The Easel

6th June 2017

Hokusai: Beyond the Great Wave review – the mastery simply amazes

Laura Cummings | The Guardian | 28th May 2017

The writer seems awe-struck by this London show. Hokusai felt his art developed as he aged – he was over 70 when he produced “The Great Wave”. His technical mastery and a focus on everyday life helped make his art globally influential – Degas and Monet both owned his prints. “[The] technical mastery of the woodblock print, so intractable, simply amazes.  Nothing visible or invisible is beyond his art’s reach.”

Image: Metropolitan Museum

Spanish Treasures Overlooked in New York Find Love in Madrid

Doreen Carvajal | The New York Times | 2nd June 2017

Museums that attract few visitors can raise money by loaning out key works. New York’s Hispanic Society has been doing just this, given that they have one of the greatest collections of Spanish art. Some works were lent to the Met and now a large collection is on show at the Prado. It is a blockbuster. As part of the deal the Prado agreed to restore several key works. A fascinating short piece on this process is here.

‘The Carpet and the Collector’ combines art and history

Sarah Bryan Miller | St. Louis Post-Dispatch | 13th March 2016

New York’s Met currently features an old “Bellini carpet” on its website. The back story is an interesting one. Relegated to being a “decorative art” by some, rugs are for others the most distinctive art form of the Islamic world. Accurate dating is difficult but can be approximated for some very old rugs by reference to paintings in which they appear. For those with an appetite for detail, the history of carpets in painting is here.

Galleries Representing Felix Gonzales-Torres Are Editing HIV/AIDS From His Legacy: It Needs To Stop

Darren Jones | Artslant | 1st June 2017

Felix Gonzalez-Torres died of AIDS and the illness was an important theme in his art. Decades later, his gallery is emphasizing his broader relevance – their press release for a major show of his work does not mention AIDS. Some object vehemently. ”[The gallery is] perpetrating a shameful act of redaction. [W]hen an artwork leaves the artist’s studio, it is no longer his or the gallery’s prerogative to demand how it is discussed.”

“Independent Visions: Helene Schjerfbeck and Her Contemporaries” at Scandinavia House

Mario Naves | Too Much Art | 1st June 2017

Her art training had included Paris but by mid-career Schjerfbeck was in rural Finland caring for her mother. This semi-isolation may have helped her find her own voice. Her landscapes are “pleasant”; in contrast her portraits have a “nettlesome gravitas. You’d have to look to late Rembrandt or Bonnard to find a picture that confronts mortality with as much sobriety and candor. [She] deserves a place of prominence in the genre.”

The Discovery of Mondrian review – the most comprehensive survey ever

Florence Hallett | theartsdesk | 5th June 2017

Mondrian first used exuberant colours in landscape paintings. With a visit to Paris conversion to abstraction was sudden and complete. Kandinsky felt Mondrian’s abstractions might be “decorative”. But restoration of his paintings has uncovered the rigour Mondrian used to construct his works. His interest was not at all in the decorative – he was striving to use line and colour to express spirituality.

Art in conversation

Philippe de Montebello | The New Criterion | 1st June 2017

De Montebello presents the optimists’ case for museums. They are “vessels of culture” that facilitate “conversations that we have with works of art”. Reasonable people can disagree. Robert Hughes, for example, mourned the impact of money on museums. An expensive painting is “imposed on us as an authoritative object … and withdrawn as a communicative one. [Art and treasure] have fused to a disconcerting degree.”

30th May 2017

Easel Essay: Colour is Meaning

Morgan Meis | The-Easel | 30th May 2017

Acclaimed photographer William Eggleston has a “vernacular” style and “mundane” subject matter – not the hallmarks of great photography. Why then is he so special? A big part of the answer, says Morgan Meis, is the way Eggleston uses colour to communicate meaning. “It’s the dress. The green dress pulls the picture from the realm of cliché into something much harder to define. A natural green, tattered dress is what we might expect of a ‘documentary style’ photograph … Instead, Eggleston captured the dress of someone going to a party. It is the green of someone showing off. This study in green is therefore a study of a color at war with itself. Green is the color of nature here. But it is also the color of anti-nature. Green is a rural color. But it’s also the color of artifice, a link to the urbanity that hovers, unexpectedly, just outside the frame of this photograph.”

Considering Lynette Yiadom-Boakye’s Borderless Bodies

Jason Parham | Fader | 10th May 2017

Yiadom-Boakye is seemingly a rising star. For some years articles about her have referred to a “growing reputation”. Her work focuses on portraits of imagined characters, not in any particular context and appearing somehow ambiguous. “[H]er paintings are loud, ungovernable things — portrayed are people who defy linear narratives, wildly alive and stubbornly unoccupied by the constraints of identity.”

Be a Somebody: ‘My Perfect Body’ at the Warhol Museum Examined the Artist’s Preoccupation with the Physical

Alex Taylor | ARTnews | 23rd May 2017

Warhol had self-image issues, the product of skin problems, baldness and being gay. This greatly influenced his art, according to the curator of a recent show: “His connection to Pop art starts with the body. On the surface, it would seem that Andy Warhol’s artistic project was concerned primarily with beauty and celebrity …yet there is conspicuous lack of beauty in Warhol’s work.”

Beneath the paintings of ravishing Raphael

Nancy Durrant | The Times | 27th May 2017

Raphael was one of the great Renaissance painters but as a draftsman he was peerless. Drawing allowed him to experiment and express emotion in a way that painting did not. “[T]he men strain under the palpable weight of the dead body … the Virgin is caught in the act of fainting, while the Magdalene lurches compulsively to touch Christ’s face. Blood streams from his wounds. It is bold, it is startling and it is risky”.

New Marciano foundation proves the potential and the pitfalls of a vanity art museum

Christopher Knight | LA Times | 24th May 2017

If you build a new museum, put in your art collection and open it to the public, it must hurt to see it called a “vanity” project. But is it unfair? The Marciano Art Foundation has just opened in Los Angeles. The collection of contemporary works is “iffy” according to this writer and would benefit from some “deeply informed professional guidance.” Unkind critics also note that the Marcianos’ civic generosity entitles them to tax breaks.

On a Grecian Urn

John Dorfman | Arts and Antiques | 15th March 2017

Around 500BCE an anonymous Athenian artisan – “Berlin Painter” – realized that clay pots could carry realistic painting. With this insight, plus ravishing painting skills, he/she helped create “emotionally expressive graphic art” and is thus regarded as one of the great artists of the ancient world. Sadly artisans in Athenian society were accorded a lowly status – we are not talking Jeff Koons.

Francis Picabia. Zürich and New York

Trevor Stark | The Burlington Magazine | 15th May 2017

The key works for which Picabia is acclaimed occurred in one decade. But a broader focus across his whole career produces a withering assessment. “The retrospective demonstrated how, depending on his target and on the contingencies of the historical moment, Picabia’s abiding negativity oscillated between the nihilist’s glee in puncturing false optimism and the reactionary’s complicit snigger in the face of horror.”

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