The Easel

7th March 2018

EASEL ESSAY: Now you’re over the sticker shock, what about the art?

Morgan Meis | The-Easel | 6th March 2018

The sale of da Vinci’s Salvator Mundi for over $US400m was an art world bombshell. Amidst the ensuing debate there was very little commentary about the work itself. Morgan Meis picks up that story.

“The central failing of Mona Lisa is that it presents mystery simply for the sake of mystery. Salvator Mundi, by contrast, is nothing but tension and great ideas. This is a work that tackles one of painting’s central dilemmas: How do you represent the unrepresentable? The painting that we now have before us is, I am arguing, more classically a Leonardo painting than the Mona Lisa. There is magic in the painting and there is mystery… This is not sfumato for the sake of sfumato. It’s sfumato at the service of the profound.”

Sally Mann: A great artist who loves tumbling into trouble

Sebastian Smee | The Washington Post | 28th February 2018

Mann is from the US South and its history shows in her work – family, mortality, racism. Images of her young children naked brought both acclaim and controversy, the latter seemingly a 1990’s over-reaction. “[Her work] looks caught up in some warped romance with the past, which nonetheless looks greater than almost everything around it.” More images are here.

Answering Society’s Thorniest Problems, With Performance Art

Megan O’Grady | The New York Times | 2nd March 2018

Part profile of the artist Pope.L, part defence of performance art.  “[E]verything the artist touches is imbued with elements of theatre“– crawling Manhattan’s streets, sitting atop a tower eating the Wall St Journal, chaining himself to an ATM using a string of sausages. While only on “the periphery of fame, [Pope.L is] the most significant performance artist of our time”.

Team Gallery’s Jose Freire on Why He Is Quitting Art Fairs for Good

Andrew Goldstein | artnet news | 5th March 2018

Gallerists love art fairs. Well, maybe not all. “All the conversations I’ve had are about how much people dislike them. The booth costs, the exchange rate, the fabrication costs, shipping … If you show a work in your gallery and you don’t sell it, it somehow accrues value, because … it has an exhibition history. If you show a work at a fair and it doesn’t sell, the value is gone. It’s burned.”

Why MoMA’s Exhibition of Towering Brazilian Modernist Tarsila do Amaral Misses the Mark

Sara Roffino | artnet news | 1st March 2018

Tarsila is feted in Brazil as a modernist pioneer but little known elsewhere. New York’s MoMA wants to connect her to Paris, Léger and cubism, underplaying her Brazilian roots.  Complains this writer “This exhibition seems to have been planned in a bubble.” Tarsila’s story is much more than a response to “Eurocentric art history”.

27th February 2018

Brassaï, The Photographer of the Paris Night

Staff | Clavoardiendo | 20th February 2018

This “unprecedented” survey probably says nothing new about Brassaï. But then it doesn’t really need to, such is the fame of his images of 1930’s Paris. Acclaim came quickly as Brassaï showed the artistic potential of photography. He described his artistic impulse as seeking to show “a sense of the magic beneath the surface of reality.” More images are here.

Betty Woodman’s Path to a Revolution Made of Ceramics

Audrey V | Widewalls | 4th January 2018

Of the key obstacles to her acceptance – gender and being a ceramicist – Woodman felt the latter was bigger. “When I started out, ceramics was not even a material you made art out of”. In her hands the humble vase morphed from domestic object to art piece. She was the first living female artist to get a retrospective at New York’s Met. A superb video (20 min) is here.

Picking apart the Internet: An exhibition that addresses the elephant in the room

Sebastian Smee | The Washington Post | 22nd February 2018

In 1991 the internet was just text and hyperlinks. Now it is so all-encompassing it influences our sense of ourselves, our sense of the truth. The art that it inspires has “alternative narratives”, suggesting experimentation more than consensus. “In many places, the exhibition is hard-going. The wall labels, inevitably, are Proustian — in length if not in spirit.”

The Impossible Task of Photographing Afghanistan

Sean Sheehan | Lensculture | 23rd February 2018

Which photographic approach better captures the ‘truth’ about Afghanistan– focusing on its stark beauty or the ravages of its war?  Two recent books differ. Of the more prominent book “The question as to whether McCurry’s beauty illuminates or obscures remains open. To me, his pictures’ unbroken radiance appears suspect.” More images are here and here.

Design Luminaries Remember The Extraordinary Wendell Castle

Ted Loos | 1stdibs | 23rd February 2018

Did Castle make furniture or sculpture? He didn’t think there was any difference. His vision of “sculptural furniture” started with creations in laminated wood but blossomed with a move into bright plastics.  His signature creations were sinuous, biomorphic chairs and tables. In the view of one commentator “the most important post-war American furniture designer by a long shot.”

New Museum Triennial

Ania Szremski | 4Columns | 23rd February 2018

The New Museum Triennial disappoints different critics in different ways. One grumbles that it “keeps its voice low”. Another says the show is “a glass one-quarter full”. A source of this irritation is its belaboured politics. It is “easy listening art … letting us bask in feel-good consensus.” Overall, there are too few works that “are satisfied to be artworks, not instigations.”

When Artists Move from the Margins to the Center

James Gibbons | Hyperallergic | 10th February 2018

‘Outsider art’ is a slippery concept. As the writer suggests, it mostly refers to artists who, because of poverty or institutionalisation, are at the margins of the art world. More important, though, is what our eyes see: “exemplars of vitality, ingenuity, sincerity, and a bracing lack of polish … It’s inconceivable the significance of outsider art will ever recede from view.” Multiple images are here.

Older links
Newer links