It’s odd to say Brancusi “exploded” onto the art scene in 1913. He could barely sell a work and, for decades, depended on a sole American patron. Such market indifference reflects “the extent to which Brancusi was operating wholly outside the temper of his time, including [radical] Paris.” Given his stature now, this is surely one of the more remarkable transformations in all of art history.
With some irony a critic quips that “after five decades, Corse is suddenly hard to miss”. What’s also hard to miss is that over that long low-profile period Corse stayed tightly focused on one thing – “to put the light in the painting … When [viewers are] looking at the paintings, it’s an outer light, but when you relate to it, it becomes an inner light to feel” More images are here.
This Beijing show is a landmark. For UCCA, Beijing’s premier contemporary art venue, it is the first show since being acquired by new owners. And for Xu, already acclaimed outside China, it is his first local retrospective. It puts him in a global context, says the writer, and highlights his core interest – “the centrality of the written word to culture”.
Blockchain technology facilitates the decentralized, tamperproof storage of information. Technology providers want to use it to improve transparency in the art market. Implementation will not be easy – apparently few galleries are interested. However, if art is viewed as an asset class, won’t buyers want transactions efficiency comparable to that which they enjoy in other markets?
Sometimes rare talents appear one after the other. Finland had Alvar Aalto, Tapio Wirkkala and Timo Sarpaneva in quick succession, all major 20th century designers who helped create the Scandinavian design aesthetic. Why was Finland so lucky? Perhaps because it had a tradition of fine craftsmanship and “there was a great yearning for beauty after the war and suffering.”
An interesting but inconclusive discussion about badly behaved male artists like Caravaggio, Degas and Balthus. Art should be judged on its own merits rather than through the lens of the artist’s behavior. Degas, for example, disliked Jews and women intensely, yet “depicted women with more tenderness, more humanity, and more vivacity than just about any other painter of his era.”
Tiananmen Square led to explicitly political art, such as Cynical Realism. This came to be the style expected of Chinese artists. Times change and today’s younger artists focus elsewhere. Is this a result of government pressure? Rather elliptically, one observer says, “There is no Chinese contemporary art, there is just art made by Chinese artists.”
So-called “outsider” artists are rarely shown in museums. The outsider label implies that these artists “lack the agency or self-awareness of their educated peers.” An outstanding Washington show reveals that such art actually has “overwhelming strength. By showing us the dazzling pluralism of the past century [the show weaves] a richer tapestry of American art history.”
Bauhaus – perhaps the most hallowed name in architecture and design – espoused an egalitarian modern life. On closer examination, a new book argues, it actually pursued “an elitist, aristocratic notion of taste.” This contradiction hastened the school’s demise but its wonderful modernist ideas lived on, eventually finding a market – in distant, wealthy post-war America.
Elegant background essay on an artist who, in the blink of an eye, has gone from ‘recognised’ to ‘high profile’. Taylor’s portraiture is wildly divergent – from the famous to the homeless. Its common thread is “the African American aesthetic tradition” and his empathetic eye. Smith puts it succinctly “Other people look: Taylor sees”.
The former Yugoslavia ended badly. Yet, after its expulsion from the Soviet bloc, it enjoyed an optimistic outlook. The architecture was remarkable, a far cry from the drab constructions elsewhere in Eastern Europe. There was “an abundant presence of design culture… in a socialist country. It was an aspect we tended not to see.” More images are here.
Jordan Wolfson wants us to feel more. His latest work ventures into “emotional mechanics” – a two metre puppet connected by chains to a moving gantry. “It is difficult not to feel something, and just as difficult to think that such feeling is pointless. Isn’t this kind of emotional response and lingering fascination one of the things we desire most from art?” A video (5 min) is here.
Being called a ‘commercial illustrator’ is sometimes a sly put-down. Rockwell was an illustrator and his work has its faults – “it often lacks nuance or subtlety”. However, he was brilliant at communicating an idea succinctly. His “Four Freedoms” series of paintings appeared first simply as magazine covers but they “profoundly altered the course of the war”.
In 1979 when Germaine Greer wrote a history of women artists, she credited just four paintings to the Baroque painter Wautier. That number is now 30, including works previously credited to her brother. Their quality has earned her a first ever survey show. Such “rediscoveries” reflect the efforts of many, including a group focused on identifying Renaissance women artists, described here.