The Easel

4th July 2017

Sophie Calle at Fort Mason: Reports from love’s front lines

Charles Desmarais | San Francisco Chronicle | 1st July 2017

It’s difficult to be precise about the art of celebrated French conceptual artist Sophie Calle. A gallery blurb says her projects deal with issues of absence and loss. She based one such project on a break-up email received from a lover. Calle circulated the note to a wide circle of women requesting their analysis “without pathos”. An excellent background piece sums up her work thus: “autobiography wrung dry of all emotion”.

Myth-Maker of the Brothel

Ian Buruma | The New York Review of Books | 29th June 2017

Utamaro painted refined scenes of beautiful women in Tokyo’s brothels. In truth this “floating world” was not so glamorous nor he its habitué. His celebrated paintings possibly had rather prosaic origins: “Politically oppressive, the authorities nonetheless gave license to men to indulge themselves in amusement. Sex, kept in bounds by rules of social etiquette, was less threatening … than political activity.”

Otto Dix at Tate Liverpool: a portrait of a crumbling Germany

Claudia Pritchard | iNews | 22nd June 2017

Returning from the trenches of WW1, Dix felt the sacrifice of soldiers was little appreciated. Then the Roaring Twenties arrived. His unforgiving portraits depicted Weimar society living on borrowed time. Disliking his candour the Nazis labeled him a degenerate.  Dix declared “I need the connection to the sensual world, and the courage to expose ugliness and life undiluted.” He had that courage. More images are here.

Small Wonders at the Rijksmuseum: a treasure trove for the soul

Christine Medycky | DutchNews.nl | 21st June 2017

For Delft’s well-to-do in the 1500’s carved prayer beads and devotional miniatures were their Rolex equivalents.  Made from hard boxwood, these beautiful objects are so intricate that CT scanners are needed to discover all their details. Attempts to reproduce them with modern tools, or using 3D printers, have mostly been unsuccessful. Some astonishing images are here.

Gathering Dust

Marion Coutts | 1843 | 15th June 2017

When practicing his photography Man Ray took a shot of a dusty surface that is now renowned for its ambiguity. It prompted the curator of a London show to wonder if twentieth century history can be described “from the perspective of dust”? Dust is “a harbinger of disturbance. This is dust as history, settling in the aftermath of events.” A short essay by the curator and more images are here.

How documenta 14 Failed Everyone but its Curators

Jeni Fulton | Sleek | 2nd July 2017

A rant about curatorial earnestness. “On day two of the press review … I was sick of being lectured to. Was it the four hour press conference we’d been subject to on the opening day … or a 40 minute atonal piece for solo violin? Very little could be established as a fact … the curators eschewing such banal things as artists’ biographies. [R]efusing commentary not only disservices the viewer, but the artwork itself.”

The Unfinished Palazzo: Life, Love and Art in Venice by Judith Mackrell

Nancy Durrant | The Times | 13th May 2017

A harmless bit of art history fun. Peggy Guggenheim was famous first because of family wealth and then again by her prescient support of new modern artists. Retreating from New York, she acquired a Venice palazzo with a colourful history that provides the narrative for a newly published book. The building now houses the glorious Peggy Guggenheim Collection, one of the ‘must see’ attractions of that city.

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.

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