One of the things in Kelly’s studio, for instance, was a book with thumbnail-size drawings of his paintings that listed details like the number of gesso layers and which paints he used (sometimes also listing their compositions, since he mixed his own rainbow of brilliant azures, emerald greens, and rich reds). “Ellsworth was obsessive about cataloging things his entire life,” writes Kevin Salatino, curator of prints and drawings at the Art Institute of Chicago, in the catalog for the upcoming exhibition “Ellsworth Kelly: Portrait Drawings.” “He documented everything and had a numbering system for his work. He is a gift to art historians because everything’s signed, dated, saved, et cetera, and there’s clearly a huge archive.”

This year, as the art world marks the 100th anniversary of Kelly’s birth, a number of current and upcoming museum exhibitions are focusing on particular facets of his work, from the canonical to the barely known.

Through his art, Magritte contended that appearances are deceptive. Making viewers and artists scratch their heads since his 20th-century heyday, Magritte’s enigmatic images portray everyday things in uncanny ways. A bright daytime sky might blaze above a street at dusk, a country landscape may actually be a canvas, and the blue of an eye could just be a reflection of an azure sky. “Everything we see hides another thing,” said Magritte in an interview toward the end of his life. “We always want to see what is hidden by what we see, but it is impossible.”

What we do see in his work is a deliberate lack of painterliness; his canvases are flatly realistic, deflecting our interest in their execution. Instead, our attention is held by the strangeness of what’s depicted.

And just like his painting technique, Magritte made himself unnoticeable by settling in a Brussels suburb as a bourgeois gentleman not unlike the bowler-hatted men that frequently star in his canvases. “I am not eager to singularize myself,” he explained. “He is a secret agent,” said critic George Melly. “His object [is] to bring into disrepute the whole apparatus of bourgeois reality. Like all saboteurs, he avoids detection by dressing and behaving just like everybody else.”

Magritte’s work has always held our attention and continues to intrigue. A 2006 exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art demonstrated his influence on contemporary art, and in 2011 a group exhibition at the Nouveau Musée National de Monaco, titled “La Carte D’Après Nature” after one of his pieces, used him as a starting point for works that render quotidian things in unsettling ways. In Magritte’s native Belgium, the Musée Magritte opened in 2009 with a collection of roughly 200 works, and last year a comprehensive Magritte biography was published, written by Alex Danchev and completed by Sarah Whitfield. Magritte also tripled his auction record this year at Sotheby’s when The Empire of Lights (1961) sold for $79.8 million.

So, who was Magritte and why is he still so important?

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“Early pottery historians simply assumed that he was white,” said Margi Hofer, a co-curator of an exhibition dedicated to the artist that recently opened at the New-York Historical Society. “Later historians, curators, and collectors did not think to question that assumption.”

In 2003, however, A. Brandt Zipp, an auction house specialist in ceramics, uncovered a Federal Census from 1800 listing Commeraw, who was active from 1797 to 1819, and the seven members of his household as Black. This important correction rightfully returns him to history as one of the few—if not only—Black master potters recorded to have been active in New York City during the early 19th century, as well as one of the few Black business owners at that time.

Commeraw’s stoneware stands apart visually for its high stylization, which incorporated stamped swags and tassels, at a time when his competitors were still ornamenting their jugs with flowers and birds. Of the thousands of stoneware jugs and jars Commeraw made two centuries ago, hundreds survive as a testament to his technical skill. His is the largest body of work by a free Black potter working during the antebellum period.

Commeraw’s stoneware pieces often resided in the kitchens of those who bought them. “We don’t know precisely who purchased his standard jars and jugs, but they were essential tools for preparing and storing foods,” Hofer said. “One large fragment in the exhibition was excavated from the site of a boarding house not far from his shop. Other archeological finds reveal that his pots traveled as far as Guyana and Norway.”

Around 20 of these stoneware pieces, along with 20 others by his contemporaries and archival documents illuminating his life as a craftsman, entrepreneur, family man, and activist, are included in the NYHS’s “Crafting Freedom: The Life and Legacy of Free Black Potter Thomas W. Commeraw,” the most comprehensive presentation of his work to date. Several of these are loans from institutions like the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the National Museum of American History, while five come from the NYHS’s permanent collection, including one that was purchased from modernist sculptor Elie Nadelman and his wife Viola, among a cohort of folk art collectors who took a renewed interest in Commeraw in the early 20th century.

Born around 1771 in New York, Commeraw and his family were enslaved to potter William Crolius, who manumitted the Commeraws in his will in 1779. A young Commeraw was likely first exposed to his craft by the Crolius family, although no documentation survives about his training. Decades later, Clarkson Crolius Sr., a descendant of Commeraw’s former enslaver, was one of his direct competitors; they were roughly the same age and may have even trained alongside each other.

After first appearing in a 1795 New York City directory as working at 29 Augustus Street (present day City Hall Place), Commeraw had, by 1797, set up his own pottery studio and kiln at Corlears Hook on the East River (just south of the present-day Williamsburg Bridge). That address soon became synonymous with his brand of vessels, used to store things like beer, molasses, cider, preserves, milk, butter, or salted meats. He proudly stamped it onto his inventory, reminding clients where and to whom to go to for more.

“He was one of the first—possibly the first—New York potter to stamp his name and location on the face of his vessels, which quickly became a standard feature,” said Hofer.

The stamp he used to impress COMMERAW’S STONEWARE on his pieces was both innovative and idiosyncratic—the ‘A’ had a pointed crossbar, and the first ‘S’ and the ‘N’ are inverted. The stamp “exudes a kind of charm that belies the skill and physically demanding labor that went into producing the vessels,” Hofer said.

Producing his vessels in standardized sizes on a potter’s wheel, Commeraw first incised his decorative motifs freehand, with a stylus, but by 1800, he transitioned to the more efficient method of stamping the decorations. Crescent and bellflower stamps were placed in different configurations so his pieces were visually cohesive but with subtle variations that made each piece unique. When the width of the stamps didn’t line up perfectly with the circumference of his vessels, Commeraw would adroitly pivot, filling in the gap by using the stamp sideways. These embellishments were then painted with cobalt oxide.

Apart from showing a range of Commeraw stoneware, “Crafting Freedom” also touches on the artist’s active advocacy for the Black community, working with various abolitionist, religious, political, and mutual aid organizations. By 1810 the majority of Black New Yorkers were free but the following year, state legislature passed a law that suppressed free Black voters by requiring them to submit a Certificate of Freedom, including testimony from a third party confirming the voter’s status as a free man, as well as payment of a filing fee. Commeraw’s signature as a witness for Peter Johnson, attesting to his status as a freedman, appears on one such certificate in the exhibition that is preserved in the New-York Historical Society library.

Two of Commeraw’s bespoke oyster jars for Black oystermen are also on view, made for Daniel Johnson and George White. At the time, New York’s oyster trade was dominated by the free Black community. By branding the Johnson and White’s names onto the stoneware jars they used to store and transport their pickled oysters, Commeraw was also branding and promoting their businesses, as he had already done his own.

Toward the end of his life, and after years of not receiving full US citizenship, Commeraw promoted the emigration of Black Americans to Sierra Leone. He and his extended family were on the first voyage of the American Colonization Society, in 1820, hoping to help found a free Black republic. The voyage quickly turned tragic, and Commeraw’s wife and niece died there of malaria. He returned to the United States in 1822 and died the following year in Baltimore.

Commeraw’s story is an individual one that speaks to the challenges of free Black Americans during the antebellum period who were not yet equal citizens—and one that still resonates today. “We hope that by highlighting Commeraw’s story we will not only bring long overdue attention to one man’s extraordinary accomplishments,” Hofer said, “but also inspire people to recover and shine a light on the accomplishments of other Black craftspeople whose stories have been lost to history.”

Leyster marked her works with a distinctive monogram—a combination J and L crossed by a shooting star (or ‘leading star,’ the meaning of her last name)—but if you didn’t notice it or ignored it altogether, you could be fooled. Leyster’s work was attributed to Hals so often, in fact, that this misconception had to be settled in a court of law. When British art dealer Thomas Lawrie paid 4,500 pounds in 1892 for The Carousing Couple after being assured it was a Hals and then spotted Leyster’s monogram under a faked Hals signature, he sued the seller in a much-publicized case. The Carousing Couple was ultimately deemed not by Hals, Lawrie got a partial refund, and the following year a scholar wrote a groundbreaking essay about Leyster as creator of this oil on panel, attributing six more paintings to her as well. By the time the artwork entered the Louvre collection, it was listed as a Leyster.

Only around 35 works are attributed to her, making it noteworthy whenever one resurfaces. A long-lost Leyster, Boy Holding Grapes and a Hat (c. 1630), which belonged to LACMA for several decades before being sold (and disappearing) in 1977, was acquired recently by the Currier Museum of Art in Manchester, New Hampshire.

So who was Judith Leyster, and why is she important? She was one of just a few professional women artists during the Dutch Golden Age and created genre scenes, still lifes, portraits, and botanical drawings. Her hallmark was the “worm’s-eye view” that captured her sitters from below, and she was among the earliest Dutch artists to introduce dramatic lighting into her nocturnal scenes. Leyster set many of her figures on a diagonal, using them to break up the picture plane and create a lively sense of movement.

Unanswered questions about Leyster’s life remain as scholars piece together her presence on the Haarlem and Amsterdam scenes, but here’s what we do know.

“Like, if men gave birth, wouldn’t every single male artist have his depiction of birth that was a quasi–self-portrait? That’s obvious,” the New York–based painter told ARTnews. “What better metaphor do we have for the creative act? Clearly that metaphor did not serve men very well, and so it’s just completely absent. Men have worked really hard to create all sorts of other metaphors for creativity that centered a male experience.”

Bassel returned to her studio a few months later and started playing with the idea of an imaginary canon where the experiences of birthing and menstruating bodies ruled supreme (and the patriarchy never existed). In Bassel’s parallel universe—and in a series she calls “Canon in Drag,” art is made by women, for women, and commissioned by women.

She started with familiar images by Old Masters such as Rubens, Rembrandt, and Van Eyck. In Bassel’s version of the Crucifixion Diptych (1460) by Rogier van der Weyden, for example, a bloodied Christ is replaced by a menstruating martyr whose uterine wall sheds posthumously in a demonstration of possibility, loss, and renewal. The Origin of the World in Bassel’s canon resembles the infamous one by Gustave Courbet (1866), but as per its name, it shows the actual act of birth. (In the catalog accompanying the exhibition, a sort of alternate-universe art history textbook, the text for Origin of the World teases that this work “anticipated the 21st-century phenomena of birth as performance art.”) And in her remake of Petrus Christus’s The Nativity (ca. 1450), Joseph is no passive bystander but rather the primary caregiver of the baby Jesus, tenderly cradling him with skin-to-skin contact.

Bassel strays from the original artworks she transforms but never veers from the canon itself. “There’s an argument for ‘Let’s burn the whole thing down and start somewhere else,’ for obvious reasons,” Bassel admits. “I don’t want to throw it out; I just want it to expand. And the other thing is, for better and for worse, the canon holds such authority.”

In her adaptation of the canon, Bassel has created works that are utterly satisfying on their own. But she is not the first woman to appropriate iconic images by men to drive home a point about gender imbalances. Below are 11 other artists who have made canonical artworks by men their own, across painting, photography, video, and sculpture.

Astrology, a divination practice based on the positions of celestial bodies (as opposed to astronomy, a scientific discipline concerned with their physical properties), proposes that the placement of constellations at the time of our birth can lend insights into our characters and even predict our futures. For those who believe in it, it can be a guide to understanding where we’re going and where we’ve been. 

In Western astrology, the beginnings of which historians trace to Mesopotamia from about 1900 BCE to 1700 BCE, personalities are said to be set by the positions of the 12 constellations in the region of the sky known as the Western Zodiac. But other cultures developed their own astrological systems.

In China, for instance, astrology—which gained popularity during the Zhan Guo period (fifth century BCE)—is based on a lunar calendar and a 12-year cycle with a different animal (rat, rooster, dragon, and so on) holding sway each year; it does not rely on observations of the stars. And in India, Vedic astrology draws on the same 12 zodiac signs as in the West but includes karmic interpretations and determines the timing of the star signs on the basis of the actual, physical positions of the sky’s constellations (as opposed to a fixed date, as in Western astrology).

Artworks incorporating astrological images have been around for as long as astrology itself. Here are 13 of them. 

For the 18 female artists considered below, including painters, sculptors, photographers, designers, and architects, their studios were also their homes. And luckily for us, these imaginative spaces—from Maud Lewis’s cottage in Nova Scotia, covered inside and out with painted flowers, leaves, and birds, to Georgia O’Keeffe’s sparsely furnished house and studio in New Mexico—are open to the public.

From the Italian Renaissance to the contemporary music scene and beyond, Leonardo da Vinci’s portrait of a Florentine woman set against a mountainous landscape has struck a chord with people worldwide. Such is her popularity that some have tried vandalizing her to draw attention to themselves and their causes. And her image has been appropriated by everyone from Marcel Duchamp to Virgil Abloh.

What’s so special about the Mona Lisa, and why do we care so much? History professor and recent Leonardo biographer Walter Isaacson argues that she’s famous because viewers can emotionally engage with her. Others claim that her mystery has helped make her notorious.

Here’s a look at some of the likely reasons for our global obsession with this sepia-toned lady.

Nonetheless, women have been professional photographers—and among the medium’s fiercest innovators—since its invention, though, their names, contributions, and work tend to be lesser known, like Bertha Beckman, famous for being the first-ever professional woman photographer. Recent efforts have been made to correct photography’s male-dominated canon, including the 2021 survey exhibitions, “The New Woman Behind the Camera,” which debuted at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York before traveling to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. That same year, the Museum of Modern Art in New York received a major gift of 100 works by women photographers aimed at “unfixing the canon.”

Similarly, a recently opened exhibition at the Villa Bardini and Forte di Belvedere in Florence uncovers female photographers from the city’s historic Alinari Archive, which includes a collection of more than 5 million photographic materials, a photographic library, and vintage photographic instruments amassed by the world’s oldest photographic firm (dating to 1852). Curated by Emanuela Sesti and Walter Guadagnini, “Fotografe! Women photographers: Alinari Archives to Contemporary Perspectives,” which runs through October 2, includes 50 photographers spanning the 19th century to today.

The show sprouted from an effort to understand female involvement in the early days of the Florentine Alinari firm. After learning that women’s roles were largely limited to administrative work or attaching photographic prints to supports, the curators decided to chart the presence of women in the firm’s international and historic photography collection. Some of those included in “Fotografe!” are now broadly known, such as Julia Margaret Cameron, Margaret Bourke-White, and Diane Arbus. Others have been rarely, if ever, exhibited.

Below, a look at seven groundbreaking women photographers whose work is seeing renewed exposure.

An upcoming retrospective at New York’s American Folk Art Museum, Morris Hirshfield Rediscovered, will show more than 40 of them. The exhibition coincides with the publication of a scholarly monograph, Master of the Two Left Feet by Richard Meyer (MIT Press), and reflects renewed interest in Hirshfield within a broader rediscovery of American self-taught artists.

In recent years Hirshfield has been included in the 2018 “Outliers and American Art” group show at the National Gallery of Art, and his work is in “Gatecrashers,” a traveling exhibition that opened at the Brandywine River Museum of Art in May. Three of the eight Hirshfield paintings in MoMA’s permanent collection are now on display there in “Masters of Popular Painting,” an installation of the self-taught artists whom MoMA’s founding director, Alfred H. Barr Jr., exhibited during his tenure.

Morris Hirshfield, Beach Girl, 1937-39, oil on canvas, 36 1/4 x 22 1/4 inches. Museum of Modern Art, New York.

For more on Hirshfield’s life and art, read on.

From Poland to New York

Born into a Jewish family in Poland in 1872, Hirshfield emigrated to New York at the age of 18 with his parents and siblings. Changing his first name from Moishe to Morris, he became a pattern cutter in a downtown women’s suit and cloak factory. He worked his way up to tailor, eventually opening a small women’s clothing shop with his brother.

But Hirshfield’s most profitable venture was the footwear business he opened in 1912 with his brother and sister: the E-Z Walk Manufacturing Company. E-Z Walk initially produced orthopedic devices such as ankle straighteners and arch supports before releasing a wildly popular line of embellished boudoir slippers designed by Hirshfield, which sold well even during the Great Depression. (It grossed $1 million annually.)

In the mid-1930s Hirshfield took a hiatus from E-Z Walk due to poor health, leaving the company in the care of two associates under whose management it went out of business. As a result, he and his wife, Henriette, downsized to a one-bedroom apartment in Brooklyn, where Hirshfield tried freelancing as a “foot appliance consultant” before retiring from feet altogether in 1937.

Liz Blahd, slippers produced from Morris Hirshfield’s designs, 2021, wool felt, silk velvet trim with silk cord detail, cotton, wool pompoms, linen, glass beads, velvet-covered buttons, mohair trim, kidskin soles.

A new career

Hirshfield began to paint, using his bedroom as a studio. Unwilling to spend money on canvas, he took two decorative paintings (relics of more prosperous times) off the walls of his apartment and worked on those instead.

His first two pieces—Angora Cat (1939), of an oversize tabby dominating a sofa, and Beach Girl (1939), depicting a woman standing in a wildly patterned, all-blue landscape—took him two years to complete, as he painstakingly layered countless staccato brush marks to create them.

Collector Sidney Janis (who had also just retired from the garment industry) spotted the works at a Manhattan gallery that was evaluating them for the Brooklyn Museum, where Hirshfield wanted them to be shown. The gallerist was unimpressed, but Janis felt otherwise and eventually bought Angora Cat, describing it as a “strangely compelling creature . . . sitting possessively upon a remarkable couch.”

That year Janis, who was on the Museum of Modern Art’s advisory committee, debuted the two paintings in a group exhibition that he guest curated there titled “Contemporary Unknown American Artists.” A Newsweek review deemed Hirshfield “the least sophisticated of the lot” but also reproduced Hirshfield’s third-ever painting, Tailor-Made Girl (1939).

Morris Hirshfield, Angora Cat, 1937-39, oil on canvas, 22 1/8 x 27 1/4 inches. Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Infiltrating the avant-garde

Janis worked to keep Hirshfield in the public eye. He arranged for Girl With Pigeons (1942), of a woman lying supine on a striped couch, awkwardly communing with a bird, to be included in a landmark 1942 exhibition curated by André Breton called “First Papers of Surrealism” at the Whitelaw Reid Mansion in New York City.

Hirshfield “would hold his own against any competition,” claimed critic Clement Greenberg in a 1942 review of Janis’s book, They Taught Themselves: American Primitive Painters of the Twentieth Century. The artist had similar faith in his skills and was quoted in that book as saying his paintings were “better than a camera could do” in picturing his particular reality.

This stamp of approval from the intellectual vanguard of the day may have encouraged collector and gallerist Peggy Guggenheim to buy her first Hirshfield that year through Janis: Nude at the Window (1941), of a woman framed by scalloped curtains that echo her ovoid breasts and belly. Guggenheim reportedly paid $900 (far more than she paid, combined, for works by René Magritte and Piet Mondrian around the same time) and hung it near a Kandinsky landscape, a Duchamp nude, and a Picasso still life in her home on 51st Street in New York.

Morris Hirshfield, Girl with Pigeons, 1942, oil on canvas, 30 x 40 1/8 inches. Museum of Modern Art, New York.

A solo show at MoMA

The high point of Hirshfield’s career was a 1943 MoMA solo show, curated by Barr, that comprised all 30 of the artist’s paintings to date. It was widely reviewed, though many felt the honor had been squandered on an amateur.

Referring disparagingly to Hirshfield as the “Master of Two Left Feet,” critic Peyton Boswell pegged him as a clumsy incompetent. “Aside from being in fairly bad taste, crudely drawn, harsh in color and static in design, [the paintings] have yet another defect in common,” he wrote in Art Digest, describing Hirshfield’s twisted perspective, “they are all left-footed.” Already dissatisfied with Barr’s administrative and fundraising skills, MoMa’s president used the exhibition as proof of Barr’s poor leadership and fired him.

Morris Hirshfield, Tiger, 1940, oil on canvas, 28 x 39 7/8 inches. Museum of Modern Art, New York.

The fade into obscurity

When Hirshfield died of a heart attack in 1946 at age 74, Janis (who didn’t open his own gallery until two years later) urged Guggenheim to mount a memorial show at her New York gallery, Art of This Century.

The exhibition opened in 1947 immediately following a Jackson Pollock show and displayed works Hirshfield had painted in the three years after his MoMA solo exhibition. “Hirshfield has made a new world; a bold, revolutionary, colorful world of unsophisticated perspective and curiously shaped inhabitants,” wrote a Town and Country art critic, reviewing the show. “That he did it by accident while believing he was accurately representing our own reality is of no importance. He did it.”

During his brief artistic career Hirshfield had 15 exhibitions, including four solo shows, most arranged through Janis. After his death, his popularity declined. He’s been sparsely shown since, his works shuttered in storerooms and private collections, but museums are again shuffling toward the Master of the Two Left Feet.