The Easel

13th February 2018

12 Masterful Portraits Leave Their Castle For The First Time

Wendy Moonan | 1stdibs | 29th January 2018

Velazquez was the greater painter but, still, Zurbarán was a star of the Spanish Baroque. Velazquez went off to the royal court but devout Zurbarán painted for churches and monasteries. Probably intended for churches in the New World these monumental portraits instead ended up in rural England, scarcely to be seen in 250 years. Zurbarán, it seems, “is about to be rediscovered yet again”. A discussion of the paintings is here.

Vija Celmins’ L.A. show: Chalkboards, ocean waves and other improbable wonders

Leah Ollman | LA Times | 12th February 2018

Post-war American artists reacted differently to surrealism. It inspired Pollock to tap into the unconscious to express universal truths.  Celmins, in contrast, has pursued an art of “extreme” attention to detail. Her images of the night sky, ocean waves, the desert, seemingly are without perspective. As a result they evoke “vastness [and] a deeply personal, interior process”.  An older but more helpful review is here.

Moralism and the Arts

Ian Buruma | Project Syndicate | 6th February 2018

Caravaggio, Rembrandt, Picasso, Balthus, Chuck Close: a rogue’s gallery of the #Metoo movement! Should these artists’ works be dismissed because of misdeeds, proven or otherwise? “To judge the moral component of artistic expression, then, we must look … at the work itself. Some art is meant to provoke … People can do things in works of imagination that they would never do in life.”

Nixon’s Angels

Elin Spring | What Will You Remember? | 1st January 2018

In 1975 Nixon did a portrait of his wife and her three sisters. They agreed to a repeat the following year – and now there is a sequence of 43 such annual portraits. “The Brown Sisters” has brought fame and exemplifies Nixon’s broad body of work – a “dogged inquisitiveness into … the fragility, resilience and hope that arise from our human connections. [His images] aren’t always pretty, but their beauty is resounding.”

How Gordon Matta-Clark Saw the City

Jillian Steinhauer | New Republic | 5th February 2018

The Bronx in the early 70’s was crumbling due both to the city’s poor finances and a lack of interest. Matta-Clark thought this an abandonment of public responsibility because buildings help form civic identity. So he set about putting artful cuts into walls, floors and roofs of derelict buildings – a mashup of sculpture, architecture and painting.  His ideas remain influential – notably with superstar architect Frank Gehry.

The Artist Questioning Authorship

Calvin Tomkins | The New Yorker | 29th January 2018

Long but interesting essay about conceptual artist Danh Vo. His family were Vietnamese refugees and the experience seems to echo. His work mostly comprises objects—collected, collaged, repurposed – that are in some way ambiguous. He is a “hunter and gatherer” says his gallerist. The curator of his Guggenheim show is more poetic: he expresses “vagaries of lived experience and the flickering instability of the self”.

Love and Theft

James McAulay | Even | 8th February 2018

A 2013 discovery of a hoard of artworks acquired by Hitler’s art dealer, Cornelius Gurlitt, has created endless problems. To whom do these works really belong? Were they all looted? Why is this art being displayed when much is of “no particular distinction?” “What purpose does it serve to exhibit this? [The victims], in the end, are all that matters. How and why the Gurlitts slept with lies is their problem.”

6th February 2018

Philip Pearlstein: Paintings 1990 – 2017

Emily Spicer | Studio International | 30th January 2018

His friendship with Warhol is marketing catnip but far from the most interesting thing about Pearlstein. He championed realism when it was not popular to do so. Further his paintings feature nudes which are posed, factual and remote – almost the opposite of the erotic pin-up. This is strange art leaving the viewer to wonder – focus on the bodies, the objects around them or the “rules” that give rise to such a deliberate tableau?

Down with blockbusters! James Bradburne on the art of running a museum

Richard Holledge | ft.com | 22nd January 2018

A reforming museum director bemoans the scarcity of passion about art and wants museums to change this. Excluding temporary exhibitions “permanent collections are, in fact, losing business. [Don’t] confuse an excellent collection with an excellent museum. We need a Copernican revolution in which you put the museum at the heart of the community and visitors at the centre of the museum.” (You may have to click on “Skip Survey” to bypass the FT paywall)

Kiefer Rodin at The Barnes

Julia Cliff | Title | 18th December 2017

Kiefer’s visit to Musée Rodin has led to an exhibition about the “compelling dialogue” between the two artists. Their interests overlap – Rodin’s passion for Gothic cathedrals and Kiefer’s interest in sculpture/architecture. Sadly, and not for the first time, hackles are raised by the more erotic works. Rodin’s drawings carry “a whiff of misogyny” while Kiefer’s are “woefully unskilled and fail utterly to transcend their perviness.”

“Art” A Brief Retrospective on the Legal Term

Michelle Pham | Helsell Fetterman | 26th January 2018

You know there is going to be trouble when the law has to decide what is, and is not, art. “U.S. Customs officials did not see a bird in Constantin Brancusi’s Bird in Space and refused to exempt it as a work of art when it arrived at New York Harbor in October 1926. Instead, they classified it as a “kitchen utensil” and imposed a standard 40 percent tariff on the sale price.”

This piece originally appeared in The SciTech Lawyer and has been made available with the kind permission of the author

Imagining President Donald Trump Sitting on Maurizio Cattelan’s Solid-Gold Toilet

Jerry Saltz | Vulture | 29th January 2018

Amidst an anti-Trump rant, some interesting points about art. Duchamp argued that context gives meaning to art. Does the fracas over the Guggenheim’s action add meaning to Cattelan’s toilet, making it a better sculpture? Would installation in the White House have made it a different artwork – or perhaps not an artwork at all? At least one critic disapproves: “an erudite potty joke but a potty joke all the same”.

Fabergé And The Russian Crafts Tradition: An Empire’s Legacy

Karla Klein Albertson | Antiques and the Arts Weekly | 30th January 2018

Peter Carl Fabergé was part of a crafts tradition going back centuries. Tsarist patronage of the arts was partly intended as a demonstration of national prowess – and Fabergé eggs do nothing if not that. Bolshevik ambitions were, of course, far more muscular and, after 1917, some of these exquisite objects came to Europe in the arms of emigres. No longer symbolic they are now merely objects of “otherworldly beauty”.

The Eternal Peter Hujar

Sarah Nicole Prickett | Document | 29th January 2018

A tinge of romance attaches to New York’s Lower East Side of the 1970’s. Amidst the urban decay important artists were emerging – Warhol, Basquiat, Mapplethorpe. Hujar was confident that fame would eventually find him, too. His friends thought likewise “In his portraits, he doesn’t exert the gaze, which is the norm of most photography. He met people where they lived. He is the greatest portraitist of the twentieth century.”

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