Museum acquisitions round-up: a double-sided print by Kirchner and one of the most depicted Black models in pre-20th century art

Portrait of Pierre Louis Alexandre (around 1879-80) by Alma Holsteinson

Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO)

Born in French Guyana, Pierre Louis Alexandre (1844-1905) is one of the most depicted Black models in pre-20th century art. Having stowed away on an American cargo ship, Alexandre arrived in Stockholm in 1863, where he worked at the docks and as a life model at the city’s Royal Academy of Fine Arts. It was there that he was painted by the young Swedish artist Alma Holsteinson, likely in the same session as her fellow student Karin Larsson’s portrait of Alexandre, which depicts him in the same pose and clothes, acquired by the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, in 2024. The Holsteinson painting was sold at Bukowskis in Stockholm in December 2024 for 760,000 kronor ($82,200), over seven times the estimate, and has now been purchased by the AGO. Caroline Shields, the curator of European art at the museum, says the acquisition helps progress the museum’s aim of “representing a more expansive history of Europe and the global interconnectedness of the African Diaspora”.

Portraits of Botho Graef and Hugo Biallowons (1915) by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner

Jena Kunstsammlung, Germany

This double-sided print depicts the archaeologist and art historian Botho Graef (1857-1917) on the front (right) and his partner Hugo Biallowons (1879-1916) to the verso. Graef was a champion of young artists, particularly those of the Brücke group, in the early 20th century. Kirchner was close friends with Graef and Biallowons—after Graef died, Kirchner wrote: “He did me so much good… It feels to me as if my father were dead, more, much more”. The print, which has been in a German private collection for 50 years and has been bought using a contribution from the Ernst von Siemens Art Foundation, was originally in Graef’s enormous holdings, to which Kirchner donated 260 woodcuts, lithographs and etchings after the historian’s death. The collection was confiscated by the Nazis in 1937 and, deemed “degenerate art”, partially destroyed.

RPM (revolutions per minute) (2018) by Jennie C. Jones

Blanton Museum of Art, Austin

The University of Texas’s Blanton Museum of Art has acquired RPM (revolutions per minute), a 2018 audio work by Jennie C. Jones (right) for its Butler Sound Gallery. Jones, who undertook the 2025 Metropolitan Museum of Art Roof Garden commission with a sound installation called Ensemble, works across paintings, sculpture, installations and audio compositions, and describes her practice as an exploration of “listening as a conceptual act”. RPM was originally commissioned for The Glass House, the architect Philip Johnson’s famous Modernist house in Connecticut, and is a minimalist audio collage, running for nearly four minutes on a loop. It has been acquired for Blanton’s outdoor space dedicated to sound art, which was built using a $5m gift from the Texan philanthropists Sarah and Ernest Butler; the Butler Sound Gallery Endowment also provided the funds to buy Jones’s work.