Monday, November 2, 2026

Frederic Church in Jamaica

Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

Oct. 30 through Feb. 15, 2027

This fall, Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum will present “Frederic Church in Jamaica,” featuring the artist’s rarely exhibited sketches from his 1865 travels to Jamaica. On view Friday, Oct. 30, through Monday, Feb. 15, 2027, the exhibition brings together over 60 works documenting Jamaica’s plant life and landscapes in detailed observational studies, framed within Church’s personal biography, grieving the loss of his two young children, and the wider context of a society and environment under colonial rule. Celebrating the 200th anniversary of Church’s birth, the exhibition draws from Cooper Hewitt’s holdings of over 2,000 of the artists’ oil studies and graphite sketches—the largest collection of Church works in the world.

“‘Frederic Church in Jamaica’ offers a window into the creative process of one of America’s most influential artists through oil studies and ‘en plein air’ sketches, which have rarely—if ever—been publicly exhibited,” said Caitlin Condell, curator and head of Drawings, Prints & Graphic Design at Cooper Hewitt. “The 200th anniversary of Church’s birth is an ideal moment for a celebration of the artist’s extraordinary work and a reinterpretation of these objects in the context of Jamaican history. These intimate drawings, made during a period of intense grief, have a powerful resonance in our contemporary moment.”

Very detailed painted botanical sketch of three palm trees growing on a steep hillside in Jamaica. — “Palm Trees,” June 1865; Frederic Edwin Church (American, 1826-1900); Oil and graphite on paperboard; H x W: 30.3 × 50.7 cm (11 15/16 × 19 15/16 in.); Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum; Gift of Louis P. Church, 1917-4-743-c.

Painted sketch of a lone tree, half-framed to feature mostly its trunk and the leaves and vines that adorn it. — Tree with Vines, May 1865 Frederic Edwin Church (American, 1826-1900) Oil and graphite on paperboard H x W: 30.4 × 23 cm (11 15/16 × 9 1/16 in.) Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum Gift of Louis P. Church, 1917-4-342-a

Painted sketch of stormy valley landscape. In the foreground, small hills covered in vegetation are in shadow. — Blue Mountains near Kingston, May 1865 Frederic Edwin Church (American, 1826-1900) Oil and graphite on paperboard H x W: 18.2 × 35.9 cm (7 3/16 × 14 1/8 in.) Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum Gift of Louis P. Church, 1917-4-354-c

Highly detailed painted sketch of a mountain valley in Jamaica. — Mountain Valley, 1865 Frederic Edwin Church (American, 1826-1900) Oil and graphite on paperboard H x W: 21.8 × 30.2 cm (8 9/16 × 11 7/8 in.) Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum Gift of Louis P. Church, 1917-4-342-b

Detailed painted sketch of the top of a palm tree. — Tree Fern, 1865 Frederic Edwin Church (American, 1826-1900) Oil and graphite on paperboard H x W: 30.3 × 32.2 cm (11 15/16 × 12 11/16 in.) Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum Gift of Louis P. Church, 1917-4-674-a

Painted detail sketch of a short palm tree centered against a brown toned interior of a jungle. — Thatch Palm, May 1865 Frederic Edwin Church (American, 1826-1900) Oil and graphite on paperboard H x W: 25.4 × 27.9 cm (10 × 11 in.) Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum Gift of Louis P. Church, 1917-4-672-a

Detailed painted sketch of a bright green lizard with yellow eyes climbing a lightly sketched brown and grey background. — A Lizard, June 1865 Frederic Edwin Church (American, 1826-1900) Oil and graphite on paperboard H x W: 30.5 × 14.8 cm (12 × 5 13/16 in.) Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum Gift of Louis P. Church, 1917-4-712-b

Detailed painted sketch showing a view of a large, diagonally-growing tree in a dense rainforest. — Rainforest, 1865 Frederic Edwin Church (American, 1826-1900) Oil and graphite on paperboard H x W: 30.5 × 51 cm (12 × 20 1/16 in.) Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum Gift of Louis P. Church, 1917-4-678-b

Botanical study sketches showing views of four different plants in Jamaica. — Botanical Sketches, July 1865 Frederic Edwin Church (American, 1826-1900) Graphite on wove paper H x W: 11.5 × 19.9 cm (4 1/2 × 7 13/16 in.) Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum Gift of Louis P. Church, 1917-4-413

Detailed graphic sketch drawing of tree ensnared in a parasitic vine. — Parasite Vine and Palm Plant, June 1865 Frederic Edwin Church (American, 1826-1900) Graphite and gouache on wove paper H x W: 44.3 × 27.2 cm (17 7/16 × 10 11/16 in.) Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum Gift of Louis P. Church, 1917-4-11-a

Loosely sketched drawing of nighttime scene with a cluster of bamboo trees on left, and figure studies on the right. — Moonlight Bamboo and Figure Sketches, Kingston, July 1865 Frederic Edwin Church (American, 1826-1900) Graphite on wove paper H x W: 11.5 × 19.8 cm (4 1/2 × 7 13/16 in.) Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum Gift of Louis P. Church, 1917-4-684

Detailed pencil sketch of a fern leaves, the studies overlapping one another to create a cluster. — Botanical Sketch of Ferns, August 1865 Frederic Edwin Church (American, 1826-1900) Graphite on wove paper H x W: 11.5 × 19.8 cm (4 1/2 × 7 13/16 in.) Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum Gift of Louis P. Church, 1917-4-431-b

Acclaimed for his monumental and astonishingly detailed landscape paintings, Church (American, 1826–1900) was an intrepid traveler and regularly journeyed around the globe seeking inspiration for his pictures. However, his April 1865 trip to Jamaica with his wife, Isabel, was in search of emotional and spiritual refuge, following the recent deaths of their two young children from diphtheria. Every day for five months, Church trekked on foot and by horse documenting the island’s topography and plant life and capturing dramatic moments of light and weather. Created during the artist’s private anguish and the public turmoil engulfing the country, where Black Jamaicans lived in extreme poverty under British colonial rule, the breathtaking sketches attest to the expressive and healing power of drawing from nature and the complexity of memory imbued in the land.

Whether executed in moments or over the course of hours, the sketches on view reveal Church’s extraordinary artistic range. The picturesque, atmospheric drawings and oil studies reflect his aspiration to accurately record details of light, color and form, but also the emotional experience of a place or scene. His graphite sketches are frequently annotated with brief notations that are both informative and poetic.

The exhibition will offer important historical context and surface the voices of Black Jamaicans, including Paul Bogle and George William Gordon, who actively addressed political tensions in the island. On view will be reproductions of period photographs (some collected by Church and some from the National Library of Jamaica), as well as rare books from Smithsonian Libraries and Archives.

Throughout the span of the exhibition, a dynamic lineup of public programs will draw in contemporary perspectives to reflect on Church’s career and the relevance of his drawings today, the economic and climate legacy of Jamaica, and the significance of observation and drawing through time. On Thursday, Nov. 12, Victoria Johnson, author of the 2026 Church biography, Glorious Country, will present an illustrated lecture that places Church within the broader global context of his time. Additional programming includes a hands-on workshop with the Smithsonian’s botanical illustrator, Alice Tangerini, highlighting the flora native to Jamaica through the practice of drawing specimens.

“Frederic Church in Jamaica” is organized by Caitlin Condell, curator and head of Drawings, Prints & Graphic Design, with Mackenzie Jones, collections assistant.

The Photography Collection: Man Ray: Kiki

The Museum Ludwig

October 31, 2026 – June 13, 2027

The Museum Ludwig’s photography collection comprises approximately 70,000 works, spanning from the early days of photography in the early 19th century to the present day. In our photography galleries, we regularly curate exhibitions featuring selected themes and photographers.

This presentation centers on Man Ray’s photograph Le Violon d’Ingres (1924), a nude showing the singer, actress, and painter Alice Prin – known as Kiki de Montparnasse (1901–1953) – from the back. Inspired by works of the neoclassical painter Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Man Ray transposes the motif into the twentieth century: in the darkroom, he used a stencil to add the f-holes of a violin to Kiki’s back so that her body becomes the resonator of a string instrument – an allusion to Ingres’ passion for playing the violin. The print on display at the Museum Ludwig is from the collection of L. Fritz and Renate Gruber and is a hand-signed reproduction of the version that made headlines in 2022 as the most expensive photograph ever sold at auction. The exhibition sheds light on the making and reception of this Surrealist icon.

Kiki grew up in poverty and earned a meagre living in Paris as a “singer, actress, painter, Queen of Montparnasse,” as the inscription on her grave states. Since her earliest youth, she also worked as a painter’s model. In 1921 she met the American painter and photographer Man Ray. They became a couple and in the eight years they were together Man Ray repeatedly took her picture, often as a nude or in closeup. Of the resulting pictures, Le Violon d’Ingres is among the most famous.

There are two original versions of Le Violon d’Ingres. For the first, Man Ray painted the f-holes onto the print. This is the picture that André Breton published in the Surrealist magazine Littérature in 1924 and that is now held by the Centre Pompidou in Paris. For the second version he took a different approach. He made a stencil of the sound holes and used it in the darkroom, combined with the negative of the main image, to make a photogram. The Museum Ludwig print is a later reproduction derived from this second original version and came to the museum with the collection of L. Fritz and Renate Gruber in 1977. Man Ray hand-signed the print with “E.A. Man Ray”. E.A. stands for épreuve d'artiste, an artist’s print, making it especially interesting to collectors.

How many prints of Man Ray’s picture exist is a matter of research. Only a few are known; the Museum Ludwig copy is the focus of this exhibition. Its production and reception offer insights not only into Surrealist photography, but also into the development of the photography market and the recognition of Man Ray as a photographic artist, even though he preferred, right up to his death in 1976, to be known as a painter – like Ingres.

Alongside Le Violon d'Ingres and related materials from the Museum Ludwig’s Man Ray – L. Fritz Gruber Archive, the exhibition also shows other photographs of Alice Prin taken by Man Ray, as well as historical images and sound recordings of the sitter.

Yilmaz Dziewior, director of the Museum Ludwig: “The Museum Ludwig holds over a hundred photographs, paintings, and objects by Man Ray, as well as extensive archive materials. Le Violon d’Ingres is among the best-known works in the history of art and photography, and I am very glad to give our visitors the chance to take a deep dive into its making and reception thanks to this focused exhibition. The show also recalls Man Ray’s decades-long association with the collectors L. Fritz and Renate Gruber, and their later links with the Museum Ludwig. Le Violon d’Ingres is one of the works that laid the foundations for the Museum Ludwig’s photography collection in 1977.”

Curator: Miriam Szwast

Man Ray, Kiki, Violon d’Ingres, 1924, Gelatinesilberpapier, Montage 38,6 x 30 cm, Museum Ludwig, Köln, Repro: Historisches Archiv der Stadt Köln mit Rheinischem Bildarchiv, © Man Ray 2015 Trust / VG Bild-Kunst, 2026

Man Ray, Kiki, 1926, Gelatinesilberpapier 23,2 x 17,9 cm, Ankauf Gruber 1977, Museum Ludwig, Köln, Repro: Historisches Archiv mit Rheinischem Bildarchiv / Rolf Zimmermann, © Man Ray 2015 Trust / VG Bild-Kunst, 2026

Man Ray, Kiki, 1925, Kontaktabzug 10,5 x 7,3 cm, Ankauf Gruber mit Unterstützung der Kulturstiftung der Länder und der Kunststiftung NRW 2012, Museum Ludwig, Köln, Repro: Historisches Archiv mit Rheinischem Bildarchiv

Man Ray, Selbstporträt mit Kamera, 1932, Gelatinesilberpapier, Print 20,4 x 15,7 cm, Schenkung Gruber 1985, Museum Ludwig, Köln Repro: Historisches Archiv mit Rheinischem Bildarchiv, © Man Ray 2015 Trust / VG Bild-Kunst, 2026

Sunday, November 1, 2026

Sotheby's The Now and Contemporary Evening Auction Live Auction: 16 November 2026

The Now and Contemporary Evening Auction in November 2026 will feature artworks which capture the paradigmatic artistic shifts of the latter half of the 20th century through to the present. Beginning with Postwar abstraction and moving through Minimalism and Pop into the critical postmodern inquiries of the 1980s through to today, these radical new modes of art-making fundamentally altered the course of art history. Spotlighting these developments within a unified platform, the masterworks of The Now and Contemporary Evening Auction call into focus the plurality of visions, identities and artistic innovations that have reshaped the trajectory of art history as we know it. These works and more will be viewable at Sotheby’s New York this November.

Browse All Lots

Beginning this November, Sotheby’s will offer some 50 works from the exceptional collection of Richard (“Dick”) and the late Elizabeth (“Betty”) Hedreen. Devoted philanthropists, active supporters of their native Seattle and Washington State, and passionate collectors for six decades, the Hedreens can rightly be considered pioneers, who were among the very first to place considerable emphasis on the visual and intellectual dialogues inherent in juxtaposing art from across the ages, assembling a collection that spans the 15th century to the present day.

The collection will be led by 11 Contemporary masterworks from Sam Francis, to Roy Lichtenstein, to Cecily Brown. This will be offered alongside a broad range of other works in a variety of media across The New York Sales this November, followed by a dedicated Old Masters auction in New York, February 2027.

View 1 of Lot 4: Reflections on “Painter and Model”

Type: lot
Roy Lichtenstein
Reflections on “Painter and Model”
Estimate: 20,000,000 – 30,000,000 USD

Type: lot
Cecily Brown
Untitled (Shipwreck)
Estimate: 7,000,000 – 10,000,000 USD

View 1 of Lot 7: Towards Disappearance I

Type: lot
Sam Francis
Towards Disappearance I
Estimate: 15,000,000 – 20,000,000 USD

View 1 of Lot 9: Water...Soft Banks and a Window (Untitled VIII)

Type: lot
Willem de Kooning
Water...Soft Banks and a Window (Untitled VIII)
Estimate: 20,000,000 – 30,000,000 USD

View 1 of Lot 3: Japanese Garden with Moon and Stars

Type: lot
Jonas Wood
Japanese Garden with Moon and Stars
Estimate: 3,000,000 – 5,000,000 USD

For Lenore and Bernard Greenberg, art in every form was part of their lives. Lenore served as a board president of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and Bernard was a founder and chairman of the LA Opera, and together they were devoted supporters of the LA Philharmonic as well as the Public Library. For Lennie and Bernie, as they were familiarly known, art held the inimitable power to transform a community. Through historic gifts, measured leadership, and a singular philanthropic spirit, the Greenbergs helped shape Los Angeles: its sound, its cultural landscape, its civic institutions, and collective imagination. As they upheld Los Angeles’ public arts and culture, so, too, did they build a collection of brilliant, timeless rigor to be enjoyed in the privacy of their home. These works take center stage this November at Sotheby's.

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View 1 of Lot 106: Suzhou, Before and After

Type: lot
Brice Marden
Suzhou, Before and After
Estimate: 6,000,000 – 8,000,000 USD

View 1 of Lot 107: White Relief with Black II

Type: lot
Ellsworth Kelly
White Relief with Black II
Estimate: 1,800,000 – 2,500,000 USD

Type: lot
Martin Puryear
Yearn
Estimate: 500,000 – 700,000 USD

Type: lot
Agnes Martin
Desert
Estimate: 6,000,000 – 8,000,000 USD

Type: lot
Kelpie
Estimate: 800,000 – 1,200,000 USD

This May, Sotheby's is thrilled to offer a major Flowers by Andy Warhol. Andy Warhol’s Flowers is an exceptionally rare and preeminent example of one of the artist’s most celebrated and iconic series. One of only seven 48-by-48-inch flower paintings on a stark white background, Flowers is one of the most visually distilled and desirable works from a series that represents a decisive moment in Warhol’s formal and conceptual engagement with mass culture and art history; thus, the present work represents one of the clearest assertions of Warhol's pop authority.

Crowd of people at the opening of the Art Museum of South Texas in Dallas featuring Andy Warhol's Flowers. Photo by Jim Olive/WWD/Penske Media via Getty Images. Art © 2026 Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Begun in 1964 and finished in 1965, only a year after Warhol’s debut exhibition at the Leo Castelli Gallery, the present work encapsulates the singularity of Warhol’s practice and career; made using his quintessential appropriation of mass-produced imagery, it is conceptually daring in its lifting of preexisting source material and formally striking in both its harmonic spatial balance and brilliant chromatic tension.

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Andy Warhol
Flowers
Estimate: 10,000,000 – 15,000,000 USD

In 1961, just a few years after moving to the United States, Kusama would participate in the Whitney’s 1961 Annual Exhibition of contemporary sculpture and painting. Alongside peers from the New York School, Kusama was here contextualized at the fore of the American avant-garde, along with artists such as Joan Mitchell, Helen Frankenthaler, Robert Rauschenberg, Georgia O’Keeffe, and Philip Guston. Each artist presented an artwork, and the present work was Kusama’s.

Among the earliest, largest, and most significant examples from the series, notably distinguished for its inclusion in one of Kusama’s earliest institutional presentations in the United States at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1961, No. 3P.B. marks both a point of genesis and a concluding statement: a technique mastered early yet endlessly generative, a visual language and ideological thesis fecund with reinventive possibility. The present work stands as one of the earliest mature Infinity Nets, in which Kusama’s signature painterly mode reaches its fullest evolution.