Gen Z has recently reclaimed the word “aura” — Walter Benjamin’s term for the strange presence exerted by a work of art — to refer to some intangible “it” factor some people possess. Fitting, given that our featured piece today takes on the question of whether works of art can have personhood. Lisa Siraganian draws on everything from the 2010 Citizens United Supreme Court decision that deemed corporations people to Pierre Huyghe’s uncanny human “statues.”
Speaking of artworks with personhood, Ed Simon takes on the Renaissance painter Hans Holbein the Younger, who painted the human like no one before and since. In classic Ed Simon fashion, his review of scholar Elizabeth Goldring’s new book is an excellent primer on the artist if you’re less familiar, and a complete recasting for even the most schooled academic. Plus, the incomparable Michael Glover introduces us to Whistlejacket, a “magnificent, rampant beast”; Scrub, a bay horse with a royal pedigree; and many other amazing equine portraits by English Romantic painter George Stubbs, on view at the National Gallery in London.
Also today, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, received the largest gift in its history for an endowed program, a peek inside the new Victoria & Albert Museum in East London, and many other goodies below. Enjoy!
—Lisa Yin Zhang, associate editor
Can an Artwork Have Personhood?
Many of us yearn for intimate, almost human interactions with art objects. But the risks might outweigh the rewards. | Lisa Siraganian
Byron Kim: A Little Deepness at James Cohan’s 48 Walker Street Gallery
A Little Deepness brings together early large-scale skyscapes, which illuminate the roots of Byron Kim’s practice in the interplay between looking and memory, with a year of his Sunday Paintings series. By turns intimate and universal, they chronicle Kim’s lived experience in which clouds, children’s milestones, political upheavals, and personal reckoning share the same quietly radiant surface.
News
- A historic $116M gift to the National Gallery of Art (NGA) will endow a new artwork lending program. In its pilot year, the initiative reached an estimated 900,000 visitors across 10 institutions in the United States.
Feature
Can the V&A’s New Museum Fulfill Its Democratic Promise?
In contrast with the institution’s behemoth architecture, its recently unveiled East London branches seem built on a human scale. | Naomi Polonsky
The International Center of Photography Presents Photobook Fest
This year’s fest will feature over 80 publishers with a full weekend of workshops, panels, and book signings. May 8–10 in Manhattan’s Lower East Side.
From Our Critics
Hans Holbein Painted the Human
He surpassed all of his colleagues in the sheer depth, visceral intimacy, and empathy conveyed in his renderings of nobles, aristocrats, and thinkers. | Ed Simon
Tale of a Riderless Horse
When George Stubbs paints a horse, it comes alive. | Michael Glover
Community
Remembering Desmond Morris, James Hayward, and Flo Oy Wong
This week, we honor a surrealist and zoologist, a monochrome abstractionist, and a pillar of Oakland’s Chinatown. | Lisa Yin Zhang
ICYMI
Harry Bertoia Gets His Moment
As a sculpture long thought lost resurfaces in Detroit, the artist and designer’s alma mater sets its sights on a major retrospective. | Sarah Rose Sharp
