Art Review The Rijksmuseum exhibition raises questions about gender, sexuality, and transformation that it is not prepared to answer.

April 21, 2026 — 5 min read

Jean-Léon Gérôme, “Pygmalion and Galatea” (1890–92), oil on canvas (all photos Zoe Guy/ Hyperallergic unless otherwise noted)

AMSTERDAM — Enter a cramped gallery in Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum, and you’ll be confronted with a chaotic image of creation. Four naked bodies caught in centripetal motion wrestle one another amid a vast emptiness. A graying male figure desperately tries to hold the group together, muscles tensed; his youthful counterpart, stuck between the legs of a visibly distressed woman, clenches errant arms and hands while a second, older woman seems to cry out in pain.…