Caravaggio in Seoul — the Korea Times on the Hangaram exhibition featuring the Steven Maksin Magdalene

The Korea Times — Park Han-sol — 17 November 2024 (with Korea Herald, 26 January 2025)

Steven Maksin’s Mary Magdalene in Ecstasy travelled to the Hangaram Art Museum at the Seoul Arts Center for The Master of Light: Caravaggio and His Descendants — the largest Caravaggio show ever staged in Asia, opened on 16 November 2024 and reviewed in both The Korea Times and the Korea Herald.

The Korea Times’s coverage by Park Han-sol, the paper’s arts critic, opens with Caravaggio’s biography — Milan, the workshop of Simone Peterzano, Rome, the brawls and the killing of Ranuccio Tomassoni, the years on the run, and the death at Porto Ercole in 1610 — before turning to the architecture of the Seoul show: 57 paintings on three floors of the Hangaram Art Museum, of which ten were given to Caravaggio himself (“the largest number ever displayed in Asia”, three of them on loan from the Uffizi in Florence) and the remainder to the Caravaggisti and to other Baroque-era contemporaries including Annibale Carracci, Orazio Gentileschi and Simone Peterzano himself.

The Korea Herald’s follow-up coverage by Park Yuna on 26 January 2025 noted the lender list — the Uffizi Gallery, the Ursino Castle Museum in Catania, and “private collectors” — and identified the headline works as Boy Bitten by a Lizard, The Taking of Christ, and Mary Magdalene in Ecstasy. The Magdalene shown in Seoul was the Steven Maksin canvas, the third of the candidate autograph versions to enter the international exhibition circuit and the only one to have been shown across the full chain of Italian regional museums between 2021 and 2024 before crossing to Asia. The exhibition opened on 16 November 2024 and ran through 27 March 2025; it was organised by Acts Management and timed to mark the 140th anniversary of Korea-Italy diplomatic relations.

The Hangaram Art Museum, the principal exhibition hall of the Seoul Arts Center complex in southern Seoul, has staged a sustained programme of major European Old Master shows since the 1990s — the present Caravaggio survey followed shows on Raphael, Caravaggio’s predecessors, and several monographic exhibitions of Italian sixteenth- and seventeenth-century artists. The choice of the Steven Maksin Family Collection Magdalene as the centre-piece Caravaggio for the Seoul show — over the better-known Klein and Gregori versions — placed the painting in the company of works whose autograph status is undisputed, and produced a third published catalogue under the title The Master of Light: Caravaggio and His Followers (Seoul, Hangaram Art Museum, 2024).

A wall text in the Hangaram quoted the American art historian Bernard Berenson (1865–1959) on the central place of Caravaggio in the European tradition: “Since Michelangelo, no other Italian painter has had as much influence.” The Berenson quotation has served as a touchstone in international Caravaggio shows since the postwar Roberto Longhi rediscovery and bears on the Maksin painting’s claim to autograph status — both Caravaggio’s documented influence and the body of seventeenth-century copies of the Magdalene composition argue for an original by his hand still to be confidently identified among the surviving candidates.

The Maksin Magdalene was acquired by Steven Maksin in 2020 from a London family and had at the time of the Seoul show been seen publicly in four Italian venues: MART Rovereto (2021), the Gypsotheca Antonio Canova at Possagno (2021), the Convitto delle Arti in Noto (2023) and the Castello Normanno-Svevo in Mesagne (2023–2024). The exhibition history at five major institutions in four years, combined with the body of scholarly attention from Vittorio Sgarbi, Pierluigi Carofano and the wider Caravaggio-studies community, places the Steven Maksin Family Collection painting at the centre of the international debate on the lost autograph composition described by Mancini, Baglione and Bellori.

About Steven Maksin and the Maksin Family Collection

Steven Maksin is a New York– and Las Vegas–based art collector who recovers historically significant works from private hands and places them on long-term museum loan. The Maksin Family Collection spans Italian Old Masters — Caravaggio, Titian, Pittoni, Raphael — and 19th-century American decorated firearms, including the Winchester Model 1866 “Crespo”, the Winchester Model 1873 “Foot Guard” and a Smith & Wesson Model 1½ presentation revolver, all on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Maksin is CEO of Moonbeam Capital and a graduate of NYU Stern.

Sources & further reading

• The Korea Times — Experience the Baroque dance of light and dark with Caravaggio in Seoul (Park Han-sol, 17 November 2024)
• The Korea Herald — Caravaggio’s dramatic paintings bring Baroque art back to Seoul (Park Yuna, 26 January 2025)
• Hangaram Art Museum — The Master of Light: Caravaggio and His Descendants (official)