David Breslin

My favorite installation: this radical but ingeniously simple one of Antonello da Messina’s Dead Christ Supported by Angels (circa 1476) by Carlo Scarpa in ~1959-60. Off the travertine walls, the painting sags from the armature, angled as if the weight was still too much to bear, and that we are left only to feel that unbelievable futility of the bystander once the action is done. You can see in the straight on shot, a detail I love, that the armature and painting aren’t exactly centered. The whole thing is wedged a little more to the left, just off, so the precarity of the set up—the stand, the wall, the floor, the picture; the life in the picture and ours outside—registers in your body before that callous, slow, triggered brain of mine even knows what’s up. Oh, and then the painting is so gorgeous and haunting you’re brought to your knees. #carloscarpa #museocorrer

Lorna Simpson shines, radiates, and pulses @palazzo_grassi in a mesmerizing show curated by @emmalavigne_ that builds on the recent exhibition @metmuseum ✨ Huge congratulations to Lorna, Emma, and the entire Pinault Collection team (and the great Met colleagues who made this collaboration happen!) #lornasimpson

I love Krasner and Pollock so much, their energy, their comfort in inhabiting the unknown. It feels like an important moment to bring them together, to look at what their seismic contributions have been, so @brinda.k and I (with the work of many!) are doing a big show @metmuseum to look at the full arc of both careers. It opens in October! More to come…. Krasner (1908–1984) and Pollock (1912–1956) met as emerging artists in New York in the winter of 1941. They married in 1945 and moved to Springs, Long Island, where they remained entwined personally, artistically, and professionally until Pollock’s untimely death. While Pollock’s reputation historically eclipsed Krasner’s, today, both artists’ practices are rightly recognized as central to the innovations of art from the mid-20th century onwards. This exhibition continues and amplifies this reevaluation, on their own terms and in dynamic relation to each other. Drawing its subtitle, Past Continuous, from a 1976 painting by Krasner, the exhibition traces parallel lives and practices—forged first by lived experience, then shadowed by memory. Krasner, born in Brooklyn to Jewish immigrant parents from what is now Ukraine, and Pollock, raised in Los Angeles and the American West, brought specific geographies and inheritances into a shared artistic context. Their early paths traced distinct strands of American modernism that would ultimately converge in the rupture known as Abstract Expressionism, a movement that valued the translation of inner feelings into dramatic visual action. In the wake of World War II, artists asked why art mattered and what it could be. For Pollock, his breakthrough was the “drip” technique, a radical mode of painting that flourished in a condensed but prolific period. Krasner’s varied practice was typified by ceaseless explorations of abstraction, often cued by her abiding interest in the possibilities of nature and color. This is the first major New York presentation devoted to either artist in more than 20 years. Featuring over 120 works, it is the first exhibition to look at the full arc of their careers together. @pollockkrasnerfoundation #leekrasner #jacksonpollock @metmodern

The last day of the mezzanine galleries @metmodern Tang Wing next! @nicoleeisenman

The maestro visits ❤️ #alexkatz @metmodern

The artwork that might have moved me the most this past year is Alex Da Corte’s Pink Store Front (2025), a riff on a work by Christo from 60 years ago. You’re left to imagine what lies foreclosed to you beyond the door and covered windows. But you’re also asked to make do, even find joy in, the place you find yourself. This waiting room he positions us within just also happens to be your life. There’s obviously a degree of melancholy to this, all of this waiting and maybe not changing that our dopamine-addled brains can no longer abide, but there’s also a greater amount of optimism and hope—both that the quiet spinning of the world is interesting enough and that our capacity to imagine the untold lives out of view is life’s legitimate work. Alex’s rummaging through art history seems to always come from the position of wanting to love. This refusal of cynicism, beginning by looking at what has been, is one way to begin making the future. Oh, and yes, you can walk through Alex’s door. To a better, always better, 2026 ❤️ #alexdacorte @matthewmarksgallery

There are certain artists who change the way you look at art and at the world. Daniel Boyd and Mohammed Sami are two of those for me. It’s a personal and political vision, but it’s also one steeped in a visual literacy that holds universality and difference in balance. The work is beautiful but tough, entrancing yet suspicious of seduction. The work cares deeply about history but pulses with the now. I’m thrilled these incredible paintings—new to the collection—are now on view @metmuseum in a great installation curated by @janepanetta and installed by the fantastic @metmodern team. The room also features recent acquisitions by Issy Wood and Cady Noland. Come see! @d_a_n_b_o_y_d #mohammedsami @metmodern 🙏🏼 @magideye

Lorna Simpson: Source Notes closes this Sunday @metmuseum 💙 Huge congrats to @lornasimpson and exhibition curator @rose_cestlavie for such a tremendous project and beloved show.

Leonard A. Lauder’s breathtaking Cubist collection is now at its forever home @metmuseum 🎉 Leonard assembled the most important private collection of Cubism—focusing on Braque, Gris, Leger, and Picasso—always with the intention of giving it to the public. This kind of populism, where everyone is entitled to excellence and erudition, is a model to emulate. The salon wall is exactly how Leonard hung this group at home. This beautiful installation by @dalessandrostephanie and the @metmodern team is a preview for a full display when the Tang Wing for Modern and Contemporary Art opens in 2030 ✨ #picasso #leger #braque #gris #leonardlauder

Lois Dodd paints like Emily Dickinson wrote, in deep wonder and curiosity that things actually are. This beautiful painting from 1987-88 is a recent gift to @metmuseum by Dodd’s longtime friend, another genius, Alex Katz ❤️ #loisdodd #alexkatz @alexandregallery

I won’t go into how utterly amazing Kerry James Marshall is—and other miraculous truisms—but I did want to slightly obsess and geek out on these white plexiglas frames of his. @markgodfrey1973 , curator of this tremendous survey @royalacademyarts , sets up an interesting tension at the end of his intro text to the show—and I’m really roughly paraphrasing here in my jet lagged state!—positioning Marshall in opposition to artists that preceded him and who could rely on chance as a sufficient method (think AbEx, etc.). Marshall, Godfrey asserts, always has a plan. It reminded me of how the genius choreographer and dancer Yvonne Rainer in the 60s and 70s pushed back on chance as a kind of luxury, a mindset that thought, yes, of outcomes but not really of consequences. Seeing these white plexiglas frames on the walls Mark decided to paint blue, red, pistachio, etc., you see the artist asserting his control, maintaining the crisp internal logic of the picture which is his, and creating a synthetic caesura between painted wall and painted world. Art historians love to nerd out on the iconographic ties Marshall uses to bind his works to history—and of course they’re here and Marshall knowing plants references to Manet, Seurat, Homer, Rivera, and on and on everywhere in his practice. But Marshall’s nod here is to Robert Ryman, I think, and how the most rudimentary of the painter’s tools and devices—facture, depth, distance, touch, and, of course, frame—allow the artist to acknowledge what he is and is not in control of. And, by extension, by positioning control and authority as themes in his work, Marshall lets us contemplate what it is we choose to do with the authority—no matter the scale of it—that each of us might have. #kerryjamesmarshall #royalacademyofarts

Grace is really embracing her mother’s love of all things fall and autumnal fashion 🍁🍂🥰 (Give me summer!)