The Easel

27th June 2017

Wayne Thiebaud: 1962 to 2017 – Americana with a cherry on top

Laura Cumming | The Guardian | 4th June 2017

“Luscious Americana” is this writer’s summation of Thiebaud’s renowned images of pies, cakes, hot dogs, ice creams. But these paintings are more than simple images. “His patisserie is so painterly as to imply all sorts of analogies between subject and style. Yet this way of painting is also very fully itself, independent of its subject. Sweet as pie though they first appear, these paintings are a more pensive form of praise.“

A new window into Wright

Blair Kamin | Chicago Tribune | 11th June 2017

“World’s greatest architect” Frank Lloyd Wright once declared of himself. Wright’s many projects often drew on a central idea – “organic” architecture that harmonised people and the landscape. “Despite Wright’s mothlike attraction to the flame of celebrity, he was deeply engaged with the essential question of how buildings can uplift the lives of individuals and communities.” Images and a video (4 min) are here.

Lustre for life: how John Singer Sargent reinvented the watercolour

Jackie Wullschlager | ft.com | 23rd June 2017

By mid-career Sargent was booked solid doing portraits of the rich and famous. Watercolours were his way of relaxing. He never gave these works much emphasis but they now seem a substantial achievement. “Most of this show is lush prewar Sargent, who in watercolour really became modern, rewriting high culture as a threatened montage of changing perspectives, passing instants”.  A video is here (2 min) and images here.

The ‘August Sander’ Show At Hauser & Wirth Reaffirms Photography As Art Form

Adam Lehrer | Forbes | 1st May 2017

Physiognomy – the inference of personality from someone’s appearance – doesn’t work. But a century ago it motivated Sander to photograph thousands of his fellow Germans. “All of his subjects seem to wear labor like a badge. [Sander said] allow me to be honest and tell the truth about our age and its people”. Sadly, he didn’t prove the theory but did lay the foundations of fine art photography. Some images are here.

Image: Hauser and Wirth

The value of art without value

Hayden Vernon | Times Literary Supplement | 26th June 2017

If an artwork is damaged is it still art? Not if, according to art insurers, it cannot be repaired for a reasonable cost. In some cases the damage may be scarcely visible. All of which makes for an odd dividing line between art and everyday objects. “Totalled [written off] art is no longer considered art because it has its market value removed, but it can be otherwise unchanged when the damage is superficial.”

The most celebrated work of modernism that almost nobody has seen

Martin Gayford | The Spectator | 24th June 2017

Romania’s communist regime apparently thought Brancusi’s art to be degenerate. So they tried to pull down the tall column which is the centerpiece of his monument to Romanian war heroes. The attempt was unsuccessful though it left the sculpture bent. Now restored, it is regarded as one of the great pieces of twentieth century sculpture. The somewhat fraught story of its conservation is here.

The fusion paintings of Fahrelnissa Zeid

G G-H | The Economist | 14th June 2017

Zeid’s life is every bit as exotic as her art. Born into the elite of Turkish society, family wealth enabled an art education at home and in Europe. Her increasingly abstract style fused the modernist ideas sweeping through Paris and London with the Bysantine and Islamic influences of her region. And, as with many other female artists, her efforts were quickly forgotten. An interesting video (3 min) is here.

Calder: Hypermobility 2017

Jill Spalding | Studio International | 18th June 2017

We are so used to Calder’s works that it’s easy to forget how radical he was. His leap of inspiration – from observing Mondrian’s work to thinking kinetic sculpture – was huge. “[His work], freed from coffee tables and institutional lawns, regains its purity of intent, abstracted once again into the primary tools of form, shape, line and movement … you realise that a Calder is in its essence its own language, a vocabulary of fresh ideas.”

5 photos that prove Marlene Dietrich never gave into the haters

Kristen Page-Kirby | The Washington Post | 15th June 2017

Marlene Dietrich was a supreme exponent of ‘life as art’. As she famously said “’I dress for the image. Not for myself, not for the public, not for fashion, not for men.” Exploiting her status as an international film star, she created an independent female persona that was (and remains) widely influential in film, fashion and popular culture. Multiple images are here.

Why does contemporary art make for wildly popular blockbusters?

Judith Dobrzynski | Aeon | 18th June 2017

A lament about the ubiquity of contemporary art shows. With few exceptions, crowds don’t show up for exhibitions of art not made in the last few few decades. Sponsors are thus reluctant to support such events. “[D]irectors struggle to make ‘old art’ seem ‘relevant’, whatever that means, but contemporary art gets a pass on that score because it is made in the present. We become, in short, less sophisticated.”

Minoru Onoda, Circle Master from Japan’s Gutai Group

Edward Gomez | Hyperallergic | 17th June 2017

Wartime Japan had an isolated, totalitarian culture. New freedoms emerged after the war and were used by the avant-garde Gutai group to ‘do what has never been done before’. Their work is now recognised as thoroughly original, at “the cutting edge of world culture.” And Onoda, for one, dreamed big: he wanted his “dizzying oceans of colored dots” to cover “wall and ceiling, but [also] the road and the car”.

John D. Graham and “Another Way of Making Modern Art”

Thomas Micchelli | Hyperallergic | 3rd June 2017

European emigres arrived in 1920’s America in such numbers that they created a new avant garde. None of the newcomers was to prove more influential than John Graham. Steeped in the theories of Jung, he advocated painting from the unconscious. His own portraits show this with their psychosexual undercurrents. But the idea caught on even more among those around him – de Kooning and particularly a young Jackson Pollock.

Tracing Seismic Culture from its Highs to its Lows

Brandon Sward | Newcity | 6th June 2017

Reviewers seem flummoxed by Murakami. He doesn’t see a difference between high and low art. Fine – but given the multiple assistants, his manga characters and the slick marketing, is he serious? “[The show is] more like watching someone capitalize on whatever happens to resonate… are we all moving toward a world wherein there is no difference between avant-garde and kitsch?” An excellent video (7.5 min) is here and more images here.

13th June 2017

It Takes Two Museums to Cover the work of this Prolific German Neo-Expressionist

Roger Catlin | Smithsonian.com | 6th June 2017

On the event of his first US retrospective Lüpertz cheerfully reveals his forthright views. Basically, new media is fine but painting is what matters. “You can’t do anything differently, whether it’s Baselitz or me there is no difference. All we can do is put a brush to a canvas. Caravaggio couldn’t do anything differently. The individual aspect of art is the artist … and that’s the exciting and wonderful part of painting.”

A must see: Dorothea Lange’s remarkable photographs at OMCA

Emily Mendel | Berkeleyside | 15th May 2017

Lange is commonly referred to as a social activist but that’s not how she saw it. She said she just wanted to show the truth. Her portraits of people who fled to California from the Dust Bowl are iconic images of poor America.  “Five years earlier, I would have thought it enough to take a picture of a man, no more. But now, I wanted to take a picture of a man as he stood in his world.” More images are here.

Paul Carey-Kent Writes on Ding Yi at Timothy Taylor Gallery

Paul Carey-Kent | ABCRIT | 4th June 2017

Ding Yi never liked China’s trendy political pop art. Instead he started making abstract paintings using just “x” and “+” marks. But that doesn’t mean they could be robotically generated. “There’s an emotional element to it. And that’s vital. A painting is a flat object, hung on a wall in silence – it has to offer the viewer something they can’t get enough off, that they can’t be finished with.”  An excellent commentary by the artist is here

10 art spectacles not to miss at Documenta 14 in Kassel

Charmaine Li | The Spaces | 9th June 2017

Documenta is a prestigious five yearly art event held in Kassel, Germany. This year for the first time an additional venue, Athens, has been used. The Athens part of the event received a muted reception. Being well funded, the Kassel show is huge and diverse – even disjointed according to one critic. Coverage of the opening press conference with the curators is here.

Portraiture rules, Part 1

Emily Catrice | Saatchi Gallery Magazine | 10th June 2017

Semiotics – the study of signs and symbols – is used to analyse a portrait of Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge. Her choice of a (very costly) painting rather than a (costly) photograph “demonstrates her assimilation into the royal family as only wealth can”. The image itself communicates “a modern monarchy consciously keen to assert itself as less ostentatious, yet as a powerful unfading institution nonetheless.”

The continued expansion of Art Basel

Ben Eastham | Apollo | 7th June 2017

Art Basel has opened and has over $3bn of art for sale. “Basel remains the fair to which galleries bring their best work. [It’s] increasingly diverse programme [reflects] the art market’s enthusiastic colonisation … of other cultural fields, in particular experimental film and theatre. Art Basel follows the contemporary art world’s broader shift away from its historic focus on objects towards the production and sale of experiences.” Really?

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