more than once a season yet had a strong and decadent fragrance and looked and felt more like an old English garden rose. Thanks to Mr. Austin these roses are now widely available and beautiful gardens around the world can be filled with roses that look like real roses and the smell of roses can be inhaled all over the world including on my own property.

I preordered all of my roses online in January from David Austin Roses and there is a wonderful variety of amazing and beautiful roses available as well as many helpful guides for planting and care. It can be overwhelming to browse the David Austin Roses website due to the number of choices. I try to stay focused when I am choosing my roses and I try to not think too hard. I try to just trust my gut. In mid-April, the roses that I preordered are delivered bare-root and when you open up the box it looks like you were mailed a box of wet sticks.

April 18, 2024

It is cold where I live in April and where I live there can be snow until May. The sky is still winter blue like a polished stone. It is remote where I live and twenty minutes down the road is the road. I am leaving town for a month tomorrow so I must prepare the bushes from last year and plant the new bushes for this year. Normally I would not dare put new roses in the ground until the end of April as there is still a possibility of frost, but I will have to take the risk. Four of the bushes from last year are sending out shoots and one of the bushes might be dead. The roses from last year are planted right to the right of the house in a patch of grass just past the driveway where you can hear the creek that is a few feet away. The creek water is freezing and fresh and on early-spring days you can smell the moss on the rocks all warmed up in the sun. I spray the bushes from last year with a pesticide and I sprinkle some fertilizer around their roots and now this year there will be no beetles. Their roots are surely more established than last year.

I walk up the hill behind the barn and I dig four new holes and it is hard to dig because it almost seems like half of the ground is rock. My shovel makes a clinking noise against the big rocks and I have to find ways to use the shovel as a lever to get the big rocks out of the ground. I dig the holes and I do it quickly because it might rain later and I don’t want to dig in the rain. In each hole I put one of the new roses and I fill the holes with a mixture of dirt and fertilizer. I pat them around their base. The roses that I selected for this year are either purple or pink. They will establish their roots and if I am lucky they will give me a bloom or two and next year they are sure to produce even stronger and more beautiful blooms as long as they make it through the winter.

April 19, 2024

A late-season frost.

May 25, 2024

I am back in town and watered all of the bushes from last year which all look great except for the second bush from the left which is dead. Last year the bush second from the left produced more flowers than any of the other bushes and as a result it probably didn’t establish strong enough roots because it was too busy showing off. It was a hybrid tea rose and showing off was in its genes. The other four bushes from last year look great and they are leafing all around and I am sure that I will see buds soon. The leaves emerge from the shoots tiny and a dark red color and after a few days the leaves turn into a regular size and green.

The new bushes from this year are also putting out shoots and they are leafing. I water all of the bushes from last year and then I bring the watering can up the hill and refill it until all the new bushes have nice and moist soil to encourage their growth.

May 26, 2024

Lilacs bloom and they fill the air with lilac breath. I never knew I had so many lilacs.

The bush the second from the right.

June 4, 2024

I like roses because I know what they are. A white rose for a funeral and a white rose for a wedding. A red rose for a sentimental date. A dozen for an anniversary or a job well done. Roses are secret but they aren’t hiding anything. During the nineteenth century some Victorians would carry floral dictionaries. The chubby little Victorians would send floral messages to each other to decode. A bouquet of buttercups and basil and dill would say that I think you are childish and that I hate you and that I lust for you feverishly. Azalea and oleander would say that I want you to take care of yourself and that you also better beware. An arrangement of bird’s-foot trefoil would say my revenge is coming passive-aggressively. A green carnation meant that you were a homosexual. You don’t need any knowledge of floriography to know what a rose means. You know what a rose means now and you would have known what a rose means then. The history of the rose is in every rose. A rose by any other name would smell as sweet but it wouldn’t be a rose. I love roses and the way that they bloom in abundance with their smells that make you stop. I love their wilting and their life and their death. I love roses and when I am lucky, in my garden, roses bloom.

June 7, 2024

Buds on all four bushes. The dead bush doesn’t bud and it is obvious that it will never bud or bloom again. Soon the buds will burst from a bud to a rose. The burst is not fast, it is slow. It is sudden. A morning and a slight chill with the sun at full volume. The rose appears suddenly and it does not appear quickly. It just appears and one morning it is there. For now it is slow.

The bush farthest to the left.

June 10, 2024

Flowers half-open this morning on three bushes. A half-opened rose has the strongest scent. The first bloom smells the sweetest and the first bloom of the summer smells the most of all.

June 11, 2024

Lots of wind and rain today. A storm like this could ruin the bloom of an entire garden. The storms come fast where I live. It will be dark and quiet and then you will hear the rain fall on the roof and it will sound heavy like crab apples. The clouds get trapped in the mountains and the mountain holds on to the clouds and the clouds spit their shower and the bushes drop their petals. I look outside and the storm is plundering the garden. Petals have fallen and are wet on the grass.

June 16, 2024

The most durable rose. The best climbing rose. The rose with the strongest scent. The best rose for health. The most colorful rose and the rose with the most red color. All the expert rose gardeners discuss these things on internet forums and in the comment sections of online rose nurseries. They discuss them but can never agree.

June 22, 2024

Bushes still blooming even after the storm. New flowers on every bush except for one. The bush the farthest to the right has only stunted buds. The flowers inside will never open. Last year it didn’t bloom either. If it does, the color of the petals inside will be a surprise. The bush might just need more water.

June 29, 2024

Each bush smells sweet in a different way, like different types of pie in a row of windows.

The bush the second to the left.

July 2, 2024

The bush with the stunted buds has bloomed out of nowhere. The dead buds were not dead, they were just dried-up. They only needed some good rain and now the buds are blooming in a vibrant orange. The orange of the bloom gets lighter as the petals go from the middle to the outside of the flower.

July 6, 2024

There is no bloom and the bushes just look like bushes. The flowers all died or their petals fell off and got eaten by bugs and beetles. You wouldn’t even know that they were rosebushes if you didn’t know better. It is now in between blooms. When you are in between blooms you don’t know when you will next see a flower and you feel guilty for taking the last flowers that you saw for granted. It could be weeks before the next bloom and it could even be a month. It could also be just a handful of days. The crab apple tree that hangs near the rosebushes is filled with small crab apples the size of grapes. They are too small now but in the fall they will be a small and normal size that is good for eating.

When it is in between blooms I look at photos of the roses from last year and remind myself what the bushes could look like if I am patient. When there are blooms I share photos with my friends. My friends say wow, and my friends say beautiful. They indulge me.

If a friend comes to visit the mountain when there is a bush in bloom I will say you are lucky, the roses are blooming. I will show my guest the bush and I will say see, a blooming rose, smell it. My guest will smell it and they will say wow or mm-hmm or so beautiful. My guest will turn and walk inside. Did they smell the rose? Did you smell it? My guests walk inside and pet my dogs.

July 12, 2024

Buds appearing again. A sweet love with a wide-eyed attitude.

July 18, 2024

All of the bushes are in bloom except for the dead bush. They all bloomed at once just like a ballet. The bushes by the house are all blooming and even the new bushes from this year have put out a few flowers and there are roses in different stages of bloom. Some just starting and some half-opened and some just opened all the way. The second bloom can make the first look lazy.

The Margaret River wine region is found in a remote part of Western Australia, approximately 300 kilometres south of Perth, but its geographical isolation has accelerated its reputation for winemaking excellence. Its output is relatively new compared to that of other regions in Australia, but is consistently lauded by the international wine community. (The region produces only 2 per cent of Australian wines, but 20 per cent of its premium ones.) Notable critics and industry leaders, from the Mondavi family to Jancis Robinson, have been championing these wines since ‘Margs’ came on to the scene in the 1970s.

Of the 214 vineyards in the region, Leeuwin Estate has established the most formidable reputation. Its range of premium wines, known as the ‘Art Series’, is adorned with labels featuring works from an array of 20th-century Australian artists, from John Olsen to Arthur Boyd and Sidney Nolan to Fred Williams. The wines include Cabernet Sauvignon and Shiraz, as well as cooler varietals: Riesling, Sauvignon Blanc and the flagship Chardonnay. ‘We call it the art of fine wine,’ says co-founder Denis Horgan, ‘and a fine winery. It’s the same thing, isn’t it? Yes. Art and fine wine blend in together here.’

The estate in its current form is the result of ‘a series of fortunate accidents’, as Denis’s wife, Tricia, explained to me on a bright and humid day last December. In 1969, the couple ventured out on the peninsula to purchase a property, ‘officially’ with the intention of developing a plumbing business. ‘But actually,’ Tricia says, ‘it was mainly so Denis could come down and surf on the coast on a regular basis.’

The land remained untouched for some years and the Horgans even thought of selling, until they were informed by staff that an American was sniffing around the plots, collecting samples and surveying the layout. It turned out to be Robert Mondavi, who, having left his family business in Napa to explore new markets and sites, was lured to Margaret River. The region was in its early stages of development (the first commercial vineyards there were planted in 1967), but people were starting to notice its potential. Denis confesses that he was a ‘beer-drinking surfie’, an accountant who knew ‘nothing about wine’; ‘you couldn’t get anyone squarer than that to get into the wine industry.’

Mondavi convinced the couple to try planting, because they were sitting on a plot of land that he could foresee would ‘rank with the best in the world’. They planted the vines in 1972 and produced their first commercial wine in 1979, the Art Series Chardonnay, which was so successful that within three vintages Decanter awarded the wine its highest award in an international blind tasting.

The couple regarded their practice as a form of art, so they decided to approach Sidney Nolan to design a label for their next wine. ‘You don’t understand,’ he replied. ‘I’m a serious artist, not a graphic artist. I don’t do labels.’ Tricia and Denis took him two unlabelled bottles; he rang the next day and said, ‘For this wine, I’ll do a painting.’ The resulting work, Dolphin Rock, appears on the 1982 Art Series Cabernet Sauvignon.

A sample of Leeuwin Estate wine bottles. Courtesy Leeuwin Estate

The Horgans want to support artists through commissioning and purchasing art – a kind of ‘oenophilanthropy’ that educates drinkers about Australian art history. Tricia tells all artists whose work she collects: ‘If you are going to be on our labels, you are going to be part of our story.’

And there are myriad stories. John Olsen appeared one day in the winery restaurant, wearing his distinctive red beret. Tricia asked him to create the first artwork for the latest Art Series Riesling. He responded with four works, Frogs in Riesling, featuring anthropomorphic amphibians in playful, exaggerated poses. These drawings were ‘so irresistible’ that the Horgans could not decide which to keep, so they now alternate between all four. ‘[Olsen] loved to say, “they change every other artist every year, but they’ve never been up to changing mine, because they know mine look so good”.’

Two Leeuwin Estate wine bottles. Courtesy Leeuwin Estate

The art collection is organic: Tricia purchases works she likes, often after meeting the artists themselves. The estate’s senior wine-maker, Tim Lovett, is keenly aware of how the art complements the wines and vice versa. He collects art himself, particularly art made by First Nations people that depicts the natural beauty and spirituality of the Australian landscape. The Leeuwin Estate Shiraz, first released in 1999, was dedicated solely to First Nations artists such as the Andinyin and Kitja painter Ngarra and Alyawarre woman Minnie Pwerle, who found success late in life with her vibrant paintings of scenes from her country.

For centuries, French winemaking was considered the gold standard for newer regions to emulate, just as Australian landscape painting was for a long time ruled by the principles of European fine art. Through its approach to winemaking, Leeuwin Estate is making its mark on both the old ways and the new.

Is there something queer about nature? I might not have said so, but Wave Hill’s Glyndor Gallery thinks otherwise, with “Perfect Trouble: Queering Natureculture,” through August 11. My walks around New York City have been rich again this summer, so allow me one last review on just that (and apologies for a late report, but I was unable to make it to this show until its closing week.)

Wave Hill could be the ultimate hybrid of nature and culture—with its stately galleries, lush grass, meticulously tended botanic gardens, and gorgeous views of the Palisades across the Hudson. Even a fine exhibition is at most an excuse to return in summer. The eight artists themselves seem happy enough to settle for nature’s richness and a bit of art. They cannot define gender or untangle its meanings. They do not even try to disentangle the natural and cultural aspects of landscape. They show just enough of themselves to make things queer and strange.

Wave Hill is more likely to warn of climate change or to celebrate nature than to unsettle its terms. Yet in truth nature in art has always been gendered—and that gender, more often than not, has been female. It contrasts with civilization as men define it and know it. Any number of female nudes have found themselves lying outdoors for the likes of Titian—or falling for its temptations with an apple and a snake. In one tale, Danaë’s father did his best to shield her from a lustful Zeus by confining her indoors. Do not be surprised if the god comes in through the window as a golden shower.

This time out, artists need gender just to tell them who they are. Culture plays a still larger role for Katherine Sepúlveda and Roger Ferney-Cortés, in separate shows in the sunroom. Theirs is the immigrant experience, the latter a Colombian’s with street carts for popsicles. Sepúlveda fills her Halloween House with a chaos of Catholic collectibles. She just has a little trouble deciding whether to exclude visitors, which she does, or, as wall text has it, to invite them in. But then the galleries will be long closed by Thanksgiving.

“Perfect Trouble” is more welcoming, because who can escape desire? Last year at the New Museum, Pepón Osorio pushed an installation like Sepúlveda’s to the edge of a crime scene and the scale of a community. Here the markers are less obvious, but the focus is on sex. That dual impulse, to gender and reticence, helps rescue from the tendentious a motley collection of art. Christopher Udemezue offers hints of people and landscape in close up, in photos and in spooky reds. Others, though, play down a stereotypically gay esthetic.

Sofia Moreno goes so far as to make fun of it. Her self-portrait in colored pencil shares a pink room with grinning demons, and all seem to be having an equally good time. She also adds clay to fabric, for what might be clothing or what it cannot hide. The gendered body may or may not appear for Diana Sofia Lozano, in the thick paint of her Blueberry Dreams, while Erin Johnson takes her video to Huntington Gardens in Pasadena and its scholarly pursuits. One learns only later of Rachel Carson’s letters to her female lover. Like Carson herself, they evoke the wonders of nature all the same.

Rachel Youn takes a step back from nature and the human alike, leaving wide open just what to desire. Artificial plants bob rhythmically up and down, and one may remember their loud, mechanical rhythms as much as their orchid purple. Other artists do rely on bare flesh for a touch of nature. Young Joon Kwak speaks of the Aggregate Body, in a wall of fragmentary photos. Seba Calfuqueo unites nature and culture with a Liquid Being, face down in sunlit grass and water. In a photo, she has lost her head but taken in its place a misty mountain peak and clouds.

Who needs earthly desires anyway when you can have goddesses and gods? Two in Indian jewelry share a swing for Pyaari Azaadi, not quite innocent and not quite making love. The artist, born in Bombay, describes herself as BIPOC, or bisexual and a person of color. The others may not be so blatantly hyphenated, but they might wish they were. They are, after all, hyphenating gender, nature, and culture. As Ruben Natal-San Miguel puts it, in portrait photos of the Bronx community up at Wave Hill House, Nature Finds a Way.

Recently, I found myself at the Tate Modern in London, accompanied by my youngest daughter, to see Music of the Mind, a retrospective of the work of Yoko Ono: her drawings, postcards, films, and musical scores. Accompanied is perhaps too easy a word. When told my daughter I wanted to go, she said, “Really?” “Yes,” I said. “Really.”  

A myth about Yoko Ono is that she came from nowhere and became a destroyer of worlds. The truth is otherwise. Yoko Ono—now ninety-one—was born in 1933, in Tokyo. Her father was a successful banker and a gifted classical pianist; her mother an art collector and philanthropist. Ono attended a progressive nursery school where the emphasis was on music: the children were taught perfect pitch and encouraged to listen to everyday sounds and translate them into musical notes. In 1943, she and her brother were evacuated to the countryside. Basic provisions were scarce. For hours, they lay on their backs looking at the sky. They said to each other: “Imagine good things to eat. Imagine the war is over.” She returned to Tokyo in 1945. She was president of her high school drama club; in a photo taken at the time, her hair is bobbed and she is wearing what looks like a cashmere sweater set. At Gakushuin University, she was the first female student to major in philosophy. Her family relocated to Scarsdale, in Westchester County; she enrolled in Sarah Lawrence College, where she studied music. After three years, she dropped out and moved to New York, supporting herself by teaching traditional crafts at the Japan Society. In 1960, she rents a loft downtown, at 112 Chambers Street, and begins to host musical performances.

Word gets around. John Cage plays. Marcel Duchamp is in the audience. Peggy Guggenheim drops by. Ono is twenty-six, twenty-seven years old—a member of a loose band of international artists who operate under the name Fluxus, including Joseph Beuys and Nam June Paik. She rejects the term performance art; instead her works are often a series of instructions, by which the viewer can construct or imagine or catalog their own perceptions: art as collaboration. At the Tate, a series of postcards was tacked to the wall, printed with multiple-choice statements such as these:

1) I like to draw circles.
dislike

2) I have always drawn circles well.
never

3) I am a better circle-drawer now.
was                                              in the past.
when I was ____ (age).

Some other instructions, as in Painting to Let the Evening Light Go Through:

Hang a bottle behind a canvas.
Place the canvas where the west light comes in.
The painting will exist when the bottle creates a shadow on the canvas, or it does not have to exist.

More instructions, in Painting to Be Constructed in Your Head:

Go on transforming a square canvas in your head until it becomes a circle.

Ono writes, “I remember Isamu Noguchi, stepping on Painting To Be Stepped On with a pair of elegant Zohri slippers.” In 1961, Works by Yoko Ono is performed at Carnegie Recital Hall  (participants include the choreographers Trisha Brown and Yvonne Rainer). She returns to Japan and performs Cut Piece—the audience is invited to come up onstage and remove pieces of her clothing with a pair of scissors. She moves to London. In 1966, she shows her work at the Indica Gallery. Visitors are handed a magnifying glass and invited to climb a ladder to look at the ceiling, where they can read the word YES, written in tiny letters. Another piece is called Painting to Hammer a Nail In.

Ono recalls:

A person came and asked if it was all right to hammer a nail in. I said it was all right if he pays five shillings. Instead of paying the five shillings, he asked if it was alright for him to hammer an imaginary nail in. That was John Lennon. I thought, so I met a guy who plays the same game I played.

Together Lennon and Ono begin to stage events for peace. Ono’s film showing hundreds of bare bottoms of people in the art world is banned by the British Board of Film Censors; Ono sends them flowers. (Around this time she suggests that, before arguing, people should take off their pants.) WAR IS OVER IF YOU WANT IT appears on billboards in London. By 1969, in March, a year after the My Lai massacre, the U.S. presence in Vietnam has peaked at five hundred thousand servicemen. Knowing that they will be hounded by paparazzi if they take a conventional honeymoon, Lennon and Ono flip the equation: they hold two Bed-ins for Peace—one in Amsterdam, the second in Montreal—and invite the press, who attend in droves, along with Girl Scouts, yoga instructors, and members of the public who bring them brownies. At the Tate exhibition, a film of Lennon and Ono in bed in Amsterdam plays continuously on one white wall. Watching, I notice a number of people rolling their eyes. Others are holding back tears. That month, a photograph of Lennon and Ono’s Montreal Bed-in for Peace appeared in Life magazine. The photograph is black-and-white, but mainly white: white sheets and comforter, white duvet, white room. Ono’s long hair is a black cloud. Lennon is wearing his round metal-frame glasses.

The first time I saw the photograph of the Bed-in for Peace was a week or two after it was published, in a copy of Life in the waiting room of the ballet studio on Long Island where I attended class two afternoons a week, on Tuesdays and Thursdays. On Wednesday afternoons, I took piano lessons. I was nine years old. I’d arrived early for class, and instead of doing my math homework I’d picked up the magazine to look at. I was wearing pink tights; a pink, short-sleeved leotard; and my long black hair was pinned in a tight bun inside a pink crocheted snood. I knew about the Beatles. In second and third grade, my friend Teddy already played the guitar—he grew up to be the jazz pianist Ted Rosenthal—and at recess we sang Beatles songs in the playground. I played the tambourine. Before school my mother plaited my hair into two long braids; by the time I was twelve, I was yanking off the elastics on the way to school, saving them in my pocket so I could pull my hair back into a ponytail on the way home.

Hanging above a stair landing in my house is one of Lennon and Yoko’s newsprint posters: WAR IS OVER, IF YOU WANT IT: HAPPY CHRISTMAS FROM JOHN AND YOKO. It’s impossible, now, to look at the film or the photograph stripped of the shuddering dark shroud of what would happen eleven years later, in the archway of the Dakota, on West Seventy-Second Street. By then I was twenty, and when I stepped onto the red-and-yellow linoleum in the grimy kitchen in the apartment where I lived off-campus, on a dark, early December evening, getting ready to celebrate a friend’s birthday, the radio was on.

Who knows why certain pictures barely glimpsed—a woman in a train car, the lights of a farmhouse beyond a ridge—leave an afterimage on the mind’s eye? Perhaps, after all, it is better to take off your pants before you start to argue. Perhaps drawing circles is better than drawing straight lines. Perhaps, really, it would be a good idea to give peace a chance. I know that in 1969, while twilight, striped by the half-open venetian blinds, gathered in the parking lot behind the ballet studio where, in an hour, my mother would arrive in our Ford Country Squire station wagon to pick me up, when I looked at that photograph I thought, There is another life.

Cynthia Zarin’s most recent books are Inverno, a novel, and Next Day: New & Selected Poems. Her second novel, Estate, is forthcoming in 2025. She teaches at Yale.

Creative Scotland has closed its key fund for artists as the Scottish government freezes its budget, reports the Scotsman. The arts agency announced on Monday that its £6m ‘Open Fund for Individuals’, which is funded jointly by the government and the National Lottery, will close at the end of August due to the Scottish government’s funding freeze, and that Creative Scotland is facing ‘severe budget pressures’. The Scottish government had pledged to ‘more than double’ its arts expenditure in the next few years. Creative Scotland expected to have £13.2m restored to its budget for this financial year, and told the Scottish Parliament last week that almost £11m of funding it had already allocated had been cancelled or threatened by the government. The agency also said that the fund for individuals would be reinstated ‘as soon as possible’ once its future funding became clearer.

Staff at the Noguchi Museum in New York have staged a walk-out in protest against the museum’s recent ban on keffiyehs. Last week, Hyperallergic reports, more than two-thirds of the museum’s 72-person workforce signed an internal petition calling for the reversal of a dress code instituted on 14 August that prohibits staff from wearing the Palestinian headscarf known as the keffiyeh. The petition asserted that the staff were ‘dedicated to protecting and fostering the work and legacy of Isamu Noguchi – a man who understood intimately the injustice of targeted discrimination and displacement’, and that the dress code ‘does not serve the overall mission of the Museum’. (Noguchi had faced discrimination as a Japanese American and spent time in an internment camp in Arizona for Japanese immigrants.) On Wednesday, to protest against the new dress code still being in place, at least 14 workers, including all nine public-facing staff, walked out.

The Hotung bequest to the British Museum, made by the late Hong Kong businessman Joseph Hotung in 2022, has been valued at £123m, reports the Art Newspaper. The bequest encompasses 246 jades from across all China’s major dynasties, 15 blue and white porcelain objects from the 14th to the 16th century, 24 bronzes and other metalworks, a Neolithic ceramic jar and the head of a bodhisattva. Hotung served on the museum’s board from 1994 to 2004; he also sat on the board of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and was the first chair of the Hong Kong Arts Development Council. His bequest to the British Museum, which was announced in 2022, was recognised in the museum’s latest financial accounts after probate for his estate was granted. It brought the museum’s total of donations and legacies for the financial year to £138.5m, compared to £27.6m for the previous financial year.

The French actor and art collector Alain Delon has died at the age of 88. Best known for his handsome looks and his performances in a number of influential French and Italian films in the 1960s and ’70s, Delon was also a lover of art, and began collecting it in 1969, when he acquired a drawing by Albrecht Dürer for 700,000 francs (approximately €922,400 today). Though his early collection largely encompassed drawings, Delon soon began acquiring works by 19th-century French artists such as Millet and Géricault, and developed a taste for Fauvist paintings and the animal sculptures of Rembrandt Bugatti, the Art Newspaper reports. Last summer, Delon auctioned off his collection at Bonhams in Paris; the sale fetched €8m. He said in a statement, ‘There are two things I regard as my legacy: my acting career and my art collection. I am so proud of them both.’