Category: Visual arts

To read signs of climate in art, look at the sky, the season and the air before you look at the story: the colour of a sunset, the presence of ice or snow, the haze around buildings and the kind of weather an artist chose to record. Then test what you see against the date, the place and the scientific record, because paintings can preserve real atmospheric conditions but are also shaped by studio habits, fashion and imagination. Scientists have used old sunsets to estimate volcanic dust and Victorian pictures to track smoke, so a careful viewer can learn to read the same clues, while staying alert to their limits.

Weather and climate are not the same thing

The first step is a distinction. The Met Office describes climate change as a large-scale, long-term shift in the planet’s weather patterns and average temperatures. A single painting almost always records weather: one storm, one frost, one evening. Climate only shows up when you compare many works across years, places and artists.

That matters in a gallery. A snowy scene from 1608 does not prove that every winter of the period was harsh, any more than one hot afternoon proves a trend today. What a single work can do is show you how a particular sky looked to a careful observer, and sometimes it lines up with events we know about from other evidence. Climate reading in art is therefore detective work: the painting is one witness, and you need corroboration.

Colour in the sky as an atmospheric record

The best-known scientific attempt to read climate from paint concerns sunsets. In 2007 C. S. Zerefos of the National Observatory of Athens and colleagues published a study in Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics that measured the ratio of red to green in the skies of a few hundred sunset paintings made between 1500 and 1900. They found a statistically significant correlation coefficient of 0.8 between those red-to-green ratios and the dust veil index, a measure of volcanic dust in the atmosphere. Using a radiative transfer model, they estimated aerosol optical depths ranging from about 0.05 in normal conditions to around 0.6 after the eruptions of Tambora and Krakatau.

A follow-up paper in 2014 went further. The team compared colour-calibrated images of paintings with online reproductions and found the online images gave accurate information. They also asked a painter to record successive sunsets on the Greek island of Hydra while Saharan dust passed overhead, and sun photometers on the spot confirmed that the painter’s red-to-green ratios matched the measured haze. The authors still listed open questions, such as how clouds affect the ratios, and presented their wider conclusion as tentative.

What this gives the ordinary viewer is a habit: when a sunset looks unusually red, orange or yellow, check the date against major eruptions. It is a prompt to investigate, not a verdict.

Volcanic years and the summer that failed

The eruption of Mount Tambora in April 1815 is the classic case. According to the Wikipedia summary of the Year Without a Summer, 1816 brought severe climate abnormalities, with global average temperatures falling by roughly 0.4 to 0.7 °C, crop failures across the Northern Hemisphere and food shortages in Britain and France. The same article notes that tephra in the atmosphere produced spectacular sunsets, and links the yellow tones of J. M. W. Turner’s work to this period.

Turner’s Chichester Canal, c.1828, in the Tate collection is often cited in this debate. If you look at it, notice how the whole sky is suffused with warm light rather than a narrow band of red at the horizon. The painting dates from more than a decade after Tambora, which is a useful reminder: a link between an artwork and a volcanic event needs a plausible time gap, and later works may reflect an artist’s established style as much as any particular sky.

Krakatau, in 1883, offers a second test. Among the theories for the blood-red sky in Edvard Munch’s The Scream is a memory of the vivid sunsets that followed the eruption. Others have proposed nacreous clouds, which occur at the latitude of Norway, and many scholars dispute a literal reading altogether because Munch was an expressive painter. Holding all three explanations in mind at once is exactly the right posture.

Ice, snow and the Little Ice Age

Winter scenes are the second big source of climate clues. Pieter Bruegel the Elder painted The Hunters in the Snow in 1565, as one of a series showing times of the year; the painting hangs in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. The Little Ice Age article records that the writer William James Burroughs found depictions of winter clustered almost entirely between 1565 and 1665, and suggested the harsh winter of 1565 prompted original images. The same article reports that Hans Neuberger analysed 12,000 paintings dated between 1400 and 1967 for cloudiness and darkness, finding an increase that peaked between 1600 and 1649.

Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Hunters in the Snow, 1565, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna. Photo: Pieter Bruegel the Elder (Google Art Project) / Wikimedia Commons, public domain

The caution sits in the same source: winter subjects became less popular after about 1660 without any recorded easing of the winters, which may reflect taste rather than weather. Fashion and markets can make a theme look more or less common than the climate alone would.

Dutch painting gives you the details to look for. The Rijksmuseum’s description of Hendrick Avercamp’s winter scene with ice skaters, c. 1608 points out that hundreds of people are on the ice, most for pleasure and some out of necessity, and that crows and a dog feed on the carcass of a horse that has frozen to death in the left foreground. That grim detail tells you more about the severity of the cold than the skaters do.

In London, the equivalent evidence is the frost fair. The history of the River Thames frost fairs lists recorded fairs in 695, 1608, 1683 to 1684, 1716, 1739 to 1740, 1789 and 1814, the last one. It also notes that from 1400 until the old London Bridge was removed in 1831, the Thames was recorded frozen at London in 24 winters, and that the bridge’s 19 piers slowed the river. So a frozen Thames in a print is partly a record of cold and partly a record of engineering. Reading a climate sign properly means asking what else was different.

Smoke, fog and the industrial sky

Some of the clearest changes in old pictures were made by people rather than volcanoes. The National Gallery’s entry for Turner’s Rain, Steam, and Speed, 1844 describes a train crossing Brunel’s Maidenhead Railway Bridge, completed in 1838, in driving rain, with a hare once painted on the track as a contrast between natural and mechanised speed. Weather, steam and smoke merge into one atmosphere.

Claude Monet’s London views push the idea further. According to the account of his Houses of Parliament series, Monet returned to London in 1899, painted from the Savoy Hotel and worked in the city periodically until 1905, drawn above all by its fogs. Analyses of solar position reported in 2006 suggested the paintings contain elements of accurate observation.

In 2023 Anna Lea Albright and Peter Huybers published a study in PNAS arguing that the shift from figurative to impressionistic treatment in Turner’s and Monet’s paintings tracks local sulphur dioxide emissions, with hazier contours and a whiter palette consistent with heavier aerosol pollution. The paper drew a direct response. Michael Marmor, an emeritus ophthalmologist at Stanford, wrote a reply arguing that most of these paintings show stylistic evolution, not pollution, noting that both artists also painted late works with clear blue skies and that Monet visited London only in 1870 to 1871 and 1899 to 1901. Read together, the two papers are a model of how to weigh evidence from paint.

Observation, studio and invention

Before you treat any sky as data, ask how it was made. John Constable is the obvious test case. His biography records that he wrote “I have done a good deal of skying” in a letter of 23 October 1821, and that his annotated copy of a meteorology book shows he knew the scientific terms for clouds (John Constable on Wikipedia). Tate holds one of his oil sketches titled Cloud Study, dated 1822, the kind of rapid outdoor study that comes closest to a weather observation.

Yet his most famous picture is a composite. The National Gallery explains that The Hay Wain, 1821, shows a changeable Suffolk summer sky with one ominous raincloud, but was painted in his London studio from open-air sketches made over several years. Its sky is accurate in character, not necessarily in date. The same entry notes that the factories and locomotives found in Turner’s work are absent from Constable’s, which is itself a choice about what to leave out.

Contemporary work that makes climate the subject

Many living artists have stopped waiting for climate to appear in the background and put it at the centre. Olafur Eliasson’s Ice Watch is a clear example. As described on the artist’s Ice Watch page, the work was shown in Copenhagen in 2014, at the Place du Panthéon in Paris in 2015, and in London in 2018 on Bankside outside Tate Modern and in the City. The Wikipedia account of Eliasson’s practice says that the first version brought twelve blocks of ice from the Nuup Kangerlua fjord in Greenland, each weighing between 1.5 and 5 tonnes, timed to coincide with climate conferences and reports. Here the material itself is the sign: you watch the ice melt.

With work like this, the reading task changes. You are less often decoding a hidden clue and more often asking what the artist wants you to notice, what evidence they draw on, and how the piece was made and documented.

A checklist for your next gallery visit

Use these questions in front of any work, old or new:

• What date and place are given on the label, and were there known events nearby in time, such as a major eruption or a famous freeze?
• Is the sky colour unusual for the time of day shown, and is the effect spread across the whole sky or confined to the horizon?
• Is there ice, snow, flood or drought, and are there details, like Avercamp’s frozen horse, that show its severity?
• Was the work painted outdoors, or assembled in a studio from sketches over years?
• Does the artist’s style change over the same period, which could explain haze or brightness without any change in the air?
• Is there human infrastructure, such as a bridge, chimney or railway, that altered the scene or the atmosphere?
• Do several works from the same years and region show the same feature, or is this one picture on its own?

If you want to practise, start with collection pages: the Tate, the National Gallery and the Rijksmuseum all publish dates and descriptions online that you can read alongside the scientific papers above. Our independent coverage and our gallery in Ruthin are introduced on the Visionary Art homepage, and wider arts writing appears at Art Culture. The most useful habit is simple: enjoy the sky first, then check it against the record.

Photo: Carl Fredrik Hill, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

To start an artist-run gallery, gather a small group of artists, agree in writing what the space is for and how decisions are made, then pick a legal structure that matches your ambitions, from a free unincorporated association to a community interest company or a charity. After that come the practical layers: a space you can afford, insurance and any licences for opening nights, a fair way of paying the artists you show, and a funding mix that does not depend on one source. The UK’s longest-running artist-run spaces show that all of this can be done on modest means, provided the work is shared and the rules are clear from the start.

What an artist-run gallery looks like in practice

An artist-run gallery is a space where artists, rather than a dealer or a public institution, choose the programme and do the running. Some of the UK’s best-known examples have lasted for decades. Transmission Gallery in Glasgow describes itself as Scotland’s longest-standing artist-run gallery, established in 1983. Generator Projects in Dundee was founded in 1996 and calls itself the second-oldest artist-run space in Scotland; it marks its 30th birthday in 2026 with a week of events drawn from its archive. In Belfast, Catalyst Arts was formed in 1993 as a voluntary, artist-led, members-based organisation.

Wales has its own model. g39 in Cardiff is an artist-run gallery, resource and creative community that began as an idea in 1997, opened in July 1998 on a small budget and became a charity in 2019. Its annual Pam Open grew out of the madeinroath festival in 2009, when it took place in empty shops and pop-up spaces around Roath, which is a useful reminder that many permanent spaces start as temporary ones.

Agree a purpose and a way of making decisions

Before you sign anything, write a short statement of what the gallery exists to do and who it serves. Generator Projects, for instance, says it focuses on early to mid-career practitioners, particularly those living in the Dundee area and outside the central belt, and that all its exhibitions and events are free to attend. A statement that specific helps you turn down offers that do not fit and explain yourselves to landlords, funders and neighbours.

Decide just as early how the group governs itself. Generator’s committee members run the space day to day in a voluntary capacity for a maximum of two years, which keeps energy fresh and stops the same few people burning out. It also runs “Takeovers”, where any member can apply to use the space for their own project alongside a funded programme of around six exhibitions a year. Fixed terms, a members’ route into the programme and a written record of who is responsible for what will save arguments later.

Choose a legal structure

The structure you choose decides who is liable for debts, whether the gallery can sign a lease in its own name and which funders will consider you. GOV.UK’s guide to setting up a social enterprise lists the main options for organisations with social or community aims: a limited company, a charity or charitable incorporated organisation (CIO), a co-operative, a community interest company (CIC), or a sole trader or partnership.

Unincorporated association

The simplest route for a voluntary group is an unincorporated association. There is nothing to register and it costs nothing to set up, but individual members are personally responsible for any debts and contracts. That is a real risk once you take on a lease.

Community interest company

A CIC is a limited company that exists to benefit the community rather than private shareholders. You need a community interest statement and an “asset lock”, a legal promise that the company’s assets will only be used for its social objectives. Registering a CIC online with Companies House costs £115 (checked October 2026). The CIC regulator’s guidance explains the asset lock, the dividend cap and the annual CIC34 report.

Charity or charitable company

If your aims are charitable, the Charity Commission’s guide to choosing a charity structure (CC22a) sets out four types: a CIO, a charitable company limited by guarantee, an unincorporated association and a trust. A CIO must register with the Commission to exist at all. Under GOV.UK’s step-by-step guide to setting up a charity you usually need at least three trustees, and you must register if annual income will be at least £5,000 or if you choose the CIO form (checked October 2026). g39 shows how one gallery combined routes: it is a non-profit company limited by guarantee, managed by a board of member trustees, and a registered charity (number 1181492).

If you choose an ordinary company, registering a limited company costs £100, and you may need the personal code Companies House issues after identity verification (checked October 2026). For anything beyond a simple association, take independent legal or accountancy advice before you commit.

Find a space and understand the running costs

Many artist-run galleries begin in empty shops, community buildings or members’ studios, and only take on a lease once a programme has proved itself. When you do take on premises, check who pays utilities, whether you can drill walls or hold evening events, and what happens at the end of the term, and get every agreement in writing.

Business rates can be the largest hidden cost. In England, small business rate relief means no rates on a single property with a rateable value of £12,000 or less, tapering to nothing at £15,000 (checked October 2026). A registered charity using a property mainly for charitable purposes can instead apply for charitable rate relief of up to 80%, which the council may top up, but you cannot have both reliefs at once. Rules differ in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, so confirm the position with the local council before budgeting.

Insurance, licences and safety

Visitors will be walking round work you have installed, so public liability cover matters from the first show. The artists’ membership body formerly called a-n became Artists Now in July 2026. Its insurance for members page lists £10 million public and products liability and £5 million professional indemnity within Artist and Arts Organiser memberships, subject to the policy terms (checked October 2026). Read the policy wording to see whether it covers a group-run venue or only individual practice.

Once you employ anyone, including paid invigilators, GOV.UK says you need employers’ liability insurance of at least £5 million from an authorised insurer, with fines of £2,500 for every day you are not properly insured.

If you plan to sell drinks at a private view in a building without a premises licence, England and Wales use a Temporary Event Notice. It costs £21, must be served at least 10 clear working days before the event, covers fewer than 500 people at any time, and can only be applied for by an individual, not an organisation (checked October 2026).

Pay artists fairly and plan a programme

Fair pay is now a standard question from artists and funders. Artists Now’s exhibition payment guide, developed with Arts Council England, Creative Scotland and Arts Council of Wales, says exhibition fees should be paid in addition to production costs. Its fee categories start at organisations with annual budgets over £50,000, where it suggests £1,500 for new work and £750 for existing work in Category A. For artist-led and project-funded organisations running on under £50,000 a year, it accepts that the categories may not fit and asks that the general principles be applied where possible (last updated April 2026).

In practice that means budgeting a fee line for every show, even a small one, and putting the agreement in writing: dates, what the gallery pays for, who handles transport and installation, and any commission on sales. Plan fewer, better-resourced exhibitions rather than a crowded calendar your volunteers cannot staff, and publish predictable opening hours.

Fund the gallery from more than one source

Most long-running artist-run spaces combine public grants, membership, earned income and donated time. g39 says that around 57 to 60% of its costs are met through the Arts Council of Wales, with the rest raised from trusts, partners, earned income, donations and volunteers, and that it is one of only two artist-run organisations with revenue status from the Arts Council of Wales.

For project funding in Wales, the Arts Council of Wales Create and Engage fund is open to organisations and individuals, with small awards up to £10,000 and large awards up to £60,000 (checked October 2026). Proposals must support at least one of the Council’s principles, which include creativity, equalities and engagement, the Welsh language and climate justice. Its funding for organisations page lists the other current programmes and deadlines. In England, Scotland and Northern Ireland, the national arts councils run their own schemes, so check their current guidance before you apply.

What long-running spaces do differently

The oldest spaces share some habits. They treat artists as the centre of the organisation: g39 runs Warp, the Wales Artist Resource Programme, offering advice, training and networking, and says it does not represent artists commercially but encourages their self-management. They keep a public archive of what they have shown. And they build a membership that gives people a reason to return between exhibitions.

Generator’s 30th birthday programme is candid about the pressures, describing reflection on “labour, institutional memory and the precarious running of an artist-run initiative”. Building handover notes, a shared calendar and an archive into the routine from the first year makes it far easier for the next committee to carry on.

A checklist before you open

• A one-paragraph purpose statement and written decision-making rules, including term limits
• A legal structure chosen with advice, and a bank account in the organisation’s name
• A written agreement for the space, with rates relief checked with the council
• Public liability cover in place, and employers’ liability if anyone is paid
• A Temporary Event Notice served in time if alcohol will be sold
• A budget line for artist fees and written agreements with every exhibitor
• At least two possible funding sources, and a plan for membership or earned income
• Regular, published opening hours and a simple way to collect visitor feedback

At visionaryart.uk we cover contemporary art and run our own gallery in Ruthin, and we follow new artist-run projects across Wales with interest. The spaces above began small; the ones that last tend to be the ones that wrote their rules down early.

Photo: Myotus, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Apocalypse on television now has a palette. Desaturated greens, dust in the light, a horizon interrupted by something broken. Stuart Fails to Save the Universe, the HBO Max comedy that began on 23 July, borrows that palette for a joke, and in doing so shows how completely the visual language of ruin has settled into convention.

From engraving to production design

The taste for ruins is old and entirely aesthetic in origin. Eighteenth century travellers commissioned paintings of collapsed temples because a broken column was more beautiful than a whole one, and Giovanni Battista Piranesi built a career on Roman remains drawn larger and darker than they were. The point was never documentary. Ruin gave scale to human effort by showing what outlasts it.

Romanticism formalised the appetite. A ruin in a landscape painting is a piece of instruction: here is time, here is your position within it. Nineteenth century painters put figures in front of collapsed abbeys precisely to make the figures look small.

Screen design inherited the grammar without the argument. What began as a meditation on time has become a set of production instructions, and the instructions are now so standardised that a comedy can invoke them in a single establishing shot and expect the audience to read the reference.

What the new series does with it

The premise is unusually literal. Kevin Sussman plays a comic shop owner who damages a device built by his old customers, opens what the series calls a multiverse Armageddon, and travels between worlds trying to repair it. Each world needs its own look, delivered fast enough to land a joke.

Chuck Lorre, Zak Penn and Bill Prady have made choices that show how much of the effect is lighting rather than construction:

• single camera photography instead of the multi-camera sitcom stage, which allows shadow, and shadow is most of what makes a room look abandoned
• no laugh track, so the image has to establish tone unaided
• a score by Joseph LoDuca and a theme by Danny Elfman, composers whose work signals genre before a single set is shown
• worlds sketched in one or two objects rather than built out, on the assumption that viewers will fill the rest in themselves

That last point is the interesting one for anyone who looks at pictures for a living. The series is not designing apocalypses. It is triggering ones the audience already carries.

The cost of a shared visual memory

This is where the reviews start to bite. In The Hollywood Reporter, Angie Han argued that the show has no real curiosity about the universes it visits, treating each as a backdrop to be crossed rather than a place to be understood. RogerEbert.com reached a similar conclusion about a clever concept underused. The series holds 76 per cent on Rotten Tomatoes from 38 reviews and 68 out of 100 on Metacritic from 18 critics, which is the score of a show that gestures well and examines little.

A painter faces the same trap in different materials. When a motif becomes legible enough to be recognised instantly, it stops asking anything of the person looking at it. The vanitas skull worked as a memento mori for as long as viewers had to think about why it was on the table. Once the skull became shorthand, the thinking stopped and the decoration remained.

Ruin imagery has reached that stage. We can all read a collapsed motorway or an overgrown shopping centre without a moment’s effort, which means the image no longer performs the function ruins were originally painted to perform. It shows time without making anyone feel it.

Why a comedy is a fair test

Comedy is the honest place to examine a visual convention, because comedy cannot hide behind atmosphere. A drama can hold a shot of a flooded street for twenty seconds and call the mood meaning. A joke has to work in four seconds or not at all, so it exposes exactly how much of an image is doing real work and how much is inherited.

By that measure the series is instructive. The apocalyptic frames read instantly, which proves the convention is complete, and they read shallowly, which proves it has been worn smooth.

There is a version of this material that would be genuinely strange, in which each universe is designed by somebody who had looked at the world rather than at other screens. What has arrived instead is a comedy that knows the vocabulary perfectly and has nothing new to say in it.

Stuart Fails to Save the Universe runs weekly on HBO Max until 24 September.

Image: Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Rovine d’una Galleria di Statue nella Villa Adriana a Tivoli, from Vedute di Roma. Rijksmuseum, CC0.

By VisionaryArt Editorial

In the shifting landscape of contemporary art, where identity, technology, and politics converge, a new generation of artists is redefining what it means to create. Among them, Xinyu XuXX—known professionally as Xinyu Xu—stands out as a figure whose work bridges cultures, disciplines, and emotional registers with remarkable fluidity.

The Artist

Born in Hunan, China in 1998, XuXX (she/it) is a Chinese-born, London-based artist and screening organiser. Her educational journey reads like a map of artistic migration: a BA in fashion design from the China Academy of Art, a Graduate Diploma in Fine Art from the Royal College of Art, and an MFA in Fine Art from Goldsmiths, University of London.

Each institution left its mark. From the China Academy of Art, XuXX absorbed the discipline of craft and the language of fashion. From the Royal College of Art, she gained the conceptual framework to move beyond design into pure artistic expression. At Goldsmiths, she found the community and critical context to develop her practice into something wholly original.

The Practice

XuXX’s work is fundamentally interdisciplinary, spanning moving image, installation, and performance. Her practice centres on feminist eroticism—specifically, the erotic capacity to form connections, transmit energy, and create intimacy across time and territory.

“Her work is interested in how image as a non-human body creates visionary erotic experiences as a method for activism,” Al-Tiba9 Contemporary Art noted in a 2023 interview. “Inhabiting space for those bodies behind it.”

This is art that refuses categorisation. XuXX’s moving images are not documentaries or narratives in the conventional sense; they are immersive experiences that engage the viewer’s body as much as their mind. Sound, movement, and visual texture combine to create environments that feel simultaneously intimate and expansive.

The Work

XuXX’s image work has been exhibited between the UK and China, including Omitted References at The Art Pavilion in Mile End Park, At the Edge of Safe House, and Our Bodies Are Portal at Asylum Chapel. In Beijing, she curated Double Interval at Three Shadows Gallery—a group show in Huangshan that explored the boundaries between moving image and physical space.

As one of the organisers of @If Splash as Your Whistle, a programme showcasing queer, diasporic moving images and films through multimedia art events, XuXX has positioned herself not just as an artist but as a cultural facilitator—creating platforms for marginalised voices in the moving image community.

The Philosophy

What distinguishes XuXX from many contemporary artists is the philosophical depth of her practice. She does not merely represent identity; she interrogates the mechanisms through which identity is constructed, performed, and experienced.

“Anyone who can empathise with subtle things or for others and convey those feelings through their medium to create a special world can be considered an artist,” she has said. This definition—generous, inclusive, and deeply human—reflects her approach to art-making: not as a solitary pursuit but as a form of connection.

Her interest in eroticism is not gratuitous; it is strategic. By engaging the body’s capacity for pleasure and vulnerability, XuXX creates art that bypasses intellectual defences and speaks directly to the viewer’s emotional experience. In a world increasingly mediated by screens and algorithms, this tactile, embodied approach feels both radical and necessary.

The Future

At just 27, Xinyu XuXX has already achieved what many artists take decades to accomplish: a coherent body of work, a committed community, and a practice that resonates across cultural and linguistic boundaries. Her trajectory suggests an artist who will continue to evolve, challenge, and inspire.

As she moves deeper into her career, XuXX carries with her the influences of two cultures, the training of three institutions, and the vision of an artist who believes that art’s highest purpose is to create connection. In the world of arts and culture, that is a rare and precious gift.

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For more on emerging artists and contemporary art, explore our coverage of [new voices in the art world](/category/art/) and [cross-cultural creativity](/category/culture/).

By VisionaryArt Editorial

In the grand tradition of art as diplomacy, few works have provoked as much intrigue, speculation, and controversy as the portrait of Donald Trump that now hangs in the White House Grand Foyer. Painted by Russian artist Nikas Safronov and gifted by Vladimir Putin in March 2025, the work depicts the American president with bloodied ear and raised fist—echoing the July 2024 assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania. It is a painting that is simultaneously propaganda, prophecy, and provocation.

The Commission

Safronov, one of Russia’s most famous artists, was contacted by “some people who said they want me to paint Trump as I see him.” He did not initially know who his visitors were, though he suspected the Kremlin. “There are clients who do not go into details,” he explained.

The commission was straightforward: paint Trump as he appeared after the Butler rally. But Safronov’s interpretation transcended mere portraiture. The painting shows Trump with blood splattered across his face, his right fist raised in defiance, the Statue of Liberty and Manhattan skyline rising behind him like monuments in a dream.

“When I started the portrait, I realized this could bring our countries closer,” Safronov told CNN. “And decided not to charge any money because I suspected what this painting was for.”

The Reveal

The painting was delivered by Trump’s envoy, real estate mogul Steve Witkoff, who described it to Tucker Carlson as “a beautiful portrait” that clearly moved the former president. For weeks, the portrait remained a mystery—its existence known, its details hidden.

Then, in April 2025, Safronov revealed the work to CNN, confirming what many had suspected: this was not merely a gift but a calculated act of soft power. The Kremlin confirmed the portrait’s authenticity. Putin’s spokesperson Dmitry Peskov described it as “an absolutely personal gift” to “his American colleague.”

Safronov’s account added layers of mystique: Putin had contacted him personally to emphasise the commission’s importance, telling him the flattering portrait was a crucial step in improving Russia’s relationship with the United States.

The Artist

Nikas Safronov is no ordinary painter. Known for celebrity portraits—he has painted Pope Francis, Kim Jong Un, Narendra Modi, and Madonna—he occupies a peculiar position in Russian culture: simultaneously respected as a serious artist and scrutinised for his flamboyant public persona. He has appeared nude in widely circulated photos, boasts about his sexual exploits, and claims to own a 17-room, 7-billion-rouble penthouse near the Kremlin.

Safronov once claimed to have dreamt his own fame into being, keeping detailed dream journals and asserting that his visions shape his path. He dabbles in numerology and claims to feel “energetic imprints” from the people he paints. In 2021, Putin bestowed upon him the title of “People’s Artist of Russia” for “great merit in the field of fine art.”

The Art World’s Response

The portrait has divided the art world. Some critics see it as a masterful piece of diplomatic theatre—a work that accomplishes through visual language what formal negotiations cannot. Others dismiss it as kitsch, a propaganda piece unworthy of the White House’s walls.

Safronov himself has been characteristically bold in his assessment of competing works. When Trump denounced a portrait of him in Colorado’s state Capitol building as “truly the worst,” Safronov compared it to “provincial Soviet portraits of collective farm chairmen” and offered the help of Russian artists in training their American counterparts.

The Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts has acquired a Safronov work for its research collection—under its former director, who was subsequently ousted, adding another layer of controversy.

Art as Diplomacy

The Trump portrait is not the first time Putin has used art as diplomacy. Similar symbolic gifts were given during the earlier Trump presidency, including a Soviet-style poster that found its way into Mar-a-Lago’s decor. The tradition of gifts between rivals dates back centuries—from Faberge eggs to diplomatic portraits—and Safronov’s work fits neatly within this lineage.

What makes this portrait unique is its timing. Delivered during delicate negotiations between the US and Russia over Ukraine, the painting occupies a space between decoration and oracle. It is, as one commentator noted, “a symbol of how power sees itself, and perhaps, what it hopes to become.”

In the White House Grand Foyer, where it now hangs—displacing an official portrait of Barack Obama—the painting serves as a daily reminder that art, in the right hands, can be the most potent form of diplomacy.

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For more on art and geopolitics, explore our coverage of [art as political expression](/category/art/) and [diplomacy and cultural exchange](/category/culture/).

By Sarah Johnson

Cannes is a lot. Honestly. It’s always just… a lot. Yachts, mostly, and people sweating in very expensive suits hoping someone important notices them standing there. But this year? The 79th one? Park Chan-wook was running the jury, which was a wild choice that actually worked out. We ended up getting some actual movies worth talking about.

Mungiu won the big one. The Palme d’Or. For Fjord. It’s his second time winning it, which makes sense because the guy just knows exactly how to make you feel terrible. He takes human misery and sort of… dissects it on a table. It’s incredibly bleak stuff. You watch it and you feel bad. Then it ends and you think, yeah, okay, that was basically a masterpiece.

Then there was Minotaur. Andrey Zvyagintsev. It won the Grand Prix. It’s huge. Like, physically exhausting to sit through because it’s so dense and political. A movie that big usually falls apart halfway through because it’s trying to do too much. This one didn’t.

Best Director was a tie, which is always annoying. Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi won for The Black Ball (La Bola Negra). It’s this crazy pop-culture explosion of a movie. And they tied with Paweł Pawlikowski. For Fatherland. Which is, as you’d expect, incredibly sad and Polish. Putting those two next to each other on a list is hilarious. But that’s Cannes.

Virginie Efira and Tao Okamoto both won Best Actress. For All Of A Sudden. Usually sharing an award feels like the jury just couldn’t make a decision, but here it worked. You literally can’t pull their performances apart. They’re too tangled up in each other. Emmanuel Macchia and Valentin Campagneshare won Best Actor. For Coward.

Valeska Grisebach won the Jury Prize. The Dreamed Adventure. It’s super quiet. It sneaks up behind you. Emmanuel Marre won Best Screenplay for A Man Of His Time (Notre Salut). Meanest dialogue of the whole festival, hands down. And Clémentine Dusabejambo won the Camera d’Or for Ben’Imana, which is nice because it shows someone is actually paying attention to the new directors instead of just the red carpet.

They gave Honorary Palmes to Peter Jackson, John Travolta, and Barbra Streisand. Make of that what you will. Just a bunch of random Hollywood people getting clapped for.

Anyway. 2026 wasn’t a total waste of time. Underneath all the ridiculous fashion, there were actually some good movies. You just had to look for them.

By Sarah Johnson

The Met Gala happened. Again. “Costume Art”. That was the actual theme. Anna Wintour somehow talked Beyoncé, Nicole Kidman, and Venus Williams into throwing a party where famous people pretend clothes are serious intellectual statements.

They aren’t.

You get exhausting amounts of fabric dragging up those museum steps. People smiling through the panic. The new Condé M. Nast Galleries are officially open now. The whole exhibition is supposed to prove that the dressed body is fundamentally high art. Maybe it is. Mostly it just looks like very expensive anxiety. You look at these outfits and you don’t think about art history. You think about how nobody can breathe or use a bathroom.

An absolute circus. We will all watch it again next year.