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.

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From this issue

Frieze Masters , One Takes
In Pictures: The Intimate Lives of Genoa’s 1960s Trans Community

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

BY Juliet Jacques |
Features , Frieze Masters
Who Commissioned the 19th Century’s Most Notorious Painting?

The origins of Gustave Courbet’s ‘Origin of the World’

BY Tim Smith-Laing |
Frieze Masters , One Takes
A Renaissance Joke: What a 500-Year-Old Self-Portrait Reveals

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

BY George Upton |
Features , Frieze Masters
Home and Away: The Bauhaus in Australia

How did the design school impact on the Antipodes?

BY Rebecca Hawcroft |
Frieze Masters , Interviews
Anna Coliva: Which Artist From the Past Would You Like to Meet?

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

BY Anna Coliva |
Frieze Masters , One Takes
Black in Bloomsbury: What Duncan Grant’s Portrait of Patrick Nelson Reveals

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

BY Rianna Jade Parker |
Frieze Masters , One Takes
Did Leonardo da Vinci Invent the Bicycle?

Was there anything the Renaissance freewheeler couldn’t do?

BY Amy Sherlock |
Frieze Masters , Interviews
50 Years of Art and Activism: An Interview with Howardena Pindell

Osei Bonsu interviews the artist about the evolution of her thinking

BY Osei Bonsu |
Frieze Masters , One Takes
The Most Popular Tree in Russian Art

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

BY Tom Jeffreys |
Frieze Masters , Opinion
The Renaissance of the House Museum

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

BY Rosanna McLaughlin |
Frieze Masters , Opinion
Piazza del Pop! Did Italian Pop Art Actually Exist?

Flavia Frigeri discusses a very Roman take on modernism

BY Flavia Frigeri |
Features , Frieze Masters
Wicked! Modern Art’s Interest in the Occult

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

BY Caroline Marciniak |
Frieze Masters , Opinion
The Avant Gardens of the English Countryside

How radical art bloomed at Dartington, West Dean and Grizedale 

BY Jessica Lack |
Frieze Masters , Opinion
Victorian Visionary: Why Is Ruskin Still Relevant?

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

BY Rachel Dickinson |