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Dr Ben Street

@thebenstreet

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Art historian, educator & author
Slow Looking on Substack
See also: @museumseats

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“From Cubism to Abstraction: Mapping Peggy Guggenheim’s Modernism”

🇬🇧How did we get from Cubism to abstraction? And how was Peggy Guggenheim involved?

From November 2, discover the answers with art historian Ben Street in the Peggy Guggenheim Collection’s first online lecture series in English, dedicated to the history of modern art.

Three lectures exploring some of the transformations that shaped the twentieth century, from Cubism to Surrealism and abstraction, through works collected by Peggy Guggenheim.

You don’t have to be an expert . . . you just need to be curious 👀

💻 Online and in English
📆 2, 9, 16 November 2, 9, and 16, at 7 pm (CET)
👉 Free. @guggenheim_venice Members only.
▶️ The lectures will be recorded and available to watch after the livestream.

Discover the program and join us 🔗 Link in bio.
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🇮🇹Come siamo arrivati dal Cubismo all’astrazione? E cosa c’entra Peggy Guggenheim?

Dal 2 novembre lo scopriamo insieme allo storico dell’arte Ben Street nel primo ciclo online in lingua inglese della Collezione Peggy Guggenheim dedicato alla storia dell’arte moderna.

Tre incontri per ripercorrere, a partire dalle opere collezionate da Peggy, alcune delle trasformazioni che hanno segnato il Novecento, dal Cubismo al Surrealismo fino all’astrazione.

Non serve essere esperti, basta essere curiosi 👀

💻 Online e in lingua inglese
📆 2, 9, 16 novembre alle 19
👉 Gratuito e riservato agli Amici e alle Amiche @guggenheim_venice
▶️ Tutti gli incontri saranno registrati e disponibili anche dopo la diretta

Scopri il programma e partecipa 🔗 link in bio.

#PeggyGuggenheimCollection

🎨All works by Calder © 2026 Calder Foundation, New York / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York by @thebenstreet

I’ve written an audio tour for the new Robert Ryman exhibition at the @barbicancentre. It features my text alongside wonderful contributions by curators @wellsfs and Amber Li as well as one of the Barbican’s own gallery attendants (read the text below to see why). Ryman was a brilliant and generous artist. It will be a great show.

Here’s an extract from my Substack on Ryman. Find the whole text on Slow Looking; link in bio.

Ryman is known for his use of white in the same way that Charlie Parker was known for his use of the saxophone. What I mean by this is both artists committed to a choice that immediately cancelled out a whole list of other possibilities. In using white, Ryman was never going to be a successful society portrait painter. In using the saxophone, Parker was never going to play in a chamber orchestra. Both pushed the materials at hand as far as they were able to within the context of their times. Both dramatically expanded the vocabulary of their tools. To say Ryman only painted white paintings is like saying Parker’s songs all sound the same.

I mention Parker here because Ryman planned to be a jazz saxophonist himself. Things not quite working out as he’d hoped, he took a job at the Museum of Modern Art in New York as a gallery attendant. And what that gave him was the experience that would lead to him to becoming a painter himself. His education was not so much in making art as in looking at it. Extended exposure to the museum’s collections seeped its way into his mind. I think of him staring at paintings by Matisse, Rothko and Malevich over the long, slow hours of a weekday afternoon, gradually internalising their lessons. by @thebenstreet

Push it. Examine all things intensely and relentlessly. Probe and search each object in a piece of art. Do not leave it, do not course over it, as if it were understood, but instead follow it down until you see it in the mystery of its own specificity and strength.

Annie Dillard, The Writing Life

My new substack is about looking very closely at a screenshot of a Käthe Kollwitz drawing through the lessons of the late great Annie Dillard.

I’m interested in a kind of history that leans into the failures and limitations of its sources rather than pretending they’re not there. I want to treat reproductions as artworks in their own right rather than as equivalents for original objects. Let’s see how it goes. Link in bio, or search Slow Looking on Substack. by @thebenstreet

I’m so thrilled to announce that my book “Edward Boccia Painter of Nightmares and Dreams” on the great American artist @edwardbocciaofficial is published. This is a decade long project of research, reverie & writing. I’m thankful to my colleagues, friends & family & to the contributors @thebenstreet @nprizel @grund.charles & to @calandra.institute for their support of my research into this important Italian American artist, teacher & poet. A special thanks to the amazing team @hirmer.publishers whose dedication to producing beautifully serious art books truly shines. Available in the United States in December. More details to come! For now joy & celebration, we all raise a glass to Edward. #art #paintings #artbook by @thebenstreet

It’s hard to imagine these paintings being made in the kind of monastic silence implied by the works of his Venetian predecessors Giovanni Bellini or Giorgione. Not only is the darting hand of the painter (or his assistants) ever present, like a signature, but the figures that populate Tintoretto’s work are always lifting, straining, hoisting, like assistants assembling the great canvases for the Doge’s Palace. The Holy Trinity (c1565), a fragment of a much larger work, shows God the Father and Christ with rhymed outstretched arms. It’s a device that is at once theologically correct and reminiscent of studio pedagogy, like an older artist instructing a young assistant in the correct measuring-out of canvas and the preparation of stretchers. For Tintoretto, the practice of painting provides all the metaphors he needs.

An extract for my review for @apollomagazine of the new Tintoretto exhibition at @jacquemartandre. Of all the painters of his time - and after - his work is (in my opinion) the richest in possibility and the most generous in providing both visual pleasures and reflection upon what those pleasures mean. Many congratulations @rowleyflex Giovanni Carlo Federico Villa @palazzomadama and Pierre Curie. An essential show, with a great catalogue. by @thebenstreet

What a privilege to have been one of the judges of the inaugural @freelandsfoundation art education award alongside the mighty @gemagain @henzward @joy_gregory_studio and Jenni Lomax.

These organisations are an argument for why arts education matters, now more than ever. Go visit @theburtonatbideford @signalcreates and @wolvesartandculture and you’ll see exactly what I mean.

As @henzward put it in his piece in the Guardian, “culture is not what we can afford once everything else is fixed. It’s one of the things that will help us fix it.” by @thebenstreet

What is that thing? (This painting is called Natura morta from 1961, because of course it is). Bottle bottle (let’s ignore for the time being the strange angle of their position and whether or not they’re one or two bottles, or): but what is that thing? That shape next to them? That thing – stone jug / hot water bottle standing on end / bookshelf / container / animal head / outline of Eastern European country / alien skull / unwieldy vegetable – what is it?

(OK: I am not waiting to be told what it “really” is. I am not waiting to solve it. It is something. And it sat there and he painted it, and it was something that had a weight and a texture. It had to be lifted and turned. He had a word for it, even if he didn’t say it out loud: a word like “that”, or “you”, or “this”. But – look, stay with it – there’s a reason why I’m not hoping to know).

What is that thing is the real title of this painting. What is that thing is the real title of every natura morta by Morandi. What is that thing is the real name of Morandi’s project as a painter. What is that thing is the real question of his paintings.

(An extract from my new Substack - THE ART OF NOT KNOWING - link in bio. The piece is pro-ignorance, pro-uncertainty, anti-symbolism, anti-interpretation. It’s an odd one; enjoy.)
Photos: Morandi / his Bologna studio / note pinned to the wall / M / Guston 1960 / Claesz 1628 / M by @thebenstreet

Why all the Vincents? This preponderance of screen van Goghs, from Kirk Douglas’ definitive version in Lust for Life (1956) to Tim Roth in Vincent and Theo (1990) and Willem Defoe in At Eternity’s Gate (2019), provides a benchmark for the representations of artists documented in The Hollywood History of Art. These performances epitomise Frayling’s definition of Hollywood’s archetype of the artist. He – invariably and inevitably he, until the 1980s – is “a special kind of inarticulate, romantic genius-hero, who does not require training… a passionate, rule-breaking outsider, challenged by the stick-in-the-mud academy and by self-serving critics.” He “can express desires which are taboo to the rest of us, though we can enjoy them vicariously”. And, crucially, his art is “misunderstood in [his] lifetime but vindicated posthumously.” Cinema’s van Goghs meet all these criteria. And by such standards, the choice of artists whose lives have made it to the movies makes sense. Frida Kahlo, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Artemisia Gentileschi, Francis Bacon: all, to a greater or lesser extent, are pretty van Gogh-y. It’s much harder to dramatize the life of, say, Henri Matisse, or Raphael (although it’s been tried).

Part of my review of @christopherfrayling’s brilliant new book, “The Hollywood History of Art”, in the current @the.tls. You can also hear me on the TLS podcast, talking about art on film.

Recommendations for best and (ideally) worst representations of artists in cinema and TV? by @thebenstreet

The story behind Firefly International

Firefly International began in 1995, when Ellie Maxwell, then a 21-year-old student from the University of Edinburgh, travelled to post-war Bosnia and started a youth project in Mostar to help displaced children rebuild trust across divided communities through art and music.

From that single project grew Firefly, a charity dedicated to supporting children affected by war through education and the arts. Ellie passed away at just 32, but her belief that creativity could rebuild what conflict breaks apart lives on in everything Firefly does today.

Firefly works with exceptional local partners who run the only inter-ethnic youth club and pre-school in Brčko, Bosnia and Herzegovina, alongside trauma-informed education in Syria, art therapy for Palestinian child refugees in Egypt, and mental health support for children in Palestine.

Despite its small size, Firefly continues to help rebuild hope for children after war, built on the belief that arts and education can bring communities together, heal trauma, and build bridges in divided societies. A belief at the heart of Artists for Firefly too.

Art historian and Firefly supporter @thebenstreet , a friend of Ellie's, put it best:

"Creativity is the basic unit of how Firefly works. When my friend Ellie started Firefly, it was her belief that making art together can be a model for living together, and artists have generously donated their work to Artists for Firefly to allow this belief to keep going. To be an artist is to manifest a faith that human activity can point beyond itself, and through Artists for Firefly we can support Ellie's mission to bring creativity to help children traumatised by war."

All proceeds from the Artists for Firefly sale go directly towards this work, giving children the chance to heal, create and dream.

Follow along and be ready to buy when the sale opens on 28 September, in partnership with @bonhamsscotland and @artwisecurators.

#ArtistsForFirefly #FireflyInternational #Bonhams #ArtForGood by @thebenstreet

The pleasure provided by this work is one very separate from that of Caulfield’s paintings. It’s one of opacities and transparencies intersecting and undermining each other, of things seen as both solid and elusive at once. Drawing can do that, and what it in turn does to the visual world is to subject it to a kind of scepticism.

Caulfield’s looking, which is dramatized in the range of actions of his drawing hand, is a hard stare at the world of objects generally thought of as transparent things. On the whole, we look through, not at, grapes, and in a sense they only become visible to us when they start to rot and shrink. The same might be said for the other subjects of Caulfield’s drawings: bouquets, brushes, lamps, pipes, jugs; all these are objects that are submerged in the backgrounds of our lives up until the point that their failures restore them to visibility.

Caulfield’s drawings show these things in a suspended state of noticing. What we are seeing is a moment of clarity, in which the opacity of things, however briefly, makes itself available.

Read my 2023 text on Patrick Caulfield’s work on paper on my Substack - link where it usually is. by @thebenstreet

A stone was found one day in a riverbed in Mexico. Sometimes you get lucky. This stone, worked free of the river mud and pulled up through the water, was just what was needed. A dark green stone, jade. As it dried in the sun its true colour emerged. Rich like the green of the river itself. Rippled like it too. It was as though the river itself had become solid.

A leap happened in someone’s mind. The jade object could be worked into something else. Tools – sharp stones, perhaps found at the edges of the same river – were put to work. Shaping it, smoothing it. Taking its cue from the natural shape of the object.

Already head-like, the stone became more so. Tools dug out eye sockets, nostrils, a mouth. After weeks of work, the stone was as smooth as human skin and contoured like a human face. Like a human face, but not quite. This was the face of a god.

From “What can ancient objects teach us about artificial intelligence?” - a new essay on my Substack. Link in bio. by @thebenstreet

**SCHOOLS KAYAK TRIP TO GERRY’S OPPORTUNITY** We have one upcoming funded local schools’ trip on Monday 29th June for up to 30 children available. If you are a local school to W9 please get in touch, preferably Primary Years 5 or 6. Recently we have been partnering with the London Sports Trust @ldnsportstrust who enable children access to the water. Here is a short clip of a film (by @jackftg) and images (by @teddycavendish) of some of our recent tours with local children from Queens Park Primary School. The children seemed to really connect with Gerry’s work. They couldn’t believe it had all been made by one man. If you are a school local to Gerry’s Pompeii and are interested in visiting please let us know and you can join our list ready for when we start making our boat trips more regular from spring next year. We are currently working with a broad range of children, educators and art mediators (including @thebenstreet ) to help develop special treasure hunts, navigating and discovering some of the historical figures whom Gerry created and memorialised in his garden ~ if you know a local west London state school who would like to participate in developing this interactive education kit please get in touch gerryspompeii@gmail.com #GerrysPompeii #Schools #Kayak #Art TreasureHunt @sashagalitzine by @thebenstreet