Issue 8
September 2019

Art history is a beautiful mess. This edition of Frieze Masters magazine celebrates its diversity. Rebecca Hawcroft looks at the Bauhaus graduates who emigrated to Australia; Tim Smith-Laing recounts the colourful history of Courbet’s scandalous 1866 painting L’Origine du Monde; Rianna Jade Parker time-travels to Black Bloomsbury; Caroline Marciniak looks at the enduring connection between art and the occult; Flavia Frigeri tells the origin story of Italian Pop Art; Juliet Jacques writes about the extraordinarily intimate photographs Lisetta Carmi took of her friends in the trans community in Genoa in the 1960s; Tom Jeffreys discusses the significance of the birch tree to Russian art; and George Upton is mesmerized by a mysterious self-portrait by Sofonisba Anguissola – one of the few Renaissance women mentioned by Giorgio Vasari in his Lives.



Plus, 24 artists – including Alvaro Barrington, Linder and Valeska Soares – nominate historical works of art that have inspired them. And answering our questionnaire is Anna Coliva, director of Galleria Borghese in Rome.

From this issue

Juliet Jacques profiles the photographer Lisetta Carmi who sensitively documented the lives of her friends

BY Juliet Jacques |

Sofonisba Anguissola’s ‘Self-Portrait with Bernardino Campi’ literally and metonymically reveals the hand of the artist

BY George Upton |

How did the design school impact on the Antipodes?

BY Rebecca Hawcroft |

The director of Rome’s Galleria Borghese on her earliest memories of art museums and the mystery of Caravaggio

BY Anna Coliva |

The movement that is traditionally understood as white and privileged was more racially mixed than is commonly accepted

BY Rianna Jade Parker |

Was there anything the Renaissance freewheeler couldn’t do?

BY Amy Sherlock |

Osei Bonsu interviews the artist about the evolution of her thinking

BY Osei Bonsu |

The influence of Isaac Levitan’s 1897 painting Spring, High Water on 20th-century film

BY Tom Jeffreys |

From the recent opening of the Villa Cerruti to Charleston’s new gallery, idiosyncratic museums and collections are flourishing

BY Rosanna McLaughlin |

Flavia Frigeri discusses a very Roman take on modernism

BY Flavia Frigeri |

Contemporary art’s resurgence of interest in magic has a powerful art-historical precedent

BY Caroline Marciniak |

How radical art bloomed at Dartington, West Dean and Grizedale 

BY Jessica Lack |

Re-assessing the 19th-century artist, critic and historian’s contemporary relevance on the bicentenary of his birth

BY Rachel Dickinson |