Women: Subject and Object @ Jill Newhouse Gallery, New York - Exhibition Curated by Jovana Stokic

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

www.jillnewhouse.com

Auguste Herbin, Jill Newhouse Gallery, NYC - Geometric Abstraction: Works On Paper 1938-59

Auguste Herbin 

Geometric Abstraction: Works On Paper 1938-59

Jill Newhouse Gallery, New York

October 22 - November 24, 2015

Jill Newhouse Gallery presents an exhibition of works on paper by AUGUSTE HERBIN (1882–1960), a leading figure in the development of geometric abstraction in Europe.

Featuring rarely seen gouaches from Auguste Herbin’s mature period, these works were previously in the collection of the Sidney Janis Gallery (1973) where they were shown alongside works by Brancusi, Mondrian, and Leger. Sidney Janis Gallery held a solo exhibition of works by Herbin in 1974.

Auguste Herbin influenced a wide range of artists and sculptors working in geometric abstract idioms from the 1940s through 1970. Artists as diverse as Victor Vasarely and Jean Tinguely have claimed his works as inspiration for their own, and recent investigations into post-war European geometric abstraction show renewed interest in Herbin’s pivotal role.

Auguste Herbin began his career as a Fauve, showing with Matisse and Derain at the Salon des Indépendants in 1906. In 1909 he moved his studio to the Bateau Lavoir, where he met Picasso, Braque and Gris, and came under their influence. By 1910, Auguste Herbin’s colorful Proto-cubist works were being shown beside paintings by Léger, Gleizes, and Metzinger and in 1918, the renowned dealer Léonce Rosenberg gave him a solo exhibition at the Galerie l’Effort Moderne, which was a leading force in the promotion of cubism and avant-garde art. In 1931, Auguste Herbin’s commitment to abstraction and non-objective art culminated in his founding with de Stijl artist Georges Vantongerloo, the wide-ranging Abstraction-Création Group and in 1949 to his publication of L’art non-figuratif non-objectif. The latter announced the formulation of Auguste Herbin’s Plastic Alphabet, a system of correspondences between geometric shapes, colors, letters, and musical notes. This universal language animated the vibrant oil paintings and gouaches of Auguste Herbin’s mature period (c. 1945–1960). As seen in the work in this show, hard-edged triangles, rectangles and circles of pure, unmodulated color are distributed in registers that organize the picture field. Pictorial structure and vivid color become inseparable.

JILL NEWHOUSE GALLERY

4 East 81st Street, New York, NY  10028

www.jillnewhouse.com

The Figure and the Forest: 19th century French Photographs and Drawings presented by Jill Newhouse with Charles Isaacs and Howard Greenberg Gallery at Kate Ganz Gallery, New York

The Figure and the Forest 

19th century French Photographs and Drawings 

Kate Ganz Gallery, New York

December 6 - 22, 2004 

Featuring newly discovered works by a mysterious painter/photographer, this exhibition is presented by Jill Newhouse with Charles Isaacs and Howard Greenberg Gallery.

The shadowy depths of the Forest of Fontainebleau and the surrounding agricultural region inspired a generation of artists and photographers—and these two disciplines were more closely connected than previously thought. A group of 25 photographs of peasants at work taken by a mysterious 19th century artist is the focus of a new exhibition The Figure and the Forest:19th century French Photographs and Drawings.

Commissioned of a French painter in the late 1870s by the important Parisian publishing firm Giraudon, these photographs were made to be sold to art students and artists as inspiration for their paintings. Though this practice of painting from photographs was common, it was usually kept secret by the artists, and officially discouraged by the Salon. The photographer, known only as Giraudon’s artist, shielded his identity, and Giraudon complied. The mystery is still unsolved to this day.

The 25 photographs, presented by Jill Newhouse in cooperation with Charles Isaacs and Howard Greenberg Gallery, have never before been exhibited as a group. Other photographs from the series are in collections of the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; The Cleveland Museum of Art; the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

The prints in this exhibition are notable for their extraordinary state of preservation, and unlike other photographic studies of the 19 th century, for their suggestion of snap-shot like spontaneity, of course technically impossible in this period. Most depict women toiling on farms and in fields, gathering faggots, tending sheep and winnowing grain, depicting a way of life which was soon to disappear.

The photographs are exhibited along with 20 landscape drawings of the Fontainebleau Forest by important 19 th century artists including Jean Baptiste Camille Corot, Paul Huet, Jean Francois Millet and Theodore Rousseau. Seen together, the photographs and drawings provide an intimate glimpse into the creation of the great paintings of 19th century rural France by artists from Millet and Courbet to Pissarro and the Impressionists. They are the very foundation upon which these paintings were based, as well as beautiful and evocative works of art in themselves.

The fully illustrated exhibition catalogue includes an essay by independent art historian Carol Nigro.

The Mystery of the Photographer

Today, the identity of the anonymous painter/photographer remains a subject of both speculation and research. Alexandra Murphy, a specialist in the Barbizon school and has organized several important exhibitions of the work of Jean Francois Millet, notes, “The photographs were made by someone who is very familiar with traditional art imagery of farmland and what might be useful to painters.” Murphy adds, “We have ruled out Millet because he, like Van Gogh, wrote many letters, and left no mention of making photographs himself. Clearly, the images are very strong and it is very interesting that they were taken by a painter.” French art historian Monique Le Pelley Fonteny, former director of the Giraudon Archives, and also an authority on the work of the Barbizon school painter Leon L’hermitte (1844-1925), is currently writing a book which will explore the artist’s identity.

The Publisher Who Kept the Secret

The publisher Giraudon specialized in photographs of 19th century rural figure studies, called etudes d'aprés nature. His first studio was across the street from the Ecole des Beaux-Arts; and students and painters were among his best clients. In the late 1870s, he advertised that he had commissioned a painter, who wished to remain anonymous, to do a series of studies of peasants at work in the forest, for use by artists.

Exhibition Highlights

The photograph French Country Study: Two boys climbing a Tree depicts two boys who may have been bird nesters, robbing a nest of its eggs. The boys appear so intensely busy; it almost seems as if the artist surprised them at their task. Woman Holding a Winnowing Basket offers a popular Barbizon school subject. Two Shepherds (1866), a drawing by Jean Francois Millet, offers a classic pastoral image of two lovers, a theme he often depicted. “Since they worked away from the villages, shepherds were known as symbols of innocent and illicit love,” notes Murphy. Paul Huet’s drawing Four Large Trees shows a magnificent spread of branches in the Fontainebleau Forest, where some of the oldest and largest trees in France can be found. Fontainebleau began as a hunting ground for the aristocrats and during Huet’s lifetime became a national park. This image could celebrate the forest’s new status.

Photography and Pleine-Air Painting

Painters such as Corot began working in the forest of Fontainebleau as early as the 1820s, and photographers arrived in the 1850s. Often the disciplines overlapped: photographers such as Gustave le Gray (1820-1882) and Henri Le Secq (1818-1882) studied with the popular painter Charles Delaroche in the 1840s, and then made photographs in the forest. Painters first used the forest primarily as a place to sketch, but in the 1840s and ‘50s they produced more finished compositions, particularly in the area around Barbizon. The photographers preserved the tradition of the sketch with these photographic etudes d'aprés nature.

Kate Ganz Gallery

25 East 73rd Street, New York, NY 10021

Jill Newhouse Drawings

12 East 86th Street, New York, NY 10028

Open by appointment only

www.jillnewhouse.com