Since designing the Lockheed lounge and Embryo chair Newsom has been at “the very apex” of design. Most reviews of his current show are gushing – “a form of alchemy … furniture pieces of immense beauty.” Not so the linked piece. It worries about “objects as hyper-commodities” and wishes Newsom would show “he can still be ingenious on the cheap”. More images are here.
In 2017, Schutz caused an art world firestorm with her painting of the murdered teenager Emmett Till. Those issues – particularly about cultural appropriation – remain unsettled. Schutz, for her part, seems chastened but unbowed. Her new work is “rife with a painterly dark energy… a progenitor of a kind of abstract-imaginative figuration”.
These Scandinavian artists have a knack for the astonishing – they once installed a replica Prada store out in the Texas desert. Now it’s a derelict community swimming pool inside a London gallery. This work has the “patina of fiction” and tells a story, with “a wink and a nod”, about the decline in civic facilities. “Gentrification makes everything so smooth and nice but it also excludes people.”
As print media ebbs, so too does the art criticism it once supported. Gary Indiana is a New York writer whose 1980’s essays – “a bracing, electric portrait of eighties art” – have just been re-published. Of Robert Mapplethorpe – “combines a preternatural refinement with an insatiable appetite”. Cindy Sherman’s characters “give the impression of having awakened in a different place than where they went to sleep”.
Fontana has “muffled visibility” a hangover, perhaps, from having once worked for Mussolini. A retrospective shows this neglect is unwarranted. Fontana pioneered “spatialism”, using light and colour to create an immersive viewer experience. And he took to making refined cuts in his canvasses, breaking the picture plane to reveal a dark void. For some, this alone secures his place in art history.
Apparently, Viola was keen to do this show after seeing some Michelangelo drawings. Putting one’s work up against the guy that painted the Sistene Chapel … WOAH!! You can guess the result. The linked piece is admirably restrained – “some fundamental challenges in this pairing”; others cannot resist nasty: “like the difference between a brilliant mathematician and a spaniel with a calculator.”
After a century, the American wing of New York’s Met finally holds a show of native American art. One critic fumes that the show is coloured by “the pride and resentments of identity politics”. That seems a bit tough. Clearly, an effort is being made to change old attitudes: “designating arts as ‘primitive’ or ‘ethnographic’ has limited our capacity to see a broader … humanity.”
Black women appear frequently in Impressionist art, reflecting a Paris that was becoming multi-racial. What has escaped everyone’s notice is that these women were depicted matter-of-factly, without racial tropes. This shift, radical for the time, is highlighted in a landmark show that is “singular in illuminating fully [this change] while pulling its theme … thrillingly into the present.”
Yiadom-Boakye is an artist in the ascendant. Many expect greater things to come. Her paintings feature imagined, handsome black figures – “because I am not white”. Her work, says this writer, has an emotional clarity and her figures, shown in relaxed, still poses, are vaguely reminiscent of the Old Masters. Or, as one critic expressed it “They say little, explicitly, but you hear much.”
Still thought his art was beyond heroic. But what did it mean? He rejected suggestions that landscapes were part of his intended narrative. An exhibition curated by Still’s daughter brings a fresh emphasis on key works – those “marked by warm golds and organic browns”. The reviewer, though, returns to a familiar question: “What do those stories say? Well, she isn’t exactly sure.”
Psychology experiments show that our distaste for forgeries comes from a perception that originals gain “identity from their history”. We are also good at identifying genuine abstract works – “people see more than they think they see in abstract art – they see the mind behind the work “. Sadly, no evidence is found that looking at art is good for the soul.
Psychology experiments show that our distaste for forgeries comes from a perception that originals gain “identity from their history”. We are also good at identifying genuine abstract works – “people see more than they think they see in abstract art – they see the mind behind the work “. Sadly, no evidence is found that looking at art is good for the soul.
Bonnard’s claim to fame is his quiet interiors, sharply framed and with surprising colour juxtapositions. Very good, yes, but enough to make him truly great? The reception to his latest show is positive but few critics seem passionate. “All that colour, all that fidgety brushwork. There is a great deal of niggling about, and piling paint on.” More images are here.
Amidst numerous critics flinging insults at Burne-Jones’ work, one tries to be more specific. What exactly are the shortcomings of this member of the Pre-Raphaelite movement? Flawed technique is a big one; an unvarying style, “cumbersomely itself”; his figures tend to “lifelessness”. The verdict – “there are pleasures to be had. But love him? I’m trying to find a way.”