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.
