Women: Subject and Object
Jill Newhouse Gallery, New York
October 14 – November 21, 2025
Jill Newhouse Gallery presents works on paper and sculpture from 1850-2025 depicting images of women. Curated by Jovana Stokic, the show includes the work of important historical artists such as Jean-François Millet, Camille Pissarro, Picasso, Rodin, and Edouard Vuillard alongside the works of contemporary artists such as Kiki Smith, Cecily Brown, and Elizabeth Peyton.
“…the figure of woman is never singular. Women emerge as subjects even when cast as objects, each image carrying its own story of intimacy, desire, archetype, or resistance. Together, these works form not a single history but a constellation of intimacies, allegories, eroticisms, and subversions, converging in the doubleness that keeps the feminine figure central to how art imagines—and reimagines—the act of looking."- Curator Jovana Stokic, Ph.D.
The show begins historically with J.F. Millet’s emotionally observed 1857 pastel of a female laborer, a Normandy milkmaid (one of the figures that inspired Van Gogh’s early figure works) ennobled by her daily toil. Camille Pissarro’s late 1880s drawing, so tenderly depicted, portrays a young girl seemingly unaware of being seen.
Vuillard’s early watercolor done in the 1890s has a quality of the artist intruding on the model, who is seen from behind. Pierre Bonnard’s 1914 sketch of his muse and wife Marthe is a study for an oil painting, and shows an image of a woman who was as addicted to bathing as Bonnard was to painting her image.
Mid-twentieth century is represented by Picasso’s 1945 drawing of his soon to be ex-lover Dora Maar, to whom he gifted the sheet with the acerbic dedication “Dora Maar Grande Peintre.” The drawing is mounted to a flyleaf of a play Picasso had written called Le désir attrapé par la queue (Desire Caught by the Tail), which was performed during the French Occupation when Picasso was forbidden to show his work, and directed by Albert Camus. Picasso showed the play to his friend Gertrude Stein, and she advised him to go back to painting. Dora Maar had often been the model for Picasso, although she later said of these works: “All his portraits of me are lies. They're all Picassos. Not one is Dora Maar.” (the drawing remained in her personal collection until 1998.)
Philip Pearlstein’s Study for Two Models With Large Whirlygig I (2006) has a cool, detached point of view of the two women portrayed, the figures becoming as visually important as the whirlygig; Elizabeth Peyton uses finely etched lines to portray fellow artist Alice Neel, seated, nude, with a very peaceful look; Cecily Brown takes on the Renaissance directly by reworking a masterpiece by Titian, dissolving the subject of a “fete champetre” into her signature swirling gestures. Kiki Smith depicts women doubled and larger than life size. New York artist Serena Nickson will show three works on paper of single female figures, embodying the current moment. Rachel Rickert shows us her personal voyage through the emotional terrain of the Pandemic, using her own image in intimate activity in the bathroom, as Vuillard and Bonnard did, but here portrayed with 21st century angst.
JILL NEWHOUSE GALLERY
4 East 81st Street, New York, NY 10028
