Installation view: “Nothing Still About Still Lifes” at the Deji Art Museum in Nanjing, China. Courtesy of the Deji Art Museum
Welcome to One Fine Show, where Observer highlights a recently opened exhibition at a museum not in New York City, a place we know and love that already receives plenty of attention.
Late last year, I had the privilege of being a guest of Shanghai’s West Bund Art & Design, the most important fair on the Chinese mainland. It was the first edition in the futuristic and newly constructed West Bund Convention Center, and alongside strong sales—Perrotin reported 40 percent of its high-end booth sold out on day one—there was an array of excellent and sophisticated art, particularly in its curated xiàn chǎng section, the equivalent of the Untitled section at Art Basel in Switzerland. But I spent the days prior to the fair at a venue no less tony with art no less impressive: the Deji Plaza luxury shopping mall in Nanjing, atop which sits the Deji Art Museum.
Deji was a revelation on several levels. As with the West Bund fair, sales at the shopping mall were nothing to sneeze at: $3.5 billion in 2025, which, according to the Economist, may make it the highest-grossing mall in the world. The museum on the top floor was open until midnight, an idea more museums should embrace because it remained popular throughout the night. Its best-loved exhibition, “Nothing Still About Still Lifes,” reopened in October and is one of those great shows that showcases the surprising depths that can be explored through artworks on a single subject: flowers.
Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Paul Cézanne, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Edvard Munch, Henri Rousseau, Andy Warhol, Yayoi Kusama, David Hockney and Anselm Kiefer are all on display, paired with works by numerous Chinese luminaries. The boldfaced names featured in this show from Deji’s extensive and distinguished collection might make it sound straightforward and even dull, but the exhibition is not. Almost everything on display is experimental in some way, an unexpected offering from the artist or an unusual take on this ancient subject. This is announced in the very first room dominated by a monumental Jeff Koons sculpture, Pink Ballerina (2009-2021), composed of delicate lace-like white marble and fresh-cut roses—real ones in deep red. Like the pink of its title, the piece’s intense florality exists mostly in the mind of the viewer.
The blockbusters on display are incredible and expensive, to the point that going through the show can feel like going to a really good preview at an auction house. I found myself especially attracted to the stranger works that display the depths of the collection. The false-looking painterly vegetal mass surrounding yellow buds in Corbeille de Fleurs would have led me to think the work was made in the 2010s or maybe the 1980s, but in fact it was made in 1925 and by Georges Braque of all people.
Not that the blockbusters aren’t just as fun. Renoir’s Fleurs dans un Vase (1878) is displayed alongside the original Majolica vase depicted in the painting. The exhibition rewards deep looking and offers threads to be followed. That first room with the Koons includes two works by Picasso, both titled Vase de Fleurs from 1901 and 1904, that demonstrate, with economy, the transition from his Blue to his Rose period. The threads between West and East are no less satisfying to explore. Wu Dayu’s Untitled 128 (c. 1980) merges the bursts of color found in European modernism and the distinctly Chinese philosophical ideas of inner energy and resonance. Sanyu’s Vase of Flowers in Blue (1956) is meanwhile sui generis. The vase is a sketch compared to the intense details of the flowers, and the background is so rich that it could be an astounding abstract painting without anything else in it.
But each work in this show is a gem. Shanghai’s West Bund Art & Design for 2026 is sure to be as well attended as this past edition, and if you’re in the region, a day trip to Nanjing to see this show at Deji would be time well spent.
Over the past century, there have been countless attempts to assemble a definitive list of essential literature. In recent decades, however, the very idea of a literary canon has become a source of sustained debate, shaped by its historical tendency to be racist, sexist and otherwise exclusionary. A glance at many of these roundups still reveals a striking sameness: overwhelmingly white and male.
That is not to suggest that Joyce, Homer and Dostoyevsky are not foundational reads for literary devotees. Rather, a truly committed reader would do well to recognize that many extraordinary books exist as overlooked peers to the greatest works humanity has produced. With that in mind, what follows is a selection of classics, old and new, that deserve a place in any honest literary canon.
Camille Pissarro, Apple Harvest, 1888. Oil on canvas, overall: 24 x 29 1/8 in. (60.96 x 73.98 cm.), dimensions: 33 1/2 x 38 3/4 x 4 in. (85.09 x 98.425 x 10.16 cm.). Brad Flowers, Dallas Museum of Art, Munger Fund
Their paintings might look like greeting cards from a nursing home, but the Impressionists were 19th century punk rockers. They upended the establishment by presenting what was viewed as rough, unfinished artwork by upstarts bent on subverting tradition. And when the conservative Académie des Beaux-Arts rejected them, this ragtag group of starving artists, including Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Camille Pissarro, Edgar Degas, Paul Cézanne and Berthe Morisot, among others, set up their own group show, a first, and had the audacity to charge admission.
Their work can be seen in the touring show “Impressionism Revolution: Monet to Matisse,” currently at Santa Barbara Museum of Art, alongside the latter’s “Encore: 19th-Century French Art.” The Dallas show will then travel to the Frist Art Museum in Nashville, Toronto’s Art Gallery of Ontario in the summer and, in late 2026, the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts.
“They revolutionized museums and how we encounter exhibitions and who art is made for and who gets to see it,” Dallas Museum of Art curator Nicole Myers tells Observer. “A lot of the things they brought to the table, real innovation at the time, stayed as a proto form of modern art making.”
It’s a short-lived but seminal moment in art history that ran for roughly 10 years, but the stylistic and intellectual offshoots that Impressionism spawned marked a sea change, paving the way for 20th-century art. Beginning with Monet’s Impression, Sunrise (1872), and from which the movement got its name from critic Louis Leroy, Impressionism was maligned by the Académie, a government-run arts organization whose annual Salon show determined which artists might have a prosperous career and which would not.
Popular among the Salon were artists like Jean-Léon Gérôme and Antonin Mercié, academicists who produced Orientalist and historical paintings often depicting scenes from Greek mythology. Impressionist paintings, in both style and subject, were decidedly outré, eschewing tradition-bound standards like a brown wash to prep the canvas as well as the requisite coat of varnish as a final step. They elevated rough subject matter like sex workers, manual laborers and industrialization, presenting them through sketchy brushstrokes unlike the clean application of paint favored by the Salon.
“It was political to them to mount their own show and buck the government in that way. It was a battle they were waging and the stakes were extremely high in France in this period, where no art was not political,” offers Myers, noting how critics like Charles Albert d’Arnoux, known professionally as Bertall, characterized Impressionist works as “awkward attempts, crude in color and tone, without contour and modeling, displaying the most complete disregard for drawing, distance and perspective; colors chucked, so to speak, at random.”
Paul Signac, Mont Saint-Michel, Setting Sun, 1897. Oil on canvas, dimensions: 26 × 32 1/8 in. (66.04 × 81.6 cm.), framed dimensions: 33 × 39 1/4 × 3 1/2 in. (83.82 × 99.7 × 8.89 cm.). Dallas Museum of Art, The Eugene and Margaret McDermott Art Fund, Inc., bequest of Mrs. Eugene McDermott in honor of Bill Booziotis
Banning black from their palette, Impressionists depicted shadow by deepening the color tones of a subject, while pointillists like Pissarro, Signac and Seurat placed disparate colored dots side by side, relying on the viewer’s eyes to mix them. Using color as shadow set the stage for Fauvists like Henri Matisse and André Derain and even Vincent van Gogh, a contemporary who called himself an Impressionist even if no one else did. Most important was their use of rough strokes rather than detailed clarity to indicate a shape or figure, again relying on the eye to draw conclusions based on context.
“Fauvism, the idea of Divisionism (Pointillism), taking color and applying it in separate strokes, the Impressionists were doing that intuitively,” notes Myers. “They began to divorce color and brushstroke from being descriptors. What makes your brain read the whole thing together as an image is about relativity, what’s next to what.”
Gauguin, whose only work in the Santa Barbara show is a familiar Tahitian scene, Under the Pandanus (1891), paints the ground in an otherworldly burgundy. It converses with the show’s second of two works by Edvard Munch titled Thuringian Forest (1904), which depicts an area alongside a forest road as pink and meaty, more like raw flesh than earth.
“Everything was about the external, objective world, but it should be filtered through the imagination, the subjective, the thoughts, the feelings of the artist to translate what they see or feel about their time,” says Myers, noting that Gauguin, who exhibited in 5 of 8 Impressionist shows, sensed something was missing from the movement early on and began exaggerating color and line. “He was the first to bring this idea of a different kind of spirituality, a lyrical quality, something more meaningful but harder to find.”
Four paintings by Piet Mondrian from the first two decades of the 20th century include a farm, a windmill and a castle ruin, as well as a stab at Pointillism in his The Winkel Mill (1908). Among them is no sign of his signature minimalism of primary colored quadrilaterals that characterize later works like New York City and Broadway Boogie Woogie (1942-43). Neither looks anything like its title, yet both capture the spirit and feel of the city.
Piet Mondrian, The Winkel Mill (pointillist version), 1908. Oil on canvas, dimensions: 17 × 13 5/8 in. (43.18 × 34.61 cm.), dimensions: 25 × 21 1/4 × 2 7/8 in. (63.5 × 53.98 × 7.3 cm.). Jerry Ward, Dallas Museum of Art, Foundation for the Arts Collection, gift of the James H. and Lillian Clark Foundation
“For Mondrian, it was this spiritual fuzzy religious association with perfect balance and perfect harmony. He felt that if he could just communicate that through lines and grids, you will feel that perfect harmony with the cosmos,” says Myers. “He thought art should convey what cameras can’t capture, because photography had become perfected. What it can’t do is provide mood or thought through color or a line and touch people. It starts with him being exposed and experimenting with Impressionism and post-Impressionism and breaking down these cornerstones of images.”
Most of the Impressionists died before the turn of the century and many didn’t live to see World War I. But Monet, the man who started it all, lived until 1926. While it’s common for artists to do their best work in their youth or prime of life, Monet’s most prescient work came later. The show includes his pre-Impressionist still life Tea Service (1872), highlighting the artist’s technical mastery, as well as two from his decades-long series of waterlilies, which, more than any body of work, best illustrates the transition from Impressionism to Modernism.
The Water Lily Pond (Clouds) (1903) shows the sky reflected in the pond’s surface, disrupted by floating lilies. The far bank of the pond is seen at the top of the frame, helping to orient the viewer (although one critic thought the image was upside down when he saw the sky and clouds reflected in the water). Water Lilies (1908) is a circular composition that has no orienting point. It’s a mass of blue and green, the sky and trees reflected in the pond, with purple patches depicting lilies. It’s not an abstract work but, like the lily paintings that follow, the emphasis is on color and light less on subject matter.
“For Monet, the unifier was the desire to paint light and how it’s interacting with different surfaces,” says Myers. “The circular one, you only have light dancing on the surface of the water or glinting off the plants down below. It is incredibly abstract.”
The other name in the title of the show is Matisse, whose first painting Books and Candle (1890) is the opposite of Impressionism in a way that would have tickled the traditionalist Salon. His one work on display here, Still Life: Bouquet and Compotier (1924), illustrates a drastic departure from his early work, incorporating ideas sprung from Impressionism that stayed with him through his later abstract works before his death in 1954.
“We take it for granted today because it is foundational, the building blocks they set up for different aspects of their production, from color theory to moving away from a kind of illusionistic style, using brushwork to convey more than what something looks like,” Myers concludes. “Feeling and mood, an optical sensation, these are things that artists today are still working with and absorbing.”
Vincent van Gogh, Sheaves of Wheat, 1890. Oil on canvas, dimensions: 20 × 40 in. (50.8 × 101.6 cm.), dimensions: 31 3/8 × 51 1/8 × 5 1/4 in. (79.69 × 129.86 × 13.34 cm.). Ira Schrank, Dallas Museum of Art, The Wendy and Emery Reves Collection
“Eva Helene Pade: Søgelys” is at Thaddaeus Ropac in London through December 20, 2025. Courtesy Thaddaeus Ropac gallery, London · Paris · Salzburg · Milan · Seoul . Photo: Eva Herzog
Hauntingly beautiful… revelatory: these are the adjectives that come to mind when staring at Eva Helene Pade’s paintings. Amorphous bodies move across the canvas like a choreography of spectral dancers, dynamically taking over the elegant architecture of Thaddaeus Ropac’s gallery in London. It’s a spectacle of erotic energy, where the power of attraction and seduction of the femme fatale finds its stage, manifesting through moody, dramatic atmospheres shaped by color sensations and instinctive emotional reactions.
Following the Danish-born, Paris-based artist’s institutional debut at ARKEN Museum of Contemporary Art in Denmark earlier this year and multiple new auction records set at auction (the latest at Sotheby’s Hong Kong in 2024, when A Story to Be Told #14 (2021) sold for $123,417) the exhibition “Søgelys” (on view through December 20, 2025) brings together a new group of paintings in which Eva Helene Pade continues to explore the violent and seductive forces that exist between bodies in space. The body is examined here as both a medium and a filter, a porous psychical, cognitive and emotional membrane through which we negotiate our interactions and relationships with others. Painting becomes a vehicle for a continuous exercise of female embodiment and disembodiment, creating both a dance and a tension that unfolds within the canvas and the surrounding space. “Color is crucial for me; it’s emotional and psychological,” she tells Observer. “The palette often defines the atmosphere of a work before the figures even appear.”
Eva Helene Pade. Courtesy of Thaddeus Ropac.
Pade turns the canvas into a living stage where color and movement try to spontaneously channel and translate the prelinguistic expressions of the human psyche. Her process is deeply intuitive: the figures emerge from the act of painting itself, beginning with an abstract field and moving through a fluid process of identification and alienation. “I start drawing figures into it. At first, they appear as little blobs, and gradually I begin carving them out until the forms start taking shape, only to change again and become something else entirely,” she says. Pade also tunes herself to rhythm, listening to classical music to enter an inner world of narratives and transforming its prelinguistic storytelling into a tool to address universal questions about the human condition.
“I work very instinctively, letting intuition lead. Sometimes it fails; sometimes it surprises me. I rely on that tension,” she says, acknowledging how her influences have shifted over time, though certain painters have always remained with her. The psychological charge of her work recalls the emotional and psychological layering of artists such as Edvard Munch, Amber Wellmann, Nicolas de Staël, Cecily Brown, Marlene Dumas and Miriam Cahn, as well as older masters like Rodin and Rubens, who reveal how much emotion can be conveyed through a gesture or pose.
Still, despite this intuitive channeling through pigment and color, Pade’s works are never autobiographical portraits; they’re personal but not literal. “I don’t paint people from my life, nor do I use photographic references. They’re intuitive, almost dreamlike—images that emerge and shift as I work,” she explains.
Like monsters or ghosts reemerging from the subconscious, these spectral presences probe the porous diaphragm between the inner and outer world, a boundary that painting can reveal. “I’ve always been drawn to painting. I began drawing as a means to process both external reality and my inner world,” Pade says. She never had strict academic training, so she taught herself anatomy, proportion and form, which may be why her figures appear slightly off, existing within her own visual logic. “That wonkiness has become my language.”
In her debut show with the gallery, Pade’s monumental and small-scale canvases are suspended on floor-to-ceiling metal posts, set away from the walls to create dynamic spatial configurations. Courtesy Thaddaeus Ropac gallery, London · Paris · Salzburg · Milan · Seoul . Photo: Eva Herzog
The canvas becomes the stage where the “shadow,” the “removed,” is confronted in a distinctly Freudian and Jungian sense. “I keep molding the surface, working into the face, pulling new elements out of the shadows that I hadn’t noticed before,” Pade confirms. “A dark color might form a symbol or pattern, which I then push back into the composition.” It’s a long, layered process that involves as much waiting and letting the paint dry as it does discovery and transformation.
Still, it’s immediately apparent upon entering the show that this new body of work engages with femininity, sensuality and the position of the female body in space. Painting is for Pade a means of exploring the relationship between self and surroundings, how this dynamic subtly defines and redefines identity between body and soul, between the one and the many. Her figures, often expressionless and featureless, convey emotion through gesture and contortion, resonating with a universality that transcends any autobiographical reading.
What she paints is a potentially cacophonous orchestra of sensations and voices, a confrontation with the chaos of humanity in which the self is continually dissolved and rediscovered. Pade began painting crowds during lockdown, reflecting the strange collective isolation of that time. “They’re images of people together, but not necessarily about any specific moment. They’re more like metaphors of time itself.”
There is always a narrative in her paintings, but it remains open-ended. It’s the drama of human existence in dialogue with the external world that Pade paints. “I don’t want to trap the viewer in a single message. It’s more like a free exploration on the canvas: an emotional and physical response that builds its own logic,” she says.
Once the paintings are presented outside of the studio, they gain new context from the space and from the people who encounter them. In London, Pade wanted to choreograph her own visual rhythm, thinking about how the paintings could occupy the space almost like stage sets. “The exhibition space was so unconventional that I had to respond directly to its quirks—the staircase, the unusual angles—so I began playing with composition almost like orchestration,” she explains. “It all made sense because the project was inspired by a ballet, so I leaned into that theatricality, treating the canvases like backdrops.”
Pade doesn’t have a background in theater but she clearly thinks compositionally, almost like a stage director. The paintings are intentionally life-sized so the figures stand in direct relation to the viewer’s body as they float and dance in these hazy atmospheres, much like in a nightclub or a theater. “I want the experience to be physical, to break the passive distance between viewer and painting.”
Although the works are two-dimensional, they feel animated by their dense atmospheres, where bodies flicker between visibility and occlusion, partially veiled by soft billows of smoke or lit from within by a flaming glow or radiant beams of light. Lifting the paintings off the wall and letting them float through the space isn’t a gimmick; it heightens this emotional rhythm. “For these crowd scenes, it made sense. The figures seem to hover or drift in space, and the installation amplifies that effect,” she notes.
For Pade, the human body is part of a primal, instinctive language, like a brushstroke, a gesture or a dance. Courtesy Thaddaeus Ropac gallery, London · Paris · Salzburg · Milan · Seoul . Photo: Eva Herzog
While staging the paintings outside her studio, she realized that by not hanging them flat on the wall the viewer could see their backs—the wooden stretchers, sketches and raw marks behind the surface. They became living metaphors for the relationship between inner world and external space. “I liked that transparency, that glimpse into process. Light passed through them in interesting ways, giving them a smoldering depth,” she acknowledges. “When people walked around, the paintings seemed to move with them. It became immersive. You could almost walk into the composition.”
In the space, the unified spectral presences of Pade’s choreography found their living essence again, becoming interlocutors with the viewers. And if painting is, first of all, an open conversation, an expansive narrative field where everyone can identify and project their own meanings, the universal power of connection offered by Eva Helene Pade’s painterly storytelling and its endless variations is proof of how her art can still evolve. Even the “failed” works contribute to her evolution, as painting remains for her both a necessity and an urgency, a means to confront and process the multifaceted reality of the world. “You learn technique, rhythm and restraint from them.”
The potentially continuous evolution of the canvases on view reveals Pade’s enduring excitement for painting. “I don’t plan big conceptual changes. It evolves organically with each new piece,” she reflects. “Some paintings fail; I destroy or hide them if they don’t resonate. I think it’s crucial to be self-critical. A work that doesn’t move me won’t move anyone else.”
Installed in the round, fragments of Pade’s images overlap so that characters appear to flit from one scene to another, vanishing and then recurring as in dreams. Courtesy Thaddaeus Ropac gallery, London · Paris · Salzburg · Milan · Seoul . Photo: Eva Herzog
“The meat and bones in my practice is somewhere between texture and storytelling,” artist Nicole Eisenmanonce said. A New York Times critic called her “Kafka with a paintbrush, mindful of the nightmares of history and partial to somber, social-realist colors.”
The artist’s first exhibition at Hauser & Wirth in Paris, titled “with, and, of, on Sculpture,” explores the multiplicity of her output, from a monumentally scaled cortège to accessible line drawings. In tandem, a major survey exhibition, “Nicole Eisenman: What Happened“—organized by Museum Brandhorst and Whitechapel Gallery—is on view until September 22 at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, spanning 100 works produced from 1992 to today.
It’s not Eisenman’s first outing in France. A show of her paintings, juxtaposed alongside work by Edvard Munch and Käthe Kollwitz, was displayed at the Fondation Vincent Van Gogh in Arles in 2022: “Heads, Kisses, Battles.” (The artist has spoken admiringly of Van Gogh’s wildly gestural canvases: “You can look at Van Gogh’s paint marks and almost shake his hand.”)
During a press visit at the Parisian Hauser & Wirth earlier this month, Eisenman explained that she works between two Brooklyn-based studios, for painting and sculpture respectively, reflecting her “bifurcated practice.” The spaces are a seven-minute bike ride apart, but she is not zig-zagging between them: “When I’m making paintings, I don’t tend to go to the sculpture studio for six, eight months. And then when I’m making sculpture, the paintings go into the attic and I lock the door and I don’t pay attention to that. It goes back and forth, usually six or eight months on, flip-flopping.”
Directly greeting the visitor as they step into Hauser & Wirth’s ground floor is Archangel (The Visitors), an imposing painting that Eisenman started last summer. “It’s gone through a few iterations before arriving at this one. And I’m not sure I’m totally done with it either—there may be more.” The canvas depicts the opening of an exhibition of sculptures, with, overhead, a “military looking animal hanging down, which is inspired by a sculpture that I’ve been obsessed with for a very long time… by two Dada artists called [John] Heartfield and [Rudolf] Schlichter.”
Those artists showed Prussian Archangel, a pig-headed mannequin in a World War I outfit suspended from the ceiling, at the First International Dada Fair in Berlin in 1920. As fascist politics rise—France is still reeling from the omnipresence of the far right in the recent European elections, and a snap election awaits yet—the painting is a queasy harbinger of what looms.
The figures in Archangel (The Visitors), milling between sculptures, feature people the artist knows and people she made up; the visitors in the rear of the painting entering the space were inspired by attendees of the Degenerate Art exhibition, a show masterminded by Adolf Ziegler and the Nazi Party in Munich in 1937. Eisenman stated: “The painting acts as a kind of parentheses of this period between the Dada art show and the Degenerate Art show—which took much of that work and reframed it as degenerate.”
Neighboring this unsettling work is Eisenman’s partial but still large-scale installation Procession (2019), which premiered in an even larger form at the 2019 Whitney Biennial. (Upstairs, a preparatory study for the installation is on view.) It was part of a colossal composition sprawled across a terrace at the Whitney, inspired by mass protests. From the excerpt on view here, which cuts across the entire ground floor, Eisenman remarked that the leader’s fists may be in the air, but it’s “not such a strong fist—kind of a tired fist that needs help.”
However, she noted that “it’s interesting for me to see this piece taken out of that grouping… it becomes less about the protests and a little bit more personal—how couples behave.” Here, she laughed. “At some point, you have to pull the other person along, or the other person’s a weight… persevering and slogging through, trudging together.”
Nearby are bright, much less representational paintings, Shape Driven Head 1-3, which Eisenman links, process-wise, as hewing more closely to her sculptural practice. She cited John Chamberlain as a meaningful equivalent: “how he makes pieces of metal smushed together—I think about this kind of process. With painting, it’s a matter of layering: of addition and subtraction.”
This is very different from how she created Archangel (The Visitors), where “there’s really a lot of plotting. It’s related to a process that’s probably more like a fiction writer, how a fiction writer would construct a narrative.” She discussed how a preparatory collage study, on view upstairs, was helpful and formative in graphing that plot: “I can move things around and decide what’s where. It’s kind of like an analog version of Photoshop, where you can have things move around and change sizes without having to redraw the whole thing every time. It’s like a really utilitarian drawing.”
One floor up, a variety of media are on display, everything from an artist’s book called “Alt Faces,” to a plaster bust of faux Gallic sophistication (Dame Francaise Chic), to a bronze sculpture (Mad Cat) topped with a helmet made from the seat of a custom Herman Miller chair, to an oil painting announcing raw squiggly CUBIST FEMALE INNARDS in all caps, to an amusing pencil drawing about life in Eisenman’s studio (an orbit of cartoon bursts including a lightbulb of insight, demarcations for internet breaks and a despondent list of NO IDEAS, BAD IDEAS, DUMB IDEAS and OLD IDEAS).
Eisenman’s ability to make at once uncanny sculptures, iconographic drawings and politically powerful paintings yields a complex ensemble. Time and again, she is a maestro at mixing malaise and playfulness and astute observations about human fallibility.
