David Hockney approached everyday life as he did every canvas: as a radical act of personal freedom, slipping into the shadows while leaving the world ablaze with the indelible, sunlit brilliance of his bohemian spirit. The unapologetic chain smoker has died at home, according to an official statement released by his publicist, Erica Bolton, noting that he “passed away peacefully” just one month shy of his 89th birthday, leaving us with a monumental legacy and urging us to “love life.”

“I love my work. And I think the work has love, actually … I love life,” Hockney told The Guardian in a profile published on November 16, 2014.

Revolutionizing Modern Art by pioneering Pop Art, transforming figurative painting and representation of queer sitters, bending the limits of perspective, and embracing technology, David Hockney was more than a master.

In the 1960s, when homosexuality was still a “crime” in Britain, Hockney proudly and fearlessly captured deeply personal and romantic gay love and intimacy in his portraits. Under the inhumane Labouchere Amendment, private homosexual acts between men were illegal in England and Wales. Men convicted of “gross indecency” faced prison sentences or forced chemical castration. The law was partially altered by the Sexual Offences Act of 1967, which decriminalized gay sex in private for men over 21. In the early 1960s, painting gay intimacy was essentially broadcasting evidence of a criminal act.

Rather than hiding his identity or using coded imagery like previous generations of artists, Hockney made celebration of gay life a central subject. Hockney openly named his pieces to amplify gay desire, such as his 1961 painting, We Two Boys Together Clinging (named after a Walt Whitman poem). Eschewing the homophobic perception of gay life as seedy, dangerous, or tragic, he painted men in calm, domestic settings, showering, relaxing, or gazing at each other with profound affection. His 1963 “Domestic Scenes” series depicted men interacting in everyday, loving ways, debunking the societal misconception that gay relationships were predatory or deviant.

His luscious, sun-drenched “Swimming Pool” series reimagined the aesthetic of Southern California by meticulously integrating realism with vibrant minimalism. Before Hockney’s arrival, California was largely viewed through the lens of Hollywood noir or cheap commercial advertisements. Hockney elevated the U.S. state to a mythic utopia that was absent in rainy Britain, and where swimming pools symbolize suburban success, leisure, and personal liberty. Hockney likened his move to California to Van Gogh moving to the South of France. The robust West Coast sunlight stripped away shadows, providing a flat, bold palette of aquamarines, pinks, and warm beiges.

Subverting traditional Renaissance perspective, Hockney frequently painted multiple viewpoints within a single image, heavily influenced by Cubism. He argued that Renaissance perspective behaves like a prison for the viewer, trapping us in a static, frozen moment like a camera lens. By channeling Cubism, he shattered this illusion to capture how human beings experience sight, dynamically, over time, and from shifting angles. Renaissance perspective requires the viewer to stand completely still, using just one eye, and Hockney encouraged active engagement in art viewing. “The problem with Renaissance perspective is that it makes you feel like an observer. But in life, you’re a participant,” he said in his 2016 book, A History of Pictures: From the Cave to the Computer Screen.

Annoyed with wide-angle camera lenses distorting the physical space of the room, Hockney reinvented photo-collages using Polaroids to construct complex, multi-angled narratives. By assembling dozens of individual Polaroid prints into a unified grid, he crushed the traditional idea that a photograph is a passive, single-second snapshot. Hockney used the medium to tell a moving narrative of human memory, physical movement, and the passage of time.

Never stuck in the past, Hockney evolved with technology, composing expansive digital landscapes and floral works on iPhones and iPads. He acquired a first-generation iPhone in 2007 just to call friends. But the following year, he discovered Brushes, an early iOS digital art application, and replaced his small, physical sketchbooks with the iPhone as a portable studio.

From his native Yorkshire countryside and the Normandy seasons to intimate double portraits of his friends and family, he transformed the quotidian into inimitable masterpieces. Hockney found inspiration in what he saw, translating his thoughtful observations of mundane moments into images that redefine our world view. Hockney returned to his home county of Yorkshire, England, in the early 2000s, swapping the glamorous pools of California for the wet, rural British landscape. Hockney painted hedgerows and copses (small, thick group of trees or shrubs growing closely together, typically found in fields, along country roads, or on hillsides) on a massive scale, sometimes combining dozens of canvases with vibrant, Fauvist purples, bright oranges, and electric greens. These large-scale landscapes compel viewers to witness the ordinary as extraordinary. In 2019, Hockney moved to a traditional, timber-framed house in Normandy, France, where he welcomed the arrival of spring. During the COVID-19 pandemic, he shifted his gaze to his backyard, chronicling the daily changes of a single cherry tree, a pond, and the local flora.

Hockney infused his work with humor, irony, and visual puns to invite viewers into his work rather than alienate them.

In the spring of 1917, Vienna was suspended between the fading luster of its cultural zenith and the quiet, inexorable erosion of an empire in decline. In his studio on Feldmühlgasse, a historic street in Vienna’s affluent, verdant, and culturally elite residential Hietzing district, Gustav Klimt was painting what would become one of his final portraits. His subject was a young woman from the Lieser family, affluent Jewish industrialists whose textile fortune had woven them into the fabric of the Viennese avant-garde. Their wealth originated with brothers Adolf and Justus Lieser, who pioneered the mechanical jute (industrial textiles) and hemp industry in the Austro-Hungarian Empire through their successful enterprise, Lieser & Duschnitz, enabling them to become prominent arts patrons. Departing sharply from his well-known Byzantine-inspired gold leaf period, the Vienna Secession master captured his sitter with a striking new aesthetic. Embracing a fluid, ferocious modernity, Klimt depicted the 18-year-old woman in a three-quarter pose positioned close to the foreground, her cascading, lavishly ornamental floral cloak juxtaposed against an eerily serene face punctuated with flushed, rosy cheeks and a crimson pout, conveying confidence and connecting the figure to the raw background. Her direct gaze, illuminated by an intentional speck of light captured in the pupils and crowned with precisely arched dark eyebrows, captivates the viewer.

When Klimt died suddenly of a stroke in February 1918, the canvas remained in his studio, slightly unfinished at the lower margins but fully realized in its emotional gravity. It was delivered to the Lieser family, where it hung as a totem of their assimilation and cultural patronage. By 1925, the masterpiece—formally documented as Portrait of Fräulein Margarethe Lieser—was photographed for a landmark exhibition at the Neue Galerie in Vienna. Austrian-American art historian, author, publisher, and gallerist Otto Kallir photographed the portrait, creating the only known black-and-white proof of its existence for nearly a century.

Mirroring the abrupt death of the artist, the cultural fabric ruptured. The painting vanished into the dark, predatory vacuum of the Anschluss, the forced political union of Austria into the German Reich on March 12, 1938. Driven by Adolf Hitler’s New Order expansionist goals, German troops marched into Austria, effectively erasing the country’s independence and absorbing it into Nazi Germany. Hitler intended to colonize these eastern territories with the Aryan race while permanently clearing out the indigenous populations, principally Slavic peoples and the Jewish population, through forced displacement, enslavement, and systematic extermination. These intermingled expansionist and racial goals directly triggered the outbreak of World War II in September 1939.

For nearly a century, Portrait of Fräulein Margarethe Lieser was assumed lost, destroyed, or buried in the opaque vaults of a silent provenance.

The Spectral Surfacing

The art world was electrified in January 2024, when Auktionshaus im Kinsky, a boutique Viennese auction house, announced that the phantom Klimt had surfaced after being quietly held for decades by a private Austrian citizen.

As the painting emerged from the shadows, its history was instantly subjected to a curious editorial revision. In its cataloging, Kinsky stripped “Margarethe” from the title, rebranding the work as Portrait of Fräulein Lieser. The auction house floated a revisionist provenance narrative, suggesting the sitter might be Margarethe’s aunt, Lilly.

To legal and restitution experts, the name change was more than a granular art-historical debate. They believe it was an attempt to decouple the canvas from its specific, documented history of Nazi expropriation.

By rewriting the identity of the sitter, the auction house could alter the lineage of ownership. Kinsky confidently assured the public that a “fair and just solution” had been reached with the rightful heirs of the Lieser family under the 1998 Washington Principles on Nazi-Confiscated Art, a set of 11 non-binding international guidelines designed to facilitate the restitution of art and cultural property looted by the Nazis before and during World War II.

On April 24, 2024, an anonymous collector based in Asia placed a live bid through prominent Hong Kong-based art advisor Patti Wong of €30 million after a 10-minute battle between multiple Asian collectors. Hitting the low end of the €30 million to €50 million estimate, the transaction shattered records as the highest price ever paid for an artwork at an auction in Austria. Still, it was an art world bummer. Deutsche Welle, Germany’s state-funded, public international broadcaster, reported that the auction was “not as sensational as expected.” On June 27, 2023, Klimt’s Dame mit Fächer (Lady with a Fan) fetched £85.3 million ($108.4 million) at Sotheby’s in London, making it the most expensive work of art ever sold at an auction in Europe and amplifying the disappointment of the Portrait of Fräulein Margarethe Lieser hammer price 10 months later.

The Reckoning in Manhattan

The facade of a seamless transaction has dissolved completely with the filing this afternoon of a sweeping lawsuit by Baker & Hostetler attorneys Oren J. Warshavsky, Gonzalo Zeballos, Tatiana Markel, and Michelle Usitalo, in the Supreme Court of the State of New York. Patricia J. Leahy, a South Carolina resident and the sole surviving great-grandchild of Adolf Lieser, targets both the im Kinsky auction house and the painting’s reclusive consignor, an Austrian citizen named Eva Ropper.

Represented by the powerhouse US Am Law 100 law firm, Leahy’s lawsuit reads like a historical indictment of the art market’s lingering complicity in wartime plunder. The complaint alleges that Kinsky’s declarations of a total settlement were patently false. Leahy, the direct heir to the Adolf and Hans Lieser estates, notes she was never contacted regarding a restitution agreement. The lawsuit paints a picture of a rushed, calculated effort to push the painting through the global market before the full scope of the family’s true lineage could stall the transaction.

The filing alleges that a law firm representing other branches of the family threatened Leahy, warning her that any public claim would be treated as unlawful interference with a commercial sale.

Baker & Hostetler litigators led and won the first full Nazi-looted art trial in the United States, securing a historic victory for the heirs of Holocaust victims. Read about it: New York Court Awards Nazi-Looted Egon Schiele Painting To Heir Of Holocaust Victim

The Geography of Jurisdiction

That battle over a Viennese Modernist masterpiece in a Manhattan courtroom is a testament to the evolving architecture of international restitution law. Leahy’s suit explicitly invokes the U.S. Holocaust Expropriated Art Recovery (HEAR) Act, a legal framework designed to strip away predatory statutes of limitations that have long shielded possessors of looted culture.

The legal mechanics of the suit hinge on New York’s status as the unequivocal capital of the global art market. Data from the Art Basel and UBS Global Art Market Report 2026 and the 2026 U.S. Art Market Report by Merrill Lynch solidify New York’s position at the apex of the global art world. New York City accounts for up to 90% of all U.S. art sales, handling a staggering 69% of the world’s total global auction sales value, according to Merrill Lynch. The United States commands 44% of the $59.6 billion global art market, well ahead of the United Kingdom (18%) and China/Hong Kong (14%), Art Basel and UBS note. Moreover, New York hosts the world’s most critical mega-auctions every May and November at Christie’s and Sotheby’s, typically moving billions of dollars of inventory in days. New York City claimed the top spot following the end of World War II, amid a shift from Europe to America due to extreme geopolitical upheaval and a massive migration of creative talent. Art transmuted from a cultural pursuit into a high-stakes financial commodity, as collectors with deep coffers began embracing it as a tax shelter and investment vehicle.

Even though the defendants reside in Austria, the complaint meticulously establishes jurisdiction by pointing out that Kinsky aggressively marketed the Klimt to New York collectors, utilizing the state’s commercial channels to legitimize and conjure interest in its €30 million auction.

The painting, valued at double its sale price under unblemished conditions, remains in legal limbo. Kinsky reportedly retains physical possession of the canvas, while its legal counsel and Eva Ropper’s representatives have gone silent, ignoring communications from the U.S. heirs.

The strategy of Leahy's suit is dramatically more potent than it was just months ago, because the updated HEAR Act of 2025 (Public Law 119-82) was signed into U.S. federal law on April 13, 2026. The revised law specifically addresses how courts were "frustrating the intent" of the original framework and explicitly abolishes the exact defenses that were used to defeat these suits. Changes include: the permanent removal of the original December 31, 2026, sunset filing deadline; strictly forbidding courts from dismissing claims based on the passage of time; explicitly outlawing defenses like laches, adverse possession, or acquisitive prescription; and barring non-merit discretionary dismissals such as international comity, forum non conveniens, or the act of state doctrine.

A Masterpiece on Trial

Ultimately, Leahy v. Ropper et al. exposes the fragile ethics that underpin the high-stakes trade in European Modernism. For nearly a century, the art market treated works displaced by the Holocaust as orphans of history, floating from private salon to auction block with their traumatic provenance erased, altered, or buried under the euphemism of “private collection.’

By bringing this action in New York, the Lieser estate demands that the global art world gaze directly at the canvas and the unresolved historical crimes that have become part of its muddled provenance.

Gordon Parks exemplified Black excellence by dismantling racial boundaries across the cultural landscape, transforming his creative vision into a formidable force against poverty and discrimination. A self-made virtuoso, he re-centered Black humanity in the global consciousness, replacing caricatures with an elegant, nuanced, and profoundly dignified look at the African American experience.

The consummate polymath’s legacy was aptly honored at last night’s 2026 Gordon Parks Foundation Awards Dinner & Auction at Cipriani 42nd Street in New York. The 20th anniversary celebration honored five key figures working at the intersection of the arts and social justice including: acclaimed poet, scholar, advocate and President of the Mellon Foundation Elizabeth Alexander; award-winning artist and activist Chance the Rapper; EGOT-winning, critically acclaimed, multiplatinum artist and producer John Legend; and renowned contemporary American painter and sculptor Henry Taylor, recognized for his expressive, deeply empathetic portraits and large-scale figurative tableaux that document the breadth of Black life in America. Acclaimed businesswoman, philanthropist and advocate Lonnie Ali accepted the honor on behalf of the Muhammad Ali Family.

“What is an artist to do in times like these?,” asked Legend. “James Baldwin said, being Black and conscious in this country means being in a constant state of rage, and we have every right to feel rage. I am angry, but anger is not enough. So, what is an artist to do? Nina Simone said it’s our duty to reflect the times. Gordon Parks helped the world see our reality more clearly, but I also want to call on the generative power of art. My wife, Chrissy, and I have four beautiful babies. They bring us so much joy and laughter, and when I see them, I don’t just think about our present realities, I see the future. That’s why I want us all to think about extending our call as artists beyond reflecting our times, beyond just seeing and telling the truth. Our power as artists is also to envision a better future. Imagine new possibilities, new ways of life, new ways of loving, new ways of building and sharing power, new structures in our political system, new constitutions, a new era for freedom.”

The honorees lauded Parks as a Renaissance man who pioneered American photography, filmmaking, writing, and composing, harnessing his creative vision as a “weapon” against poverty, racism, and social injustice. As a self-taught artist, he annihilated racial barriers to become the first Black staff photographer at LIFE magazine and the first African American to direct a major Hollywood studio film. As a whole, his wide-reaching oeuvre elevated Black humanity. Fostering a tradition of Black Excellence, the Foundation’s honorees continue to demonstrate how art and social advocacy are intertwined and essential to survival and the livelihood of future generations.

Born in Fort Scott, Kansas, Parks was the youngest of 15 children in a poor tenant farming family. Following his mother’s death when he was 15, he moved to St. Paul, Minnesota, where he was briefly homeless. He worked as a piano player, a railway waiter, a busboy, and a semi-pro basketball player, before unleashing his mighty “weapon.” While working on a passenger train in 1937, Parks was emotionally inspired by magazine photo-essays of Depression-era migrant workers. He bought his first camera for $7.50 at a pawnshop and taught himself how to use it. In 1941, he became the first African American to win the prestigious Julius Rosenwald Fellowship, earning him a position with the Farm Security Administration (FSA) in Washington, D.C., where, he captured his most iconic photograph, American Gothic, Washington, D.C. (1942), featuring Ella Watson, a Black cleaning woman, holding a broom in front of an American flag.

In the spring of 1966, Parks traveled to Miami and London to document the boxing legend-in-the-making, as Ali confronted fierce public backlash and intense scrutiny for his unwavering stances on race, the Vietnam War, and other cultural taboos of the era. The Ali portraits were published alongside an intimate, inquisitive six-spread personal essay on his relationship with the “brash, poetry-spouting kid” in the September 9 issue of LIFE magazine.

A stunning black-and-white close-up of Ali, emerging dappled with sweat from a shadowy background, was on view last night, along with a massive projection of the image behind the stage. Parks masterfully captured the emerging giant’s nuanced amalgam of charismatic showmanship, fierce moral conviction, and deep introspection. Despite his brazen public persona, experts and biographers often reveal his deeply thoughtful, private nature, underscored by deep passion for philosophy, spirituality, and poetry. Ali was widely regarded as a profound thinker on race, religion, and human dignity, aligning his ethos with Parks.

Beyond the honorees, the fete acknowledged two legendary, late-career American photographers who are 85 years old, Darryl Cowherd and Louis Mendes, through the acquisition of significant works for the Foundation’s permanent collection.

Both artists knew Parks personally and their work advances art as a form of social activism. Cowherd is a seminal figure in Chicago’s Black Arts Movement during the 1960s and 1970s, including his role as a founding member of the photographic arm of the Organization of Black American Culture (OBAC). Cowherd’s career spans candid street photography, portraiture of civil rights icons (like Stokely Carmichael and Imamu Baraka), and broadcast news journalism. He contributed directly to the historic 1967 South Side Chicago mural, the Wall of Respect, and his archive is preserved at major institutions like the Art Institute of Chicago and the National Gallery of Art. Mendes is a towering figure in classic New York City street photography, traversing the city’s streets as a roving portraitist, capturing a massive, more than six-decades-long visual chronicle of the city’s diverse population and seismic cultural shifts. He is widely and inimitably visible for his classic news-photographer style, dressed in a trench coat and operating a vintage, large-format Graflex Speed Graphic camera with a massive flash bulb. Mendes preserves the physical, immediate history of analog film photography in the modern digital age.

The evening also amplified this year’s Gordon Parks Foundation Fellows: jazz pianist, composer, and performance artist Jason Moran; Sanford Biggers, an interdisciplinary artist known for blending history, folklore, and social commentary across sculpture, textiles, and installation art; Amanda Williams, a visual artist and architect whose work explores the intersections of race, color theory, and the built urban environment; and Professor Leigh Raiford, a prominent scholar of African American and African Diaspora Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, author, and curator specializing in Black visual culture.

Guests were delighted by special tribute performances to Ali by Chance The Rapper and Jason Moran, a musical interlude by The Roots’ Dave Guy and Anthony Morgan, and the Inspirational Choir of Harlem.

This year’s co-chairs are:Alicia Keys and Kasseem Dean, Tonya and Spike Lee, Ben Stiller and Christine Taylor, Huma Abedin and Alex Soros, Anderson Cooper, Sarah Arison, Kathryn and Ken Chenault, Sherrese Clarke, Malcolm Jenkins, Michi Jigarjian, Judy Glickman Lauder, Carol Sutton Lewis and William M. Lewis, Jr., Crystal McCrary and Raymond McGuire, Dana Tang and Andy Darrell, Clara Wu Tsai, Gail and Jeff Yabuki and Betsy and Ed Zimmerman.

Columns filled with organic matter, algae, and microbial colonies rising from the water, opulent Gilded Age furniture cast in cold, solid concrete, and a monumental sturgeon crafted from steel, aluminum, and salvaged local Hudson Valley car parts transform the landscape at Storm King Art Center.

A brisk breeze, low humidity, and abundant sunshine enhanced the viewing experience at yesterday’s annual opening celebration which unveiled 2026 exhibitions by Anicka Yi, Saif Azzuz, and Liz Glynn. Some 60 miles north of Lower Manhattan, the unrivaled open-air museum and natural reserve in New York’s Hudson Valley encompasses around 500 acres of rolling meadows, woodlands which amplify about 120 large-scale sculptures by Modern and contemporary masters within its permanent collection, alongside a rotating selection of site-specific temporary installations.

The three new temporary installations by Yi, Azzuz, and Glynn fundamentally transform the sprawling landscape by introducing elements of microscopic time, indigenous regional histories, and architectural displacement.

Yi – a New York-based conceptual artist who constructs sophisticated, living frameworks that dissolve the friction between organic ecosystems and technological evolution – reimagines a seven-acre field as an active, living biological laboratory that guides the viewer’s gaze down through the strata of deep geological time.

Message from the Mud is installed as an active archaeological dig that centers on a mounded earth pool filled with water and soil samples pulled directly from Storm King’s South Ponds. Transparent acrylic Winogradsky columns rise out of the water. Invented in the 1880s by Russian microbiologist Sergei Winogradsky, these simple, self-contained miniature ecosystems are used to grow a massive variety of microorganisms and demonstrate how different bacteria recycle nutrients in nature over time.

Inhabited by diverse organic matter, these vessels foster the continuous growth of shifting algae, cyanobacteria, and bacterial colonies. Yi’s artwork serves as a dynamic microbiological portrait, evolving daily in response to ambient light and temperature.

Azzuz’s giant sturgeon sculpture bridges distinct geographies by physically incorporating raw materials, languages, and ecological narratives from both the Pacific Coast (Northern California) and the Atlantic Coast (New York’s Hudson Valley). The titles, weych-pues / tàkhòne (where the rivers meet), borrows from the Yurok language, referring to Weitchpec, a historic Yurok village at the confluence of the Klamath and Trinity Rivers in Northern California, and tàkhòne from the Lenape (Munsee/Delaware) language honors the ancestral lands of the Lenape people along the Hudson Valley region.

Azzuz constructed the core of the sturgeon with locally salvaged car parts to reflect the region’s heavy infrastructure and human manufacturing. The contemporary Libyan-Yurok artist based in Pacifica, California, intertwines these industrial scraps with natural materials sourced near his home in the San Francisco Bay Area, integrating the organic textures of the Pacific watershed.

As an enrolled member of the Yurok Tribe, Azzuz anchors the sculpture in an Indigenous framework, mapping the layered histories of the Hudson River directly onto the landscape. By compelling viewers to gaze horizontally across the park toward the water, the sculpture frames the environment as an interconnected network of vital resources and ancestral memories rather than real estate.

Glynn’s Open House introduces a sense of human history and architectural ruin, displacing a sumptuous, historic indoor New York City space into the open wild. The critically acclaimed Los Angeles-based conceptual artist, whose multidisciplinary practice spans sculpture, large-scale installation, and participatory performance, repurposes the Gilded Age ballroom on Fifth Avenue, designed by Stanford White for William C. Whitney, a financier and founding father of the Whitney family’s immense fortune.

Casting the furniture’s dramatic scale and intense eclecticism in cold, solid concrete, the austere sofas and chairs are arranged like a ruin across the meadows. Previously installed in an urban setting, Glynn debuts Open House in a raw, natural landscape that invites everyone to take a seat. Spread out across the grass, the heavy concrete furniture transforms a once-exclusive, private interior space into a weathered, democratic public lounge where visitors are encouraged to interact.

Subverting the visual language of Manhattan’s wealth and power, Glynn displaces the ballroom which was designed to be used only once a year for the city’s elite. Undermining symbols of historical exclusion, Glynn rejects the expensive woods and plush silks chosen for Louis XIV-, XV-, and XVI-style sofas in favor of populist, utilitarian material typically associated with modern public housing projects and civic plazas. She conceived the piece when contemporary New York City real estate and cost-of-living metrics began to rival the staggering wealth gaps of the late 19th century.

Celebrants viscerally engaged in the themes of yesterday’s festivities with Before Skeletons, Before Teeth, a prehistoric-inspired culinary experience by Yi in collaboration with Care of Chan, presenting a shared human experience driven by biological, emotional, and sensory connections.

All three temporary exhibitions will remain on display through November 9, offering an array of viewing opportunities in different climates.

Encountering the supernatural, three-eyed gaze of a spectral feline elevated to regal stature, her shape evokes the cat goddess Bastet’s historical link to Egyptian design principles. Primarily worshipped as a guardian feline, her role in Egyptian civilization intersects deeply with mathematical concepts. Embodying the Eye of Ra, Bastet is directly tied to the mathematical fractions used in accounting and sacred geometry. Moreover, historians like Herodotus described how her temple layout was a masterpiece of precise geometric symmetry.

Bastet is frequently named as the wife of Ptah, the patron deity of craft, construction, and architecture. While he oversees the logical blueprint, structural geometry, and the builder’s grid used to lay out temples, she imbues the spaces with internal life, warmth, and protective energy. Together, they represent the ideal union of physical form and spiritual essence.

Connecting with the subject’s gaze, we witness the depth of Leonora Carrington’s inquiry into esoteric texts detailing sacred geometry, alchemy, and the mathematical blueprints of the universe. Her characters frequently enact intricate, cryptic rituals within rigid, geometric environments.

A highlight of TEFAF New York 2026, Carrington’s El gato (1951), presented by Leon Tovar Gallery, a New York-based gallery specializing in Modern art from Latin America, resonates powerfully with contemporary viewers amid long overdue appreciation for women Surrealists. Undermined for decades by a male-dominated Surrealist movement that portrayed women as passive muses, lovers, or hysterics rather than serious artists, the British-Mexican and her female peers were marginalized through patriarchal structures. Their immense contributions were dwarfed by their relationships with famous men, relegating them to footnotes in the art historical canon. Leaving behind a far more profound legacy, Carrington transcends masculine Surrealism’s obsession with shocking imagery to birth an enduring feminist universe that subverts patriarchal structures with matriarchal power, domestic alchemy, and non-hierarchical ecosystems.

After you visit TEFAF New York, opening today at the Park Avenue Armory and on view through May 19, explore the sculptural splendor of Shape of Dreams Leonora Carrington, which opened yesterday and is on view through July 25 at L’SPACE in Chelsea. After decades dedicated mostly to painting, writing, and alchemy, Carrington devoted her later years to creating bronze and mixed-media sculptures that draw us deeper into ancient mythology, Celtic folklore, the occult, and human-animal hybrids. By delving into the past, Carrington drew us closer to our future. Contemporary philosophers like Giorgio Agamben dismantle traditional boundaries between humans and animals, arguing that the difference is not rooted in biology, but an artificial, political construction engineered by men to justify violence and control.

The red hot market for Carrington was fueled by the May 2024 sale of her painting, Les Distractions de Dagobert (1945) at Sotheby’s to Argentine billionaire Eduardo Costantini. The $28.5 million winning bid by the real estate developer and founder and chairman of the Museum of Latin American Art of Buenos Aires (MALBA), was a ninefold surge over Carrington’s previous $3.3 million record, positioning her work as more valuable at auction than pieces by Salvador Dalí and her former partner Max Ernst. Carrington is now ranked as the fourth highest-selling Surrealist artist of all time, trailing René Magritte, Jean Miró, and Frida Kahlo, and the fifth highest-selling woman artist overall. Her 1951 bronze cat-head sculpture, La Grande Dame fetched $11.4 million at Sotheby’s on November 18, 2024.

Engage with an abstract, surreal animal form at the Carpenters Workshop Gallery booth, showcasing an aerodynamic, curved cabinet sculpture with multiple drawers by Marc Newson. Pod of Drawers (1987) exemplifies the mastery of contemporary design by marrying historical decorative arts, surrealism, and industrial manufacturing. The Australian designer reimagines Chiffonnier Anthropomorphe (1925), an anthropomorphic chest of drawers by French Art Deco cabinetmaker André Groult. Newson evolves Groult’s feminine-body-inspired curves and transforms the cabinet into an undulating, fluid sculpture resembling an abstract, organic form.

Trained as a jeweler, Newson built the cabinet by hand, approaching the aluminum paneling like metal marquetry or a specialized form of metal patchwork. He hand-beat and cut sheets of aircraft-grade aluminum and painstakingly attached them to a fluid fiberglass body using visible rivets to create a retro-futuristic shell. Art and design curiously collide with five functional drawers that follow the bulging contours of the frame which stands on painted black wood feet.

The array of exquisite works presented by Carpenters Workshop Gallery signal the rapid proliferation of the global market for high-end handcrafted design and furniture. It is projected to blossom from $25.2 billion in 2025 to $43.4 billion by 2035, according to Future Market Insights (FMI). In the U.S. alone, the luxury furniture sector is expected to surge from $6.55 billion in 2026 to $8.17 billion by 2031, maintaining a 4.52% Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR), predicts FMI. Consumers are increasingly eschewing mass-produced minimalist interiors to covet bespoke, structurally organic statement pieces that convey quiet luxury and are committed to elite artisanship, and high-integrity provenance storytelling.

Making its U.S. market debut at TEFAF New York 2026, Hong Kong-based high jewelry house FORMS offers works that feature dreamlike, illusionistic, and biomorphic elements that achieve a surreal quality through technical illusion and the juxtaposition of contrasting materials. Founded in 2010 by Elad Assor and Tzvika Janover, the appointment-only atelier produces fewer than 100 bespoke, highly architectural pieces each year.

The emerald and diamond shakudo ring, for example, seems to defy gravity. Two meticulous step-cut stones – a vivid, high-clarity green emerald and a step-cut white diamond – are mounted corner-to-corner without any visible prongs or obtrusive metal borders separating them. They appear to float effortlessly next to each other over the envied hand. Matte-dark shakudo frames absorb surrounding light, creating a void-like border that transforms the emerald and the diamond into glowing, weightless portals. Shakudo (赤銅) is a traditional Japanese metallurgical alloy historically used in samurai sword fittings and now utilized in avant-garde high jewelry.

The jewels dazzle in the atmospheric environment created by Hong Kong–based In Situ & Partners, transforming the traditional fair stand into an intimate jewel-box setting. Set within one of the historic rooms of the Park Avenue Armory, the site-specific immersive experience draws on subtle sacral references and engages in a cross-centuries dialogue with the building’s original 19th-century boiserie, herringbone floors, and fireplace. Fairgoers are welcomed through a semi-transparent golden mesh screen into a sequence of three lacquered niches crafted by Italian studio Materica. Marble pedestals hold up each piece as a singular object of contemplation. Almond-green textile walls, deep burgundy carpeting, and brushed-bronze vitrines elevate the mood, curate a deeply textured palette to evoke an atmosphere of intimate, understated drama.

A four-time participant at TEFAF Maastricht, the FORMS entry into the U.S. market signals the growth of high jewelry, defined by unique, bespoke, or highly limited pieces priced above $100,000. While entry-level luxury categories flounder, the global high jewelry market is experiencing a structural boom, valued at $30.7 billion, according to Intel Market Research, driven by macroeconomic trends, shifting demographics, and a pivot toward hard luxury assets.

Both TEFAF Maastricht and TEFAF New York are organized by The European Fine Art Foundation and adhere to the same incomparably rigorous, industry-standard vetting practices, which gives institutions and elite collectors the confidence of attaining inimitable, impeccable quality that is lacking or absent in other marketplaces. While TEFAF Maastricht encompasses the depth and breadth of all art history, TEFAF New York offers a more intimate experience celebrating primarily 20th-century Modernism and contemporary works.

In a conversation with my 16-year-old son at last night’s preview, art world savior, philanthropist and chair emerita of the Museum of Arts and Design (MAD), Barbara Tober, heralded the 11th edition of TEFAF New York “a truly wonderful place to be.”

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NOTE: When written with a lowercase “s”, surrealism refers broadly to any art, literature, or aesthetic style that incorporates bizarre, fantastic, or dreamlike elements. Surrealism with a capital “S” denotes the avant-garde intellectual, political, and artistic movement founded in Paris in 1924 by writer André Breton.

From Guillaume Bresson’s Baroque-style depictions of contemporary urban scenes to David Reed’s theatrical abstractions rooted in Italian Mannerist techniques, and Shirley Jaffe’s synthesizing of European modernism with American abstraction, TEFAF New York 2026 celebrates contemporary artists who re-contextualize centuries of art.

In its 11th year, the New York edition of Europe’s crown jewel of art fairs draws together cross-collecting from a 3,300-year-old ancient Egyptian limestone royal stele to an array of fresh works by a wide range of artists, including Mickalene Thomas, Minjung Kim, Eva Helene Pade, and Cai Guo-Qiang. From May 14-19, 88 world-leading art dealers will present museum quality artworks across modern and contemporary art, jewelry, antiquities, and design at the opulent Gilded Age Park Avenue Armory in New York.

Paris-based Galerie Nathalie Obadia, which has been participating in TEFAF New York since 2023, this year is presenting works by Bresson, Jaffe, Reed, Thomas, Andres Serrano, Agnès Varda, Seydou Keïta, and Robert Kushner.

Sans titre (2026) from Bresson’s ongoing series reflects art history through a conceptual framework known as anachronism (derived from Greek for “against time”), marrying hyper-contemporary imagery with classical European traditions. His contorted, sometimes intertwined (not in this case) bodies mirror classical compositions of Renaissance titans like Michelangelo and Giotto, Baroque master Peter Paul Rubens, and Late Renaissance (Mannerism) master Tintoretto.

Reed’s vibrant #812 (2025-2026), an acrylic and oil on polyester, strikes a 1980s pop vibe with playful teals and pinks, as his new paintings expand on his singular reinvention of abstraction that digs deep into centuries of art. As I learned during an extensive studio visit with Reed in January 2020, his work is richly layered by transforming colors with cangiante (”to change”), an Italian Renaissance/Mannerist technique popularized by Michelangelo and Andrea del Sarto, and emulating swirling, energetic, and multi-directional High Baroque line movements. His fluid loops and prominent paint splatters evoke the dramatic, emotional scale of Baroque altarpieces.

Building on last year’s showcase, Galerie Nathalie Obadia curates a selection of Jaffe’s historical paintings and works on paper. One of these works, an oil on canvas, The Red, the White and the Blue (1964), signals a shift from Abstract Expressionism to a more structured, geometric style, referencing art history by bridging Parisian modernism with her own, evolving exploration of abstraction.

Galerie Nathalie Obadia is debuting Thomas’ Portrait of Din #8 (2026), which subverts the traditional European odalisque motif, even when her muse is clothed and standing, and the subject’s gaze confronts the viewer instead of looking away. Thomas re-contextualizes the Black female body, inserting her Afrocentric visual languages into classical portrait structure. Moreover, she empowers her muse, by using Din’s name and treating her as a creative collaborator, eschewing the white male tradition of presenting the muse as an anonymous, passive object.

London- and Milan-based Robilant+Voena (VOENA), which participated in TEFAF’s inaugural New York fair, invites us into a dialogue between Korean artist Kim and Lucio Fontana. Kim’s works on mulberry Hanji paper borrows from Eastern painting techniques, calligraphy, and a painstaking process of layering, cutting, burning, and reassembling to produce surfaces that are simultaneously serene and structurally intricate. Fontana, a key figure in 20th-century Italian art, and Kim disrupt or destroy two-dimensional surfaces to explore space, time, and materiality.

Global mega-gallery and TEFAF New York mainstay Thaddaeus Ropac introduces rising Paris-based Danish painter Pade to the U.S., with its centerpiece, Jagt (Hunt) (2026). The depiction of a contorted, lunging naked woman shrouded in gunsmoke and pursued by a pack of hounds is an homage to historical hunting imagery and choreography traversing the 14th-century Renaissance to the 20th-century avant-garde. Learn more at TEFAF Talks: Eva Helene Pade Meet the Experts on May 16, from 2.30-3 p.m. EST.

Fellow art market heavyweight White Cube selected TEFAF to position Cai’s new exploration of vibrant colored gunpowder on canvas after decades of working with mostly black gunpowder in the context of traditional Western and Eastern historical narratives. The Lower East Side-based Chinese contemporary artist’s solo booth presentation includes a series of bird gunpowder paintings that depict avian flocks captured in successive states of flight, movement, and decay, which evolved from his extensive research into azulejos, traditional tin-glazed ceramic tile works of Portuguese and Spanish architecture.

Perhaps begin your TEFAF New York 2026 journey at Stand 212, inspecting the 3,300-year-old, 2.5-foot-tall Egyptian limestone stele of Thutmose IV (c. 1401–1391 BC) presented by London-based David Aaron, imagining how the 18th dynasty pharaoh might gaze across the aisle at major modern/contemporary and design galleries, including Carpenters Workshop Gallery showcasing contemporary metalwork, Galerie Gisela Capitain highlighting German artist Martin Kippenberger alongside a curated selection of contemporary and post-war masterpieces, and a curated selection of postwar masters and contemporary artists by Ben Brown Fine Arts.

If you attend one New York art fair, make it TEFAF, where unrivaled vetting standards and meticulous curation promise an experience that will transform your understanding of art throughout the ages.

“No, dear, the white ones are for us,” said my friend and Orthodox sister Madeline, as I instinctively reached for a red carnation corsage. “How lucky are those who get the red ones.”

The white pairs best with my wrap dress, a deep blue, my mother Lubov’s favorite color, adorned with a white flower print. But the red matches my eyes, as the tiny blood vessels on the surface of my eyes have dilated. Tears derive directly from your blood supply. When you cry, your autonomic nervous system signals the lacrimal glands to produce fluid rapidly.

“What’s wrong? Are you OK?” asked Valerica, another Orthodox sister at our beloved Cathedral on 2nd Street in New York’s East Village.

Choking back tears, and now aware that my efforts to obscure my eyes with my hair have failed. I explained it’s the first Mother’s Day since Lubov died on July 1, 2025, four days before her birthday, as recorded in the U.S. without any physical evidence of her birth in Vitebsk Oblast, Belarus, where she was born a prisoner of Stalin.

“Oh, that’s very normal,” Valerica assured me, giving me a hug, and saving me embarrassment.

My darling friend Ari doled out an “extra hug,” knowing the depth of my profound sting.

“A long while yet will you keep that great mother’s grief. But it will turn in the end into quiet joy, and your bitter tears will be only tears of tender sorrow that purifies the heart and delivers it from sin,” Father Zosima, the wise and saintly Eastern Orthodox elder, tells Nastasya, a passionately grieving peasant mother mourning the sudden death of her three-year-old son, Alexey (Alyosha), in Book II, Chapter 3, “Peasant Women Who Have Faith” in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s greatest masterpiece, The Brothers Karamazov.

Zosima tells Nastasya not to suppress her weeping, promising that her that grief will eventually transform into a purifying, spiritual peace.

Eventually seems like eternity in this moment.

Dostoevsky wrote this scene shortly after losing his own three-year-old son, Alyosha, to epilepsy. The character of Father Zosima was heavily inspired by monk, Elder Ambrose of Optina Monastery, where Dostoevsky sought solace during his own intense grief.

Of course, I have not suffered the pain of Nastasya or Dostoevsky, but Father Zosima’s sage advice is nonetheless relevant and extends to the legacy of trauma I carry from Lubov’s mother, my Babushka, Alexandra Dimitrievna (Dimitrieva) Grishaev (born March 3, 1913, in Vitebsk Oblast, Belarus; died March 4, 1998, in Wilbraham, Massachusetts). My Babushka and my Degushka (maternal grandfather) Grigori Ustinovich Grishaev lost their three sons, Pytor, and twins Mikhail and Ivan, in infancy. Lubov survived camps in Belarus and Poland before encountering her first physical “home”, a displaced persons camp in Hanover, Germany.

A few years after arriving to the U.S. as refugees, they suffered the loss of more children, likely avoidable if they’d had access to acceptable healthcare. Of course, filthy Slavs were regarded with little, if any, dignity in an America that continues to vilify ethnic Russians for the heinous crimes of their own oppressors.

My grandparents were inhumanely treated by their “sponsor” through Church World Services, a rural New Hampshire farmer who chose them for my Degushka’s experience as a secretary of agriculture for Vitebsk Oblast and master mechanic for German automobile manufacturer Opel, and my Babushka’s masteries including baking, cooking, and all forms of needlework, despite losing most of her eyesight on the ship from Germany. She forced overboard because she had contracted typhoid fever. A man in his 20s, who no connection to my family besides a regard for all humanity, rescued her, and she survived, save for her vision.

The trauma doesn’t stop there.

During the last visit to my mother’s house, which was destroyed by a flood caused by my brother-in-law, who died at age 52 on Sept. 13, 2024, I sifted through the very few pieces of salvaged ephemera, including a crude, yet formal, doctor’s note, clinically explaining, without any hint of compassion, why he insisted my Babushka have abortions.

I vividly recall my Babushka’s abrupt shift in mood from joy to sorrow after she ran for a phone call while bathing me. My mother experienced a second stillborn birth. The first was a year before my birth. My own birth was nearly thwarted, as I was born breach, more than 24 hours after my mother’s water broke, and extracted using vacuum and forceps. The now-defunct brutal practice is replaced by emergency cesarean, which I agreed to after a day of labor as I was told it was the only way to save my son Michael Alexander. I doubt that’s medically true. While the barbaric techniques have improved, the emotional treatment of women giving birth in the U.S. remains arcane and impersonal, at best. My mother’s obstetrician, who refused her cries for a C-section, later called me a “death sandwich, barely born” between two stillborns. Amplifying the cruelty of his vile words, he left my mother and me with significant physical damage that endured throughout my mother’s life and continues to hinder mine.

The last couple of weeks have been emotionally excruciating, and I’ve struggled with a constant headache, bouts of nausea and dizziness, over-engaged allergies, and a sense of detachment and disorientation. It occurred to me only in this recent period that my mother’s lack of enthusiasm when I told her I was pregnant at age 38 was her attempt to prepare me for the potential devastation of losing a child. She reluctantly, yet joyously, hosted a baby shower at her home and attended another hosted by my dear friends, Darcy, Paula, and Shanny. In Russian tradition, or at least my mother’s tradition, a baby shower is taboo as the instance of losing babies seems inevitable.

Motherhood, like college or home ownership, isn’t for everyone, and I detest social prescriptions that dictate otherwise. But for those who consummately embrace motherhood, the grief of loss is incomparable.

Frida Kahlo’s desire to become a mother was a central part of her life and art, underscored by her infertility following a catastrophic traffic accident in Mexico City when she was 18. Kahlo used the term “child-mother” to describe her relationship with her niece, often revealing her affectionate maternal side in letters, frequently marked with red lipstick.

“Isol of my heart. Child-mother, source-fruit,” she wrote to her niece, Isolda Pinedo Kahlo. “You know how much I love you—now even more—because having given you away, you give me your little girl, and so I have two loves. The same ones I wanted to have alive in my womb many years ago.”

Grateful for Michael Alexander, who today bears the immeasurable weight of his first Mother’s Day without his Babushka Lubov and his second without his Nona Sharon Ruth.

Frida Kahlo, My Birth (Mi Nacimiento), (1932), oil on metal sheet (tin/copper), 30.5 cm × 35 cm (12.0 in × 13.8 in) Private Collection of Madonna

Madonna owns this oil-on-copper painting created in the style of a retablo, a traditional Mexican devotional painting often depicting patron saints. Kahlo painted this masterpiece while simultaneously grieving the death of her mother and her own recent, ruinous miscarriage at Detroit’s Henry Ford Hospital. The composition draws inspiration from 16th-century Aztec sculptures of Tlazolteotl, the goddess of fertility and midwives who represents creation out of sacrifice. A white sheet conceals the mother’s upper body and face, acting as a dual reference to Frida’s mother’s death and a visual distance from the trauma of miscarriage. Frida’s head, evidenced by her signature unibrow, emerges from her mother’s womb. Kahlo said it illustrates how she imagined she was born and symbolizes giving birth to herself. An icon of the weeping Virgen de las Angustias hangs above the bed, a nod to her mother’s devout Catholicism. The Holy Mother watches over with grief but conveys helplessness. Madonna told Vanity Fair that she uses the brutal honesty of the painting as a litmus test for friendships.