Chase-Riboud will be the featured artist in the inaugural exhibition at Hauser & Wirth’s latest space, in New York’s SoHo neighborhood, which is expected to open in October. That month also marks the end of a small show at the Museum of Modern Art that pairs the work of Chase-Riboud with sculptures by Alberto Giacometti.

It is the latest in a series of high-profile exhibitions devoted to Chase-Riboud, who last year had surveys at the Serpentine Galleries in London and the Pulitzer Arts Foundation in St. Louis.

“Last year, I saw the Serpentine Galleries show, which really blew me away,” Marc Payot, president of Hauser & Wirth, told ARTnews. “For me, she is such a radical sculptor in terms of how she uses the different materials, from silk to metal to bronze. I see her in the same level as [Louise] Bourgeois or Eva Hesse or Phyllida Barlow, these very radical female women sculptors.”

Payot added, “Unfortunately, she has really has not received the recognition she has deserved. Now, it is getting better.”

For decades, Chase-Riboud has been sculpting abstractions from bronze, fiber, and other elements that often allude to various historical figures, from Malcolm X to Cleopatra. Fashioning her materials in ways that appear to pit hardness against softness, Chase-Riboud has termed her most famous works “monuments,” referring to how they immortalize facets of these people’s personae. Her sculptures draw equally on modernism and styles derived from a spread of African cultures.

Beyond her sculptures, Chase-Riboud has also written prolifically, her books including Sally Hemings, a 1979 novel that sought to inhabit the psychology of the enslaved woman who may have born some of Thomas Jefferson’s children. The book generated controversy on its release, although it is now out of print in the US.

Last year, Chase-Riboud, speaking to ARTnews, said her subjects are “people who have been rejected by mainstream history because of their race, because of their gender, because of their politics, or because of war. I think that as a group of people, they are some of the most fascinating ones that ever existed.”

During the course of her career, Chase-Riboud has rarely been represented by a commercial gallery, although she did, for a period, work with New York’s Michael Rosenfeld Gallery. Prior to joining Hauser & Wirth, Erin Jenoa Gilbert represented her independently, facilitating her exhibitions and serving as her agent.

“She sees the importance of what a large gallery can do for her, in terms of the institutions and the market, and also thinking of her legacy,” Payot said, referring to the fact that Chase-Riboud is now in her 80s. “This is different when you are young. Age becomes a factor.”

He added that Chase-Riboud relished the opportunities afforded her by a gallery the size of Hauser & Wirth. “She said to me, ‘When is my Hong Kong show?’ I said, ‘Whenever you want to do that.’ She said, ‘Well, you better hurry up and do that!’”

Long dismissed as one of Picasso’s “muses,” Gilot has in recent decades been reappraised as an artist in her own right. She had energetically worked alongside Picasso, however, and even maintained a contract with Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, the same dealer who represented him at various points.

“In the course of her long life, Françoise Gilot has consistently been true to herself, even as she has repeatedly invented herself,” Markus Müller writes in his 2022 book, Picasso: Women of His Life. a Tribute. “She had to wait until her one-hundredth year to see a work of hers—an affectionate portrait of her daughter, Paloma, dating from 1965—break the magical one-million euro barrier at auction; but in an age in which people are more interested in price than in value, this can undoubtedly be read as a kind of material consecration of her life’s work.”

That work, titled Paloma à la Guitare, shows the young woman with a feathered hat seated cross-legged in a chair. With its cool colors and a background split into intersecting, abstract geometric planes, the work is emblematic for Gilot, whose work drew on Picasso’s modernist style while offering her own take on it.

The painting sold in 2021 for $1.3 million at a Sotheby’s London auction devoted to women artists, generating a record for Gilot.

Gilot achieved an unusual status among his lovers: Of the four relationships discussed in her 1964 memoir, Gilot was the only one who left on her own terms. Picasso ended the other relationships—with Dora Maar, Marie-Thérèse Walter, and Olga Khokhlova—often acrimoniously, after having, in Gilot’s recollection, pitted the women against one another.

Writing that Picasso had a “Bluebeard complex,” Gilot says, in her memoir, “he preferred to have life go on and to have all those women who had shared his life at one moment or another still letting out little peeps and cries of joy or pain and making a few gestures like disjointed dolls, just to prove there was some life left in them, that it hung by a thread, and that he held the other end of the thread. From time to time they would provide a humorous or dramatic or sometimes tragic side to things, and that was all grist to his mill.”

In another famous remark, Gilot would write that Picasso treated women like “goddesses and doormats.”

But Gilot’s time with Picasso was different. In her memoir, titled Life with Picasso and written with Carlton Lake, she describes pushing back against the demands that she be a passive partner while also occasionally falling prey to his manipulations. She left him in 1953—and went on to outlive him by 50 years.

The Bluebeard remark was one that Gilot seemed particularly proud of. “Don’t forget that I was Bluebeard’s seventh wife,” she would later say. (Gilot and Picasso never officially married, as he stayed legally married to Khokhlova until her death 1955, though they had separated some 20 years prior.)

Françoise Gilot was born in Neuilly-sur-Seine, France, in 1921 to a middle-class family. Her father, who ran a perfume factory, did not think art was an appropriate career for Gilot, whom he wanted to study law. Her grandmother, however, nurtured her as a painter.

Gilot met Picasso, who was 40 years her senior, at a restaurant in Paris in 1943. He had been with Maar at the time, but he invited her to his studio anyway. Gilot knew their liaison would prove a “catastrophe,” as she once stated, but she pursued his overture, and a relationship ensued.

When he later insisted she live with him to push their relationship forward, she felt unsure, then ultimately did so. Her moving in with him caused a rift with her family. In her memoir, Gilot recounts that her father only began to make amends with him after she and Picasso severed ties.

Life with Picasso does not offer a rosy view of their relationship, but it does not represent it as entirely loveless either. Gilot recounts one instance in which Picasso threatened to throw her off a bridge during an argument and even pressed her toward the edge of one. She invited him to live up to his promise, but he did not end up doing so. And yet, she also recalls Picasso as a passionate artist and, at times, a caring father to their two children, Claude and Paloma.

In their home in the south of France, Gilot set up her own studio, working on paintings depicting herself and her children. These works draw equally on the rich hues of Henri Matisse and the fractured geometries of Georges Braque, and seem to offer more sentimental, less violent views of subjects that recurred regularly throughout Picasso’s art.

One 1952 self-portrait, painted the year she received her first solo show, at Galerie Louise Leiris in Paris, features the artist seated confidently, with one leg folded beneath the other. As she casts her arms around one knee, she seems assured. This is in sharp contrast to some of Picasso’s portrayals of Gilot, in which her expression is typically wiped of any psychology.

After leaving Picasso the next year, Gilot wed the painter Luc Simon in 1955. Their marriage dissolved six years later.

Gilot started writing Life with Picasso with the journalist Carlton Lake in 1961. By the next year, she had set aside two days a week to speak with Lake about her years with Picasso, and then edit his copy as needed.

Upon its release, Life with Picasso became a bestseller—and the subject of controversy. The New York Times praised the book as a better-than-average memoir with “importance,” noting that Gilot had still been sure to assess Picasso’s “genius” with respect. John Richardson, who would later become Picasso’s biographer, would go on to feud publicly with Lake over the book. Critics in France were more divided, with one French art journal writing, “Françoise Gilot has betrayed Picasso.” Douglas Cooper, who collected Picasso’s work, reportedly burned copies of the book during a party.

During a visit to La Jolla, California, Gilot met the virologist Jonas Salk, and in 1970, they began a relationship. They later married and remained together until his death in 1995. “It was love because I admired his commitment to the human race, his humanity, and he was a fine man,” Gilot later recalled. “But I can’t say I felt passionately about him. With Pablo it was different.”

The rest of her career saw her continuing to make art, publishing her poetry, and even gaining some acclaim in New York, where she set up a studio toward the end of the ’70s.

The ghost of Picasso has continued to follow just about any mention of Gilot. In 2012 Richardson organized a show about Picasso and Gilot’s relationship that featured a number of her works placed alongside his.

“That the French have made Ms. Gilot an officer of the Legion of Honor is perhaps not so much a testament to her work as a visual artist as it is a recognition that her dedication to insisting on her side of the story, and her right to tell it—in art, books, lectures and exhibitions like this one—is, ultimately, a feminist enterprise,” wrote Maika Pollack in a review for the Observer.

In 2019, Life with Picasso was reprinted. “Gilot’s memoir shines, now, as a proto-feminist classic, the tale of a young woman who found herself in the thrall of a dazzling master and ended up breaking free,” wrote Alexandra Schwartz in the New Yorker.

Speaking to the New York Times in 2022, Gilot, who had recently turned 100, said, “I see life as a labyrinth. You don’t fight it. You go where it takes you. You go the other way.”

Attanasio became a partner at König in 2022, just a few months before allegations of sexual misconduct against its founder, Johann König, were reported by Die Zeit. (He denied the accusations and subsequently contested the report.) Attanasio first joined the gallery in 2014 and has worked with artists such as Alicja Kwade, Claudia Comte, and Katharina Grosse.

In a statement to ARTnews, Attanasio referred to Berlin’s “remarkable transformation” as something that prompted her departure to Pace, where she will hold the title of senior director.

“In this ever-changing landscape, I recognize a wealth of opportunities that align perfectly with Pace’s mission and vision,” Attanasio said. “The evolving nature of Berlin’s art scene presents an exciting canvas upon which I can continue to foster artistic excellence and contribute to the global art discourse. I am thrilled to explore new horizons, forge meaningful connections, and showcase exceptional talents that resonate with the spirit of this dynamic city.”

None of Pace’s three biggest competitors—the mega-galleries David Zwirner, Gagosian, and Hauser & Wirth—operate a space in Berlin or anywhere else in Germany.

Attanasio’s appointment is the latest in a series of expansionary moves made by Pace. According to a recent ARTnews survey, Pace took on more than a dozen artists in the past year. Meanwhile, at the end of 2022, Pace also restructured its staff, with Samanthe Rubell now serving as president, a title that CEO Marc Glimcher no longer holds.

His eight galleries—303 Gallery, Martine Aboucaya, Mehdi Chouakri Berlin, Konrad Fischer Galerie, Simon Lee Gallery, Galerie Francesca Pia, Projecte SD, Galerie Barbara Wien—jointly announced his death on Saturday.

“His unique personality and his artistic understanding of the world we are living in will stay alive in the art he has left behind,” the galleries wrote in their statement. “Our hearts and thoughts are with his beloved wife Uschi, with whom he shared art and life for many years.”

Many of Feldmann’s artworks would have been considered stunts if they were done by lesser artists. In 2011, when he became the oldest artist to win the Guggenheim Museum’s $100,000 Hugo Boss Prize, he pinned that amount in $1 bills to the institution’s walls. In 1999, he had master craftsmen produce a plaster replica of a Neoclassical sculpture; Feldmann then painted it bright pink.

But critics saw these works as more than just pranks. His works, many of them composed of pictures he’d collected over the years into a massive archive, are today considered important, if under-known, forerunners to appropriation art of the ’80s. Some have even grouped his art in with the strain of Pop that could be found during the ’60s in Germany, his home country.

Some of Feldmann’s earliest notable works involve groupings of appropriated images that seem banal. Known as “Bilders” (“Pictures”), these booklets, produced between 1968 and 1976, were made available for free. 11 Bilder, for example, consisted of fewer than a dozen pictures of women’s knees. Divorced from their original contexts, these shots took on new, strange meanings in the hands of Feldmann, who circulated them in ways their creators may not have intended.

Feldmann’s photographic works grew more expansive during the course of his career. He produced two books, both titled Voyeur, in 1994 and 1997, that featured a wide array of images, from documentation of plane crashes to nudes. At the P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center in 2004, he showed 100 Years (2001), a work whose title suggested a survey exhibition, only to subvert that logic. Instead, the installation was composed of 101 pictures of people aged 8 months to 100 years old that Feldmann had sourced from his family and friends.

While these works could’ve been written off as unserious endeavors, Feldmann was clear that they were, in fact, rooted in something serious: his experience in postwar Germany.

“After World War II, there were very, very few pictures in Germany,” he told Art in America in 2011. “It was nothing like today. And it was actually the fact that there was such a small quantity of images around that made me so interested in them. The few I could get, I really wanted to see.”

Hans-Peter Feldmann was born in Düsseldorf, Germany, in 1941, and would remain in that city for much of his career. He studied painting at the University of Arts and Industrial Design Linz in Austria, only to leave that medium behind in 1968.

During the ’70s, Feldmann appeared in two editions of Documenta, the famed recurring German art show in Kassel, cementing his reputation in the country’s art scene. Until his 2011 Guggenheim Museum show, Feldmann’s fame remained largely confined to Europe.

With his career on the rise, Feldmann had a museum survey in 1980 in Ghent, Belgium. Then he quit art-making for roughly a decade, working at a thimble shop, creating tin toys, and helping to operate a mail order service. It wasn’t until 1989 that he returned to art-making; his friend, the curator Kasper König, had urged him to do so, and later organized a show of his art at Portikus in Frankfurt.

Some exhibitions by Feldmann felt more like junk shops than art shows. One 1992 exhibition at New York’s 303 Gallery consisted of postcards of the Eiffel Tower, chintzy picture frames that held images of people like Greta Garbo, and photocopied pictures of things like washing machines. “Trafficking in banality unredeemed by glamour, Feldmann produces work that is modest to a fault—more F. W. Woolworth Co. than Saks Fifth Avenue,” critic David Rimanelli wrote of that show.

His idiosyncratic habit of collecting seemingly random objects reached its apex with 9/12 Front Page, a room-size 2001 installation composed of the front pages of 117 newspapers, all from September 11, 2001.

During the course of his career, Feldmann appeared in two editions of the Venice Biennale, one edition of the Bienal de São Paulo, and one edition of the Gwangju Biennale. He had a retrospective at the Museum Ludwig in 2003, and in 2007, he was included in Skulptur Projekte Münster, the public art show founded by König, where Feldmann’s contribution involved the redesign of a public bathroom facility that was lent a new paint job and high-quality ceramic furnishings.

The bathroom work was a fitting one for Feldmann, who seemed most fascinated by things people consider boring or not worthy of attention. “I am not interested in the high points of life,” he once said. “Only five minutes of every day are interesting.”

“Her work was characterised by great energy and humour,” the Almaty-based Aspan Gallery, which also represents her, wrote on Instagram. “We were honoured to work with Bakhyt for many years.”

Born in 1985 in Aktobe, Kazakhstan, Bubikanova was considered to be a leading figure in the art scene of her home country. She studied under Moldakul Narymbetov, the leader of the avant-garde collective Kyzyl Tractor.

In her art, which spanned painting, sculpture, installation, photography, and more, Bubikanova considered Kazakhstan as a nation that was becoming increasingly connected to the rest of the world through industry. In an attempt to process the country’s future, she often looked back to its past.

In the 2012–13 collage Peri, she offered images of her crouched nude form. In place of her face, she superimposed a giant eagle’s head. The work’s title refers to deities from Persian mythology that were mischievous and often female. Because of their actions, they could not enter paradise until they atoned.

At the current Gwangju Biennale, Bubikanova’s contribution consists of works that recall traditional miniatures that at one point proliferated throughout Central Asia. These works are being presented in a cabaret-like environment meant to recall the cafés seen in Toulouse-Lautrec’s paintings, allowing East and West to press up against one another.

Bubikanova’s art also appeared in the 2014 International Biennale for Young Art in Moscow, a 2017 survey of Kazakh art at Yarat in Baku, and a 2021 solo show at Aspan Gallery titled “Centuries Bow to the Talent… Or How not to Become Hitler.”

Esentai Gallery, the space run by Art Future, praised Bubikanova for “an incredibly fresh twist in art with a deep meaning, along with humor, irony and artistic gesture for everything that is happening.”

The shift owes something to feminists like Linda Nochlin, who, in a well-known 1971 ARTnews essay, asked if Picasso would have been called a genius if he were born a girl. But most people don’t know Nochlin. They know Hannah Gadsby, a comedian who took up Picasso in their 2018 Netflix special Nanette, going so far as to say he “just put a kaleidoscope filter” on his penis when he helped think up Cubism, a movement that prized a multiplicity of perspectives.

Gadsby is even more unsparing than that in the audio guide for their new Brooklyn Museum show, “It’s Pablo-matic: Picasso According to Hannah Gadsby,” which opens to the public on Friday.

Gadsby notes that Picasso was a “monumentally misogynistic and abusive domestic authoritarian dictator,” and that he “takes up too much space.” To further underscore the point, perhaps in homage to Hughes, Gadsby lends Picasso the nickname “PP.” You can do the work figuring out that very unsubtle pun.

“Picasso is not my muse of choice,” Gadsby later says of organizing the show. “I regret this.” They should.

Organized with Brooklyn Museum curators Catherine Morris and Lisa Small, “It’s Pablo-matic” aspires toward a new kind of Picasso scholarship that better accounts for his misogyny, his bad behavior, and his colonialist impulses. Gadsby and the curators intend to accomplish this by weaving in more recent works by pillars of feminist art, a noble gesture meant to “unearth and champion voices and perspectives that are missing from our collective understanding of ourselves,” per Gadsby.

The show’s problem—Pablo-m, if you will—is not its revisionary mindset, which justly sets it apart from all the other celebratory Picasso shows being staged this year to mark the 50th anniversary of his death. That is the appropriate lens for discussing much of Picasso’s oeuvre in 2023. It is, instead, the show’s disregard for art history, the discipline that Gadsby studied, practiced, and abandoned after becoming frustrated with its patriarchal roots.

The Pablo-ms begin before you even enter the first gallery. Above the show’s loud red signage on the museum’s ground floor, there’s a 26-foot-long painting by Cecily Brown, Triumph of the Vanities II (2018), featuring an orgy of brushy forms set against a fiery background. The painting looks back to the bacchanalia of Rococo painting and the intensity of Eugène Delacroix’s hues. It has little to say about Picasso, an artist whom Brown has spoken of admiringly.

Inside the show, there’s Jo Baker’s Birthday (1995), a Faith Ringgold print featuring a reclining Josephine Baker beside a bowl of ripe peaches. This is a direct allusion to paintings by Henri Matisse like Odalisque couchée aux magnolias (1923), not to Picasso. (A better Ringgold selection would’ve been her 1991 quilt Picasso’s Studio, which takes on the artist more directly.) Likewise, there’s Nina Chanel Abney’s Forbidden Fruit (2009), in which a group of picnickers are seated around and atop watermelons. It’s a composition that specifically recalls Édouard Manet’s Déjeuner sur l’herbe (1862–63), not any particular Picasso painting.

There’s no question that Ringgold and Abney are highlighting the limits of modernism—they replace white figures with Black ones, whom they suture into European images. But this exhibition is not about the modernist canon as a whole, which is itself an extension of a male-dominated Western art history that spans centuries. It’s specifically about one man, per the show’s title: Picasso, whom “It’s Pablo-matic” flatly offers as the only modernist worth critiquing. He isn’t.

Ironically, one of the few Picasso-focused works comes courtesy of Gadsby themselves. It’s a ca. 1995 copy of Picasso’s Large Bather with a Book (1937), depicting a blocky, boulder-like figure crumpled over an open volume. Gadsby painted their reproduction on the wall of their parents’ basement. Looking back on it, they now call it “shitty.”

“Picasso once said it took him four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child,” Gadsby writes in the wall text. “Well, I don’t want to call myself a genius … But it did only take me four years to be as funny as Raphael.”

“Funny” is debatable, but comedy is used as a curatorial device throughout the show. Gadsby’s quotes, which are printed above more serious art historical musings, are larded with the language of Twitter. “Weird flex,” reads one appended to a Picasso print of a nude woman caressing a sculpture of a naked, chiseled man. “Don’t you hate it when you look like you belong in a Dickens novel but end up in a mosh pit at Burning Man? #MeToo,” reads another that goes with a print showing a minotaur barging into a crowded, darkened space.

Most of the works in this show are by Picasso, strangely enough. This in itself constitutes an issue—you can’t re-center art history if you’re still centering Picasso.

But if the curators must, they have at least brought some impressive works to the US for the exhibition. There are several paintings on loan from the Musée National Picasso in Paris, some of which are enlisted in savvy ways.

One of them, Corrida: la mort de la femme torero (Bullfighting: Death of the Female Bullfighter), from 1933, shows a woman tumbling across two colliding bulls. Upon impact, her breasts spill out, lending the scene an unseemly erotic quality that courses through so many of the Picasso works in this show. It’s all the more disturbing to learn that this female toreador was based on Marie-Thérèse Walter, who was romantically involved with Picasso at the time. I agree with the curators’ assessment that this painting emblematizes Picasso’s brutal tendencies. I only wish it wasn’t paired with this quote from Gadsby: “If PETA can’t cancel Picasso … no one can.”

It’s key that the show repeatedly references Gilot and Walter, as well as other women from Picasso’s love life, like the artist Dora Maar and the dancer Olga Khokhlova. These women were previously written off as Picasso’s “muses,” and “It’s Pablo-matic” suggests that historians still have trouble talking about them. While the show is frank about the negative aspects of these women’s relationships with the artist, they are always discussed within the context of Picasso, who continues to exert a strong gravitational pull.

I detected a disingenuous sentiment amid it all. Gilot and Maar both produced art of note. Where was that in this show? It would’ve been instructive to see their work placed on equal footing with Picasso’s. Or, for that matter, pretty much any female modernists. The only ones who make the cut are Kathe Köllwitz and Maria Martins, both of whom are represented by unremarkable examples of their remarkable oeuvres.

These women didn’t make it into history books for a long time, and that’s the subtext of Kaleta Doolin’s Improved Janson: A Woman on Every Page #2 (2017), a piece included in this show. The work takes the form of a famed art history textbook that has, in every one of its pages, a vaginal oval cut out of it. An image of Picasso’s Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907) was sliced by Doolin during the work’s making, its lower left-hand corner now lopped off.

Doolin’s work is about removal: she leaves parts of Janson’s book absent to make clear that women artists, for so many centuries, were kept out of the picture. This was a painful, violent elision, and Doolin makes steps toward rectifying the carnage by acknowledging all that contributed to it. If only Gadsby had done the same.

Why does this show contort art history so? There are numerous Picasso works here that portray threesomes, rapes, and bestiality. The wall text doesn’t hide the sources of these images: Ovid’s poetry, Greek mythology. When Picasso represented a minotaur kneeling over a nude, sleeping woman who can’t consent, he was glorifying sexual assault, using classical art as a limp justification. He was hardly the first male artist to do that, however: Bernini, Titian, Correggio, Poussin, and many more did it too. Yet this exhibition directs its aim only at Picasso.

Many of the women in this exhibition are responding to centuries of misogyny, not just Picasso’s. Betty Tompkins has a grand, grisaille painting showing an erect penis entering a vagina in close-up—an image that recalls a certain Gustave Courbet work—while Joan Semmel takes a lighter approach, with a painting of a post-coital couple shown from the woman’s point of view. Ghada Amer is showing a terrific embroidered work in which pools of red thread reveal pairs of splayed-open women’s legs, and Rachel Kneebone has a porcelain piece that looks like a fountain of limbs. There’s no specific reference point in these works, because the male gaze is omnipotent. It wasn’t found only in Picasso’s studio.

The final gallery, the sole one without any Picasso works in it, brings “It’s Pablo-matic” into even squishier territory. There are some great works here—Dara Birnbaum’s classic video skewering Wonder Woman, an Ana Mendieta photograph of an abstracted female form sculpted into the ground, Dindga McCannon’s painting of a multihued revolutionary with real bullets fixed to the canvas—but they have almost nothing in common, beside the fact that they are all owned by the Brooklyn Museum.

The supplement to this exhibition, available on the Bloomberg Connects app, includes an interview with one artist in this gallery, Harmony Hammond. Asked about her feelings on Picasso, she says, “Truth be told, I don’t think about Picasso and his work.”

It would’ve been nice to have more artists who were thinking about Picasso, or whose work, at least, has something to do with him. But this seems like too much to ask from the curators, especially Gadsby, who greets that line of thinking with a big, fat raspberry. “Humans are not doing great,” they say on the audio guide. “We are unsettled. I blame Picasso. That’s a little joke. Or is it? I don’t know.”

TEFAF, full name The European Fine Art Fair, hosts annual editions in New York and Maastricht, the Netherlands. Drenth, who was based in the Netherlands, helped facilitate the fairs in both cities.

When hired last December after a stint as interim director starting in February 2022, Drenth became the fourth director in three years. At the time, Hidde van Seggelen, president of the TEFAF executive committee, praised Drenth for his “proven track record in business development, strategy, and non-profit in the cultural sector.”

But this past Friday, Annie Armstrong revealed in an Artnet News “Wet Paint” column a largely unseen side of Drenth: his Twitter, which is now private. The article contained word of a spread of tweets that decried leftism and “woke” culture.

“Just as with the Iranian revolution in 1978, left-wing do-gooders stand hand in hand with jihadists. Not knowing that after the success of the revolution they will die first,” read one from August 2022, when he was still TEFAF interim director, according to Artnet.

“Speculating about the transition of the population is only a problem when you are not a Muslim,” reportedly read yet another.

Still one more read, according to Artnet, “Woke is the new Westboro: Hyper-Calvinistic hagglers.”

Asked to comment on the matter by Artnet, Drenth said, “My Twitter feed expresses my personal opinions and I separate this from my work at TEFAF. So I will not comment on that.”

TEFAF’s announcement of Drenth’s departure stated that he would focus on his consultancy firm, the Amsterdam-based Bart Drenth Advies. The release did not mention the Artnet report on his social media.

Van Seggelen, TEFAF president, said in a statement on Wednesday, “The board is grateful to Bart for his accomplishments achieved as Managing Director of TEFAF. Bart joined TEFAF at a time of great upheaval and transition caused by the pandemic when the art market and fairs were just returning to business. Despite these challenges, Bart’s leadership, fiscal discipline, and efforts to align and structure the team led to stability and progress for TEFAF. This year, TEFAF held two successful editions in Maastricht and New York, indicating that the foundation and fairs are well-positioned going forward. The board wishes Bart all the best in his future endeavors and thanks him for his service to TEFAF.”

“I have nothing to add to the statement of TEFAF, except that it has been a pleasure and privilege to work for TEFAF,” Drenth wrote in an email to ARTnews.

TEFAF said it would announce the new leadership structure for its fairs in the coming weeks.

Elisabeth Sussman, the curator who had long held that post, is set to remain on the Whitney staff as she completes an exhibition focused on polymath artist Harry Smith, set to open in the fall. The museum did not specify what her role would be, however.

At the Brooklyn Museum, Sawyer’s exhibitions included a recent retrospective for Jimmy DeSana, a photographer whose sexually frank art made him a key member of the 1980s art scene before he died of AIDS-related causes in 1990. This November, Sawyer is set to open “Copy Machine Manifestos: Artists Who Make Zines,” which the Brooklyn Museum is billing as one of the largest museum shows dedicated to zines.

Before joining the Brooklyn Museum, Sawyer had been at the Columbus Museum of Art in Ohio, where he co-organized “Art after Stonewall: 1969–1989,” an ambitious survey of two pivotal decades of queer art. The show ranked on an ARTnews list of the most important exhibitions of the 2010s.

Other shows curated by Sawyer include celebrated solos for John Edmonds and Liz Johnson Artur, both at the Brooklyn Museum, which hired him in 2018.

“Drew is one of the liveliest and most penetrating minds in the field of photography and contemporary art today,” Scott Rothkopf, who will soon assume his post as director of the Whitney, said in a statement.

At the Whitney, Sawyer will spearhead the acquisition committee devoted to works of photography. With drawings and prints curator Kim Conaty, he will also facilitate the Sondra Gilman Study Center, named for the Whitney’s longest-serving trustee and home to the museum’s more than 19,000 prints, drawings, and photographs.

“I am excited to be joining the team at the Whitney at a pivotal time in the institution’s history, and I look forward to continuing their work in championing living artists and in redefining discourses in U.S. American photography and art through its renowned collection and programming,” Sawyer said in a statement.

His hire is the latest shift in the museum’s curatorial staff. In February, Marcela Guerrero was promoted from assistant curator to curator, and Jennie Goldstein was made associate curator. Rothkopf, currently senior deputy director and chief curator, was named director the following month. Similarly, Sawyer’s departure from the Brooklyn Museum is the second high-profile one this month; Eugenie Tsai, the institution’s longtime senior curator of contemporary art, announced she would step down at the end of June.

In vast installations, Kabakov took up the many failures of the Soviet Union, where he lived for decades before departing for the West in 1987. By building out the worlds of imagined characters via room-size artworks, Kabakov offered heightened versions of the reality he lived for viewers across the globe.

Kabakov’s visions were unsparing, sad, and explicitly critical of the state, and were, in that way, quite unlike the government-approved art being made in the Soviet Union. For that reason, he became a giant of the “unofficial” art scene of the Soviet Union, covertly—and even dangerously—producing work that existed beyond the mainstream.

These works could not be shown in the Soviet Union, but they could be realized elsewhere. With the end of the Cold War, Kabakov found success in the West—and ended up shifting art-making in Russia, where many artists have looked to his work for inspiration. When he and his wife Emilia had a Tate Modern retrospective in 2018, art historian Claire Bishop labeled him “the paradigmatic installation artist.”

Kabakov’s breakthrough came in 1988, when he became an overnight success after opening a solo exhibition at Ronald Feldman Fine Arts in New York. The show he staged there, “Ten Characters,” was a grouping of installations that simulated the look of a 10-room communal apartment where Kabakov lived as a child. Such shared apartments were common among the many who couldn’t afford to live alone, and Kabakov recalled his in the form of rooms that were each inhabited by an unseen character.

The Man Who Flew into Space from His Apartment (1985), the most famous of them, featured a cloistered space whose walls are lined with propagandistic Soviet imagery. In its center, hanging from a hole torn into the ceiling, is a ramshackle slingshot by which the inhabitant apparently launched himself out of the room. If the Soviet Union promised human betterment through the space race, this resident seems to have taken matters into his own hands, likely only to fall short of reaching the stars.

The exhibition was a critical success. “For this visitor, it beats the movies, any day,” John Russell wrote in the New York Times. “The truthful expression of unadulterated identities is laid bare, unprotected by convention,” Kirby Gookin wrote in Artforum.

This kind of art-making stood in marked contrast to much of what was being produced in the Soviet Union at the time. “I was not a Russian artist who wanted to show Russian art to the West,” Kabakov once said in an interview with Anton Vidokle, a Russian-born artist who founded e-flux. “The conceptual position was to look at Soviet life through the eyes of a ‘foreigner’ who has arrived there.”

As international favor for Kabakov grew, his installations expanded in size. Labyrinth (My Mother’s Album), a 1990 work now owned by the Tate, guides viewers through a maze that pays homage to Kabakov’s personal experiences; it even features audio of him singing Russian songs. Walking through the mostly vacant corridors lit only by hanging bulbs, one ultimately comes to the center, a room with nothing but rubble. The viewer is left to consider how this compares to professional photos of the Russian city of Berdyansk exhibited elsewhere in the installation, taken by his uncle. These are images of Russia the government may not wish to show off.

In 1989 Kabakov began working with his niece, Emilia, whom he later married. Together, they lived in Berlin, then Paris, and finally in New York, where they settled on Long Island. Only periodically did he return to Moscow, the city where he had been based for decades before that.

Even after the Soviet Union broke apart, Kabakov continued to produce art about the sense of utopia associated with it. “The fence of communism is gone now, so my work is about a world that no longer exists—it’s a strange feeling too, having the world I lived in for so many years disappear,” he told the Los Angeles Times in 1995.

Ilya Kabakov was born in Dnepropetrovsk, Ukraine, in 1933. When World War II started, his father went to fight, leaving him alone with his mother, who moved first to the Caucasus, then to Samarkand. Because his father did not return after the war, they lived nomadically, ending up in Moscow, where he attended art school at the Surikov Art Institute.

But, Kabakov once recalled in an interview with the New York Times, “I learned everything like a monkey, without any feeling at all. And when I finished, I felt that I was not alive. So I decided to create a masterpiece, into which I could put all my ideas and everything I had ever felt and all the beauty I had seen. I believed that this work would make me real.” He started a large painting, then left it behind.

Publicly, Kabakov produced well over 100 children’s books that earned his living. Privately, during the ’70s and ’80s, Kabakov became a leader of a movement known as Moscow Conceptualism, whose style was slippery enough to avoid censorship. Answers of an Experimental Group (1970–71), one of the works produced during that era, features a ready-made hanger alongside a grid of phrases meditating on art-making. The philosopher and art critic Boris Groys, a colleague of Kabakov, admitted that the work wasn’t entirely successful, but still praised it as “liberating,” noting that it put him on a new path in his own writing.

Although he created pieces like that one largely out of the public view, the Kabakovs’ work ended up being exhibited in Russia. In 2008 the Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich put $3 million toward refurbishing an old garage that was later turned into a Moscow art center, aptly called Garage, that exhibited a grouping of Kabakov installations. That same year, Abramovich turned heads when he bought one of Ilya Kabakov’s paintings for more than $5 million at auction.

By 1995 Kabakov had diagnosed the “firm hostility of collectors who don’t have the place to house” his room-filling works, known as “total installations.” Things had clearly begun to change, making him uncomfortable. He termed the crowd that showed up for the Garage opening rozovii gnoi, or pink pus.

Alongside the installations, the Kabakovs continued to produce grand paintings. They weren’t well-received in the West. Claire Bishop wrote in her Artforum review of the Tate Modern show that they are “hideous, overscale pseudocollages whose bombast gives Jeff Koons a run for his money—but instead of the latter’s porno-slick Photoshop effects, we had socialist-realist images fragmenting in layers of trompe l’oeil.”

Still, the Kabakovs continued making their total installations, most notably at the Paris Grand Palais, where they staged the 2014 “Monumenta” commission, filling the entire space with an enormous work called Strange City that included a vast satellite dish.

Across the years, the Kabakovs’ works appeared in many international venues, including multiple editions of the Venice Biennale and one edition of Documenta, and in big surveys at institutions like the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., and the Pushkin Museum in Moscow, where they had a retrospective in 2008.

Kabakov remained staunchly critical of Russia until the end; the obituary for him by TASS, Russia’s state-run news agency, noted that his foundation’s Facebook page is still banned in the country. Although he did not speak much about the war in Ukraine, Emilia did, calling it, in an interview with the Art Newspaper in 2022, the “most frightening of wars because it seems possible that it could lead to all-out nuclear war.”

Despite the sourness of their art, the Kabakovs did periodically voice optimistic sentiments. In 2005 they launched a project called Ship of Tolerance, a wooden boat whose sails are covered with children’s drawings about tolerance. In the past two decades, the piece has visited Sharjah, Miami, Havana, New York, and the Siwa Oasis in Egypt.

“The goal of course is the connection to other cultures, and the ship is the symbol,” Ilya told ARTnews in 2011. “The children are very sensitive to this. Other symbols are the wind, the message in the bottle, freedom of the sea. The children have to know that their message will be heard.”

Rodriguez was arrested at the 43rd Precinct in the Bronx on Thursday morning and was released that same day. The New York Police Department said that Rodriguez had been charged with misdemeanor counts of menacing and harassment in connection with the incident, which took place Tuesday.

That same day, Rodriguez was fired by Manhattan’s Hunter College, where she was formerly an adjunct professor in the art department. Hunter released a statement in which it said that the school “strongly condemns the unacceptable actions of Shellyne Rodriguez.”

After the story was picked up by right-wing publications, Rodriguez released a statement saying that the school had “capitulated” to “racists, white nationalists, and misogynists.”

On Friday, the School of Visual Arts, where she had also been an adjunct professor, “made the decision not to new Shellyne Rodriguez’s contract,” the school wrote in a statement to ARTnews.

Earlier in the week, right-wing outlets like Breitbart and Fox News had reported another incident involving Rodriguez at Hunter. Video circulated online by the Students for Life of America, a nonprofit group that identifies as “one of the leading pro-life advocacy organizations in the world,” seemed to show Rodriguez confronting students that had a table with materials related to the group.

“You’re not educating shit. This is fucking propaganda,” Rodriguez appeared to tell the students before pushing what she tossed what she later described as “postcards and [a] metal container of rubber fetuses.” Based on the video, the students did not appear to be hurt.

On Tuesday, the New York Post ran an article in which it claimed that Rodriguez had raised a machete to Reuven Fenton, a journalist who had a byline on the report. The Post alleged that Fenton had identified himself when he visited Rodriguez’s Bronx apartment, before she emerged from it holding the knife; a spokesperson for Rodriguez later disputed this, saying that Fenton and a cameraperson “did not use the intercom to gain access, and appear to have been trespassing inside the building when they pounded on her door and started yelling at her through the door.”

The NYPD said that “a 42-year-old male was menaced with a machete after a verbal dispute,” and there were no reported injuries. An investigation, the department said, was ongoing.

ARTnews attempted to reach Rodriguez through a spokesperson, but was unsuccessful.

Update, 5/26/23, 9:30 p.m.: This article has been updated to include details about the status of Rodriguez’s contract at the School of Visual Arts.