The Easel finishes each year by listing, from the more than 300 stories featured through the year, those that were most widely read. This newsletter features the first seven of these pieces; next week will feature another seven.
Modern Japanese architecture has international allure. It draws on ancient traditions of wooden buildings and ideas about the fluidity of internal spaces. Less obvious but not less important is ‘wabi-sabi’ – the Japanese concept of beauty. More than Greek ideals of beauty, wabi extolls restraint, simplicity – “nothing lasts, nothing is finished, and nothing is perfect”. More images are here.
Bruegel’s paintings are so rare and fragile that a Vienna show of 30 paintings is unprecedented. He borrowed Hieronymus Bosch’s detailed style but Bruegel focused on village life and landscapes. What did he intend – morality tales, comedies or just pleasant rural scenes? “They’re mysterious and don’t give away a lot of clues.” More images are here.
Indigenous art sometimes gets the lame description ‘outsider art’, implying it has little in common with western art. This view would have greatly surprised Picasso and Matisse, among others. So how do we describe the relationship between indigenous and western art? Morgan Meis takes a close look.
“The fact remains – a great many of the artists [including Picasso] who are celebrated in the galleries and museums of Modern art were utterly discontented with the boundaries of “the Modern,” of which they are often considered the exemplars. Fascinatingly, for our purposes, they would replace the Modern idea of art with something more akin to what the Aboriginal artist has been doing all along: making sacred and ritual objects that mediate between human being and cosmos.”
Schiele’s works still shock. They exude a sense of angst that somehow prevails over the eroticism and nudity. “Klimt [Schiele’s mentor] suffused his pictures with the heady, aphrodisiac perfume of fin de siècle Vienna, while Schiele scraped the era’s fecal underside.” More and more, says the writer, history’s judgement is appreciating the latter. More images are here.
Why do we still pay attention to Old Masters paintings? There are a handful of famous names – Rembrandt, Vermeer, Velázquez, Michelangelo – toward whom adulation seems obligatory. Yet, walking the galleries of a major museum, you quickly realize there are many others. With their ornate gilded frames and often perplexing subjects, why should their works command modern attention? Indeed, why do museums continue to acquire them?
Keith Christiansen, a self-confessed addict of paintings by the Old Masters, is the John Pope-Hennessy Chairman of the Department of European Paintings at New York’s Metropolitan Museum. Recently Morgan Meis, Contributing Editor of The Easel, talked to Keith about the modern relevance of these works. Keith’s response to the topic was, well, emphatic.
From the outset, Morisot’s work was distinctive. Her female subjects had “a profound psychological presence”, reflecting her own experience of womanhood. But she was also expressing life’s impermanence. “Her work’s lack of finish conveys, like no other Impressionist, a sense of evanescence. We do not live long”. More images are here.
This is the last regular issue of The Easel for 2018. Next week, and the week after, the newsletter will highlight the year’s most popular stories among Easel subscribers. There will then be a break of two weeks before The Easel resumes on Tuesday January 22.
Many thanks for your interest over the last year. After four years, The Easel is starting to feel a little bit grown up!
Season’s greetings to all.
Andrew
Some fancy analytics show that a small network of “curators, art historians, gallery owners, dealers, agents, auction houses and collectors” drive artists reputations and prices. Sounds alarming – is this new news? After all, every era has its tastemakers. The writer claims the concentration of influence comprises an “undemocratic and impenetrable structure” Really?
A survey of African American art, now in New York, “succeeds brilliantly” in capturing the spirit of the 1960’s and 1970’s. It also reveals the dilemma those artists felt about focusing on “overtly racial subject matter” versus art “unconstrained by ethnicity”. Probably unresolvable, the issue nonetheless stimulated a “collective mass of respectable efforts” that helped a few “to reach the stars”.
Houston scores a double hit. A show of Jasper Johns drawings “dazzles. He captivates us with things we’ve known all our lives.” But that’s not all. The show inaugurates the Menil Drawing Institute, the first museum in the US specialized in contemporary drawing. Namechecking the renowned Vienna museum, one critic gushes “This week at the Menil, America gets a modern Albertina.”
A defense, in three parts, of Schiele and his sexualized imagery. His works were explicit but also granted women “an uncommon degree of sexual agency”. At the time, childhood was considered little different to adulthood. Finally, he was trying to expose the decadence that lay behind Vienna’s espoused conservatism. “One can depict something horrid without endorsing the horror.”
The 1990 theft from Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum is rated art’s biggest ever heist. Even after resorting to unorthodox methods such as a social media campaign, the case is unsolved. Now, a TV series is being tried. “As years have gone by, I’ve gotten far more suspicious about [the guard’s] activities that night … there’s really still something there … the mystery just deepens over time.”
Not a review of Delacroix the precursor to modernism. Rather, Sillman gets into his head. He was “frail, sexist, … a snob [with] bombastic ambitions. In other words, he’s full of it.” Delacroix “made the picture plane something “bloody and animal and hot. His famous idea was that paintings are bridges to the souls of the spectator [but] his paintings are more like planks thrown over his own abyss.”
For those of you starting to panic because you have left your Xmas shopping to the last minute, this may help.