Rebecca Ness Rewrites Art History as Personal Inheritance

Rebecca Ness opens her latest exhibition with a claim of ownership. In "Inheritance," she declares that all of art history belongs as much to her as to anyone else — and she backs the statement with paint.

The show's premise inverts the conventional meaning of its title. Inheritance, Ness suggests, usually makes us think of money: handing down heirlooms after a loved one passes, or being next in line for the deed to the family house. A one-way street, an open-and-shut door. For the artist, inheritance is closer to transformation — taking something old and making it new.

Ness pursues that transformation by revisiting and updating historical paintings in contemporary contexts. The centerpiece intervention targets Édouard Manet's "A Bar at the Folies Bergère" (1882), the Courtauld's famous meditation on spectatorship and reflection. In Ness's hands, the 19th-century café scene becomes a crowded, sweaty night at Cubbyhole, the West Village lesbian institution. The barmaid's guarded gaze finds its contemporary equivalent in a room full of bodies.

A second body of work takes on the 19th-century trompe l'oeil board paintings of William Harnett and John F. Peto, the American still-life specialists who painted racks of letters, tickets and scraps with deceptive flatness. Ness updates the format as a corkboard assembled with cut-out and crumpled pages from art history textbooks alongside photographs of the artist herself — a Pinterest board brought to life, with the artist physically inserted into the canon she is quoting.

The paintings carry the argument. Works such as "Orange Wall" (2026), oil on linen, show Ness working at full scale in a tradition she simultaneously inhabits and revises. By quoting Manet, Harnett and Peto rather than painting around them, she treats the canon as material — something to be handled, crumpled, pinned up and repurposed rather than revered from a distance.

The move carries weight beyond homage. Updating "A Bar at the Folies Bergère" at a lesbian bar recasts who gets to stand behind the counter and who gets to look. Replacing Harnett's and Peto'sVictorian ephemera with torn textbook pages makes the point explicit: the sources of art history are not finished monuments but available stock, and the artist's own image belongs on the board.

"Inheritance" positions Ness within a lineage of painters who have claimed the museum's contents as raw material for the present. Whether the claim sticks will depend on what she does next with the tradition she has just checked out.